I persevere

I’m 47 now.

Or rather, I’ve been 47 for the past two days. I didn’t really want to post about it on my actual birthday, partially because I was super busy that day with two VRChat gigs (following immediately after the previous day’s choir show), but partially because I spent the first half of the day super depressed, particularly over the state of the world, but also over a bunch of interpersonal conflicts I’ve been having which seem to rhyme with one another, and also learning that a good friend of mine is in a really bad situation right now.

And how so many people I feel close to are hurting.

And how of course I share a birthday with a fucking tyrant who was using his birthday as an excuse for a jingoistic military parade, and how completely reasonable it would be that most of my friends would be out protesting that, rather than coming to see me perform silly songs about mental health in VRChat.

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Survival is an act of defiance

Back in 2016, when Trump was first elected, so many people around me were despondent and telling me that they should just kill themselves before the rest of the world did it for them. Why should they bother going on, in a world that just wanted them dead anyway?

This is why I wrote Strategies to Live, especially the final verse:

In the long run everything will be fine
It will just be a matter of time, in
Twelve billion years this will all be gone

In the meantime, please1 try to survive
The world is better with you alive
Outliving him is a reason to go on

It took me unti 2021 to finally release it on an album, and I perhaps didn’t do as good a job of it as I could have since I felt like it was no longer relevant. Now that it’s relevant again I end every set that I can with it.

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I don’t have a whole lot to say right now

I knew things were going to be bad, but I wasn’t expecting just how out-loud bad they’ve been starting on day 1.

Erin in the Morning is a great site to follow. Also What The Fuck Just Happened Today?

I have deactivated my Facebook. Not that I was very active there anyway but it’s clearly not the place for me, per the CEO’s own missive.

I’m flying my pride flag high. Soon I’ll be hosting someone who’s escaping from a deep-red state for a couple weeks, I hope to do more to help my local community.

Everything important in my life feels like it’s either under attack or has become a shouting match.

I hope I can get in a good headspace for working on music. I have a game jam coming up this weekend and a month-long one in February.

Tomorrow I have a small show in VRChat and then I have my appointment with the ENT which will hopefully help me find a solution for my vertigo, and after that I have the first night of choir practice for this season, and I’m holding on to what I can.

Two new things about Werner

So I learned two things about Werner today.

First, it turns out he was born either in early 2002 or late 2001, making him at least 18 years old, not 17 as I previously thought.

Secondly, the person I adopted him from is named Maelyn Dean. Congratulations, Maelyn! I’m so happy for you. I’ve been reading Real Life Comics since pretty close to the beginning, and could never bring myself to remove the RSS feed from my reader. Now I’m really glad for that.

I love how far the world of webcomics has come when it comes to trans acceptance, too. Back when I was starting out around 20 years ago, any time I brought up trans stuff in my deeply-personal comics I’d just get trolls shouting “NOBODY CARES!” at me, and I felt more comfortable just withdrawing and being evasive and metaphorical about it all. But since then, especially in the last few years, it’s become such a joyous world of acceptance and loveliness, and it’s amazing to see so many stories being told by people who are finally feeling comfortable being themselves after so long.

Comics are such a great medium for storytelling and I really want to get back into it at some point. Hopefully soon.

Long transitions

Tonight, my set at Song Fight! Live went really well. There were some rough patches due to the usual nature of the beast but we managed to hold it together and afterwards everyone told me how great it sounded. I’m overall happy with that.

An “interesting” thing has been happening regarding how people deal with my gender stuff lately though.

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Lending Club update

Remember how a few months ago I had a positive interaction with Lending Club regarding deadnames on 2FA emails? Well, the other day when I logged in it required a 2FA email and, amazingly enough, they actually fixed the problem! I hope more companies actually start to take these complaints seriously and fix issues with how they handle trans peoples' names.

Shout-out to Lending Club!

A couple weeks ago I started getting 2FA emails from Lending Club (an online peer-to-peer broker for loans and investments thereof). 2FA is of course a good thing, but less good is when the 2FA emails are addressed to my dead name, rather than my current, legal name.

So, I forwarded it along with a complaint about what was wrong, and fully expected to be brushed off like most companies do. However, they actually responded amazingly, with an explanation of the problem, an apology for it, and a commitment to fix it!

To all the other companies I’ve experienced this issue with: this is the right way to respond.

Thank you for your patience while I took a deeper look into your inquiry. Please know that I was able to find out the reason why the emails you are receiving use your previous name when your current name listed on your account is [current name].

When our engineering team set up the notification emails for our two factor authentication security feature, the source that they used to pull investor data from was the credit reports at the time of account creation, rather than the name listed on the account currently. I do apologize for this and please know that your case has been escalated to our engineering team in the hopes of fixing this issue.

Dysphoria Discourse

There has been yet another explosion of discourse over on Trans Twitter as a result of a couple of prominent people talking about their beliefs regarding dysphoria and what it means to be “really” trans.

The term “transmed” has come about, as an attempt at a more “gentle” form of what many folks call “truscum,” namely that you must feel dysphoria to be Really Trans, and that the end goal absolutely must be a “proper” transition, which is such an incredibly reductive, prescriptive, and invalidating set of concepts that it does much more harm than good to people who are already having difficulty questioning themselves and need support and compassion to figure out where they stand and what they need.

The problem with discussing dysphoria is that it’s such an ineffable, subjective concept that it’s impossible for two people to even agree on what it is – hell, it’s difficult for one person to agree on what it is – and it can also refer to so many things, many of which overshadow each other and behave in confusing ways, and thus how can any objective criterion be formed based on what essentially comes down to what someone’s feeling?

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