Category: Life

I’m pleased to announce the initial release of my latest project, the Story Creator. The Story Creator lets you make your own “choose your own adventure” style game online. You can try it out at story-creator.ca.

The site gives you a spot to submit your own stories. These stories are written in “story code”, which is really just the simple markup language Markdown. The Story Creator will then understand that code and build a website out of it.

This is what one of those websites made with the Story Creator would look like:

Documentation for how to write “story code” is available on the site. It covers everything you need to know plus numerous examples. Many examples come with a Try Example button to take the code out for a spin.

When playing out one of these “choose your own adventure” games, the site will build a history of all actions taken. You can thus go back in time and explore a different branch of the story.

Finally, the Story Creator doesn’t save anything. The main reasons are that it greatly reduces project complexity, server load, maintainability requirements, and copyright concerns. However, there is still a means to share your works out there by leveraging third-party document sharing sites.

The source code for the Story Creator is available on GitHub and released under the MIT License. You’re free to copy the code, change it and make it your own, redistribute it, etc.

I’m really pleased with myself. It’s been two years since my last open-source project I saw to completion, a graphical package manager for Arch Linux. I consider the workshops I’ve done to be creative endeavours, but they weren’t on this scale. It feels good to finally finish something, you know?

Anyways, you can take the Story Creator for a spin here.

 

I gave a presentation on Friday at Algonquin College for the Trans Day of Remembrance on “Not Passing.” You can view the slides here.

It was partially inspired by the Not Trans Enough zine, to which I contributed. If you’re trans and haven’t read it, I recommend it. It covers an issue which gets very little airtime, and that is how not passing and living outside gender norms elicits very different treatment as compared to binary passing trans people.

It was also inspired by all the times that trans people had made it clear to me that passing was the only acceptable outcome. To them, I could only be pre or post surgery. They gave unsolicited advice about my appearance. They talked down about themselves for not passing.

Those interactions always make me feel a little sad. Because what they’re doing is demonstrating that they internalizing the message that surrounds them: that their body isn’t good enough. That only when they cannot be physically distinguished from a cisgender person is their body satisfactory.

And in the way they talk, it’s clear that they think it’s like this for everyone. They don’t seem to think that the problem is the rest of the world, that we’re fine as we look. That it doesn’t invalidate our gender. That we can create our own communities without people who shit on us for our appearance.

It’s particularly sad because for a lot of them, they won’t ever pass. So what’s in their future is a lot of hate over themselves for something that can’t be changed. I understand it though: that’s what the world is telling them in so many ways.

Our bodies are different and it doesn’t make our gender any less real. The steps we do to have our gender recognized and bring personal relief to us can help, but is no magical cure. And a magical cure wouldn’t be for us to all look cis, it would be for people to accept us as we are.

But the message around us is that we are worthless if we don’t end up indistinguishable from a cis person.. We don’t have the space to say “I’m a woman, I look different than a lot of women out there, and that’s okay.”

Passing is a fucked up concept, but I get it. Hell, if I could pass, I would. I’m tired of being misgendered and be invalidated because I don’t. I have a binary identity though, so as cissexist and messed up as “passing” is, it’s at least applicable to my context. Passing doesn’t make sense in every context though, and expectations around it are most toxic for people who aren’t at any end of the gender spectrum. This society, as intolerant as it is of people who cross this spectrum for defying its notions of gender, is especially cruel to those who eschew these gender norms altogether.

In my presentation, I talked about obstacles that non-passing people face and how gender conformity is pushed on us from the outside.

View the slides here. Use the right & down arrow keys to navigate the slides.

Mental health is a subject that I consider touchy for this blog. This is the site both prospective employers and extended family will find when they my name, and given the stigma that persists around mental health issues, makes me sensitive to being open about this subject.

On the other hand, this is also a blog, my blog, and it has been for twelve years now. Some level of candid discussion about my current life is something I do want for this.

A few posts ago I mentioned that I was going to see a therapist. He didn’t work out, unfortunately. Therapists are like relationships – what may be great for one person doesn’t necessarily work out for another.

In this case, the therapist’s inexperience in handling clients that weren’t straight, cisgender, vanilla, monogamous couples was obvious and became a blocker. Inexperience doesn’t necessarily translate into inadequate care from a therapist, but it did in this case.

He couldn’t seem to get over the fact that I was trans.

