Maëlys McArdle

Blog

  • Where to from here.

    Where to from here.

    The last year has been eventful:

    I also leaned into my minimalism further. I more or less completed constructing my “before New Zealand” dream life in Ottawa.

    • Sailing.
    • Recovering from surgery.
    • First car!
    • August 2018. I go attend the trans march. I notice how many more of us attend year on year.
    • Summer party.
    • Albany!
    • Bosom friend time.
    • Canoe camping.
    • Thanksgiving with bestie.

    My life plans right now are to walk the Camino de Santiago in May 2020, to move to New Zealand in 2020/2021, and to then come back to Canada two years later to rejoin my chosen family and become a parent. Until then I want to save money, go camping a bunch, work on my mental health, and spend time with my besties.

  • First car

    I have achieved a life goal: getting a car.

    I got one for three reasons despite living downtown. The first is that for the last six months I have spent over 3 hours a day bussing to work. The commute by car meanwhile is 25 minutes each way. I want that time back. Second, I wanted to learn to drive standard for my worldwide travels and especially my move to New Zealand. Third, I wanted to go camping a bunch this summer and that’s just easier with my own vehicle.

    The car I got was a 2014 Ford Fiesta with a bunch of nice extras like fog lights and turn lights on the mirrors. It had 70,000 km on it and I paid $5,000. It was a very generous price by the seller, and I appreciate them for it.

    This is my first car, and though I took a few lessons, I had never driven manual before. In a trial by fire, a few hours after I got it I drove it, my bestie, and her two sibs to the Gatineau Park. I stalled it four times that day.

    I didn’t have license plates. I thought it would be more difficult to get through the bureaucracy of getting my first car, but it took three minutes at Service Ontario. The safety was done, I had proof of insurance, and the used vehicle package was filled out.

    I can now tick another box on my 2019 goals list.

  • Three months since surgery

    Three months since surgery

    It’s been three months since my vaginoplasty, and two months since laser eye surgery.

    Healing has been going well on both fronts. As far as my eyes go, I see better than I ever did with glasses in good lighting conditions. In poor lighting, when looking at bright objects such as crosswalk signs or screens, there is this visual effect accompanying these light sources that reminds me of what things look like when you have tear drops in your eyes. There was also a bloom effect around bright lights and this seems to have reduced significantly. It may take up to a year for my eyes to heal fully.

    With regards to my genitalia, I had a bit of a scare two weeks ago. I had discovered a growth in my surgical site. It looked like parts of my insides had fallen out of my body. After communicating with the overnight nurses at the recovery facility, it turns out it was hypergranulation. It’s a common complication. I went to see my doctor, and she necrotized the tissue. Over the next week it simply disintegrated with grey bits lining my underwear. Otherwise bleeding has ceased, and the surgical site has been healing quite nicely. I figure I’ll post photos at the six month mark. This too may take a year to recover fully.

    The follow-ups between laser eye surgery and bottom surgery have been starkly different. For laser eye there was an in-person follow up the next day, next week, next month, and now at the three month mark following the procedure. With bottom surgery, which was far more complex and expensive, I was on my own. Nothing ever came of the surgeon’s assurance he’d see me in a month following surgery. There was an automated email for two weeks, then nothing. I sent questions about bleeding that went unanswered. I heard nothing for three months. When the complication occurred, they did respond but asked questions for a different surgery than the one I had, then when I corrected them they gave me instructions to follow that were again for a different surgery. It reminded me of how bad communication in the lead up to surgery was.

    Neither surgery have been a source of much thought as of late beyond medical recovery. It all feels so normal. I adjusted to life without glasses immediately. I don’t miss constantly cleaning lenses, having my breath fog my sight, or minding the frames. As for having a vulva instead of a penis, that too was a quick adaptation. I don’t miss my penis, the sex, the spontaneous erections, the bump it made in my underwear or taking four diuretic pills a day. Having a vulva with a clit isn’t exciting, it just is. It reminds me of my breast growth during second puberty. It just was. Things might as well always have been this way.

    I’m glad I did these surgeries. They are a testament to how far I’ve come to be able to make these big steps in my life. With that, I conclude with my instagram stories during the course of my surgery and ensuing stay in rehab.

  • Shifting away from queer & trans advocacy

    Ten years ago, I wrote a blog post where I talked about my focus shifting to queer and trans issues. I was ignorant at the time, and spent the next decade unlearning, and growing. I’ve reached another inflection point in my life where I’m exhausted and am now stepping away from this work.

    I wrote that first blog post in my early twenties. I’m in my early thirties now and there’s a cohort of queers a full generation younger than me. They are freshly traumatized with newly acquired vocabulary validating the wrongs they previously couldn’t name. They have an outsider’s perspective which lets them be incensed at injustice in a way that gets lost with better knowing the institutions that produce them. They are more inclusive than we were at their age, although still quite exclusive, and favour immediacy. They aspire for big picture changes.

    They need space to go through the experiences we went through and grow. I need space from that type of advocacy and its unbridled anger, all-or-nothing approach, selective dependability, clique based on desirability, and relationship turmoil. The older queers I know have pivoted from system-level change to working at a smaller scale, where their impact is immediately felt, and started doing so in a professional capacity. They are social workers, nurses, union reps, librarians, executive directors, and academics. Their activism is intertwined with their jobs.

