Two new things about Werner

Comments

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

Comments

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.

Read more…

Lending Club update

Comments

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!

Comments

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

Comments

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?

Read more…