He would bring up my trans status every single session, even though it was unrelated to the topic at hand. He asked me about my genitals (“have you had the surgery”) and used the derogatory “shemale” to reference women like me. He brought up how recently I came out a number of times, in a context that appeared to imply that my gender identity was as recent of an invention.

His education on trans issues came from popular media. He referenced that a few times. On our last session he talked about an episode of Law & Order where a trans person is killed. He didn’t seem to get how an episode about a trans woman, written by cis people and played by a cisgender man, had no value to me other than as a study of harmful stereotypes.

Anyone who understood that I am a woman, not a man pretending to play a woman, would see how flawed and hurtful any of this is. They would get that “shemale” is derogatory and reductive, that it’s as rude to ask me about genital surgery as it is any other woman when it has nothing to do with the care at hand, and that having a man play trans women isn’t something I celebrate.

There was also a bit of erasure. He pushed back on the assertion that my dating pool is smaller as a result of my being trans. I told him it was intellectually dishonest to suggest that I had as large of a dating pool as a cis person. I gave him examples of the nasty messages I’ve gotten on dating sites specifically because I was perceived as trans, and how television shows and movies mock those who date trans people.

Like having disabilities or being a person of colour, being trans carries with it a socially imposed penalty on desirability, and by denying that it unfairly shifts all of the blame on me.

In the spirit of giving him the means to expand his horizons a bit, I presented him with a list ofresources, starting with John Oliver’s well-researched 14 minute segment on trans issues. He never ended up checking any of them out.

While that was unfortunate, it wasn’t that which pushed me to sever my care with him. It’s when we got to talking about sex.

I don’t like sex. That goes back to childhood trauma.

My therapist believed that I couldn’t have a meaningful relationship without liking sex. He thought maybe I didn’t like sex because I wasn’t using enough lube, which was comical given that I was slated to give a sex education workshop, and suggested I introduce sex to masturbation fantasies. I explained to him that introducing sex was about as mood killing as thinking about my grandmother. He was insistent, and I followed his advice. I predictably ended up feel awful.

That’s when I decided to drop him.

I can, of course, have a healthy relationship without sex. I think that what was going on here was that his understanding of healthy relationships was very limited. It felt like he had only been exposed to a very few kinds of people in his life – seemingly straight, monogamous, cisgender, and vanilla. He projected that lack of exposure in his unimaginative approach.

That lack of exposure also came across when we talked about my existence outside heteronormativity, and in particular around being poly. One reason I’m poly is that it allows me to have romantic relationships with partners while they can find that sexual satisfaction and more in other partners. It allows for stronger relationships. The therapist saw this poly in a negative light, bringing up the flaky relationships of heterosexual swingers he knew as an example.

It wasn’t an informed comparison. Straight swingers aren’t known for having worked on their relationship issues around multiple partners. They tend to be more monogamous arrangements with temporary extras as sexual partners. People who self-identify as polyamorous meanwhile tend to have all partners in equal standing and be far more inclined to work on themselves to make the relationships work. Someone who would of had any exposure outside of the very narrow focus of the straight vanilla community would have known this.

That’s not to say that these sessions were without value. I learned a useful phrase when coping with grief and with recognizing that I have trouble accepting my emotions as valid. Also being able to talk, freely, for all this time was a release.

I’ll keep looking for a therapist. I might look for one that’s explicitly LGBT friendly.

For the fourth time, I’m seeing someone to talk over my issues.

The first time it was cognitive behavioural therapy to address a decade’s worth of nightly panic attacks. It didn’t help as far as the panic attacks went – being on SSRIs did – but it also gave me the opportunity to talk about traumatic events that I had witnessed. That was good. I also learned how to think about how habits and layout can influence thoughts. I don’t remember how long this therapy went on for; maybe a few months.

The second time was to deal with relationship issues. Through that I learned to deal with conflict, as I would previously shut down emotionally. I also learned to communicate anger constructively, which was something I didn’t know how to do. I had previously been verbally abusive when angry. The things I learned there were invaluable. I feel like we did this for six months to a year.

The third time wasn’t really by choice – I had to in order to acquire a referral in order to see a doctor that might prescribe hormone replacement therapy. There I was able to talk about my gender identity and issues with my parents – many of which weren’t related. I walked out with a better sense of my own identity. I did that for five months.

The fourth time has just started. I’m going in to find ways to address what I believe to be my codependency issues and behaviours that can harm people I care about. I also want to talk about grief and loneliness.