    I don’t have one of these occupations, nor am I a user of services, and this makes me an outsider. We don’t need more people like me. We need insiders. It takes insiders for things to change in the small measures necessary to transform the social landscape. It takes insiders at Health Canada and Blood Services Canada to end the ban on blood donations from gay men and trans women. It takes insiders in the Ministry of Health to stop denying coverage for reproductive care to pregnant trans men. It takes insiders in LGBT community organizations across Ottawa to stop excluding services to francophone newcomers. It takes insiders at retirement homes and their corporations to make elderly gay people from going back in the closet. It takes insiders in Catholic schools to stop the messaging that queer and trans youth are unwanted. It takes insiders in research positions at universities to ask the right questions to change policy discourse. It takes insiders to make the little changes everywhere. At this point in my life, there’s not really a place for me and I want to use the energy I’ve been investing in others to work on my own growth.

    A great many things have happened in the past ten years to be more inclusive of queer and trans people though these gains have been imbalanced towards white, settler, and affluent individuals. Some things, however, remain much the same. Housing needs to be a right, sex work needs to be seen as work, education needs to be affordable, mental health care covered by the province, jobs accessible, and basic income guaranteed. A lot of trans people are still dying in Ottawa and communities across Canada and they don’t always look like the packaged-for-cis-audiences trans narratives on television. Things are not okay. There was a funeral this weekend. But I can’t do this anymore.

    I conclude with two observations I’ve made a decade apart about the nature of prejudice to show that it, or perhaps I, haven’t changed that much. Here from a piece I wrote ten years ago about opponents of equality for gay people:

    It’s hard to understand those that sit on the other side of the fence. An emotion that could easily be confused for hate fuels these people. They subscribe to inducing great torment, and yet are completely uncaring of this fact. It’s a particularly dangerous human state, one which is passive, and doesn’t involve violence nor rage. After all, these are rational people, behaving in a calm intelligent manner. Yet, in this one aspect of their livelihoods, they are able to commit themselves to such vast societal destruction.

    These are not bad people, yet they do bad things.

    And here about discrimination writ large that I wrote last week:

    In the end, a lot of prejudice isn’t fueled by hate, but by discomfort, and only with vulnerability can it be addressed meaningfully. Though discomfort is more innocuous-sounding than hate, actions (or lack thereof) rooted in discomfort can be indistinguishable in their cruelty and harm done to those motivated by hate.

  • Capture Enthusiasm

    I love helping others learn to code. My approach is to preserve the enthusiasm people bring to the table when they first show up.

    Enthusiasm is easy to squander. When people feel lost, they lose enthusiasm. When they’re told that they’re doing something wrong over and over, they lose enthusiasm. When they feel embarrassed about what they don’t know, they lose enthusiasm. When they can’t see the end in sight, they lose enthusiasm. When they face constraints peers don’t seem to have, they lose enthusiasm. And they especially lose enthusiasm when they are made to feel like they will never be okay at it. A lot of this can be prevented by the educator’s approach.

    Learning anything new is hard, and with that comes an inevitable loss in enthusiasm. To counter that effect, I try to:

    • Keep new information to absorb to a minimum and revisit what they already know
    • Structure learning so participants can make regular and visible progress
    • Encourage experimentation and making mistakes
    • Show genuine enthusiasm yourself – how you visibly perceive the content has an effect on others
    • Align content to other interests they have as to leverage their enthusiasm for that other subject
    • Create my own teaching material which prioritizes the reader’s feelings over quantity

    It’s much easier to preserve enthusiasm when there’s no fixed deadlines. Still, no matter what the context, I place as much importance on listening as to speaking. It’s also important to the participant’s success and those of others for there to be boundaries, but I am very selective about which constraints are necessary. I don’t offer unsolicited advice, instead keeping the pace commensurate with the learner, checking in regularly, and showing genuine interest in the questions they ask. Anything new tidbit they glean is great so no question is ever too rudimentary.

    Bringing this into the real world, I’m currently mentoring a comp sci student. They chose the problem they wanted to solve. They drew what they wanted the ideal app to look like. I helped them identify the MVP and reduce the scope. This brings the deliverable into something tangible, which reduces the chances of getting discouraged to the point of wanting out later in development. We then broke the project into three discrete parts: the front-end, the back-end, and the data store. We focused on each component starting at the data store. Isolating the problem space to one component gives a light at the end of the tunnel and reduces how many new concepts they have to grasp. They created the repo on GitHub. I gave them small assignments that could be done in 30 minutes.

    For the two-part workshop I gave at Algonquin college, my approach was “less is more”. I wanted participants to come out of the sessions being able to say that they could code. I wanted their computer screens looking like that of a professional developer. I also wanted to impress that they already had many important skills relevant to this type of work.

    I showed them what software developers actually do (Google things a lot), covered what a programming language is, went over the emotional intelligence aspect of software development, before finally getting into a bit of coding. I selected a programming language with real-world applications (Python) and IDE (Visual Studio Code). The format was alternating between showing a new little thing they could do, and then having them experiment, with one mentor per four participants. They learned about showing text on the screen, doing simple math, using functions, getting user input, creating functions, and reading files. I omitted a lot of content that’s usually in introductory lessons for the sake of keeping it as simple as possible while covering a lot of functional ground. So I didn’t go over the difference between an integer and a float, or cover index-based loops, or ASCII vs UTF-8, etc.

    The workshop was free. They didn’t have to come back for that second session if they didn’t want to but they all did, safe for one. They were enthused and wanted to learn more. That’s exactly the emotion I had hoped to elicit and what we should all strive for.

    When approaching instruction, center how you want people to feel. You want them to feel like they can do this. Like they’re making progress. Like what they’re learning is relevant. You can pull all of that off in a way that’s honest with them. I think too often the enthusist’s emotions isn’t considered at all, and that this is to the detriment of all.