Trans activism

Today I had to hold a five minute speech at my Swedish course. I am not out as trans in school, they “just” know that I have a husband. A few friends know but it has never been a good time to come out and I don’t feel obligated to talk about my trans history. They know that I am Alex and that felt enough.

But then this opportunity came. A five minute speech about dialects, nordic languages, sociolects or something in that area. I choose to talk about my own body language and spoken language as a man and as a woman. I did is as a little show where Alex and the girl I use to try to be. It was the most scary thing I have done in quite a while but oh so fun!

This is the ms I had (translated though), the italic styled text was told with a very feminine body language another voice:

My minutes here in front of you will deal with body language from a gender perspective. More specific, my own body language as man and as a woman.

When I was born 27 years ago something usual happened. My parents didn’t see that I was a boy. That can sound weird but there actually was not any single sign that said otherwise.

(at this point I turned on a overhead projector that showed my driver license with Oldname and a feminine photo)

I noticed the difference quite early but used very many years to cover up the tracks. I really wanted to be a normal girl.

To look as normal as possible I had to learn everything a woman was supposed to be. To be on the safe side I had to know how a man was acting so I could avoid that.

I think that it is remarkable that so many small things can make so much difference.

During about a year I lived as both woman and man depending on who I met. With some family and old friends I was Oldname and with my immediate family I was Alex.

No one misinterpret my signals. By the way I choose to dress, speak and use my body I could choose to pass as man or woman.

What is it that makes us think that someone is male or female?

When I walked up here I used big confident steps. I placed myself right here in the middle in front of you. I took a good look at you and looked calm. If Oldname would have been here she would stand a bit by the side, glanced at the teacher and then rearranged the papers. (said with a giggle and a blush)

Alex talk with a clear and slow voice
Oldname speaks faster, she almost reels off her words at a high paste that you almost never would hear Alex use. Oldname would need a much longer manuscript then Alex and she doesn’t make pauses in her speech but marks points with different melody when she talks.(said in one breath)

Then it went on like that, when I described myself and just took a step aside when I was Oldname to reinforce that I was different characters.
After a while i paused and looked at them and said

The worst thing of it all
When Alex speaks almost everyone listens
When Oldname said the same thing she had to work twice as hard to get half the attention

Oldname took to much space
Alex gets authority

I do not tell you this just to pass this assignment
I do not tell you this just to give you something cool to tell your friends

I tell you this because I want you to know what a tremendous power body language can give you. That someone who act masculine gets attention that a classic feminine way to express one self goes without.

I did not only go from male to female
I went from under paid to over paid
I went from G:s to straight MVG:s (from C’s to straight A’s)

What I am sad to tell you is this: What we say is not yet as important as how we say it.

I got by far the most applause afterward. I was so nervous and had to force the words out of me afterwards. But now it is done. My first live trans activist performance. I know it will be many more and it feels good that I never have to do it for the first time again :)

(The photo in the beginning of this post is of me and my darling niece, taken a few days ago.)

Amateur – Lasse Gjertsen

I saw this a couple of days ago on a blog I never read before and today I stumbled upon it again. I think it is a sign that I should share this with you. I could really recommend his “Jeg går en Tur – A self portrait” too. I like his way of using his creativity

An unexpected ending

Today me and my husband is celebrating our last wedding anniversary. That is so weird. We have to divorce because only unmarried people are allowed to a legal sex-change in Sweden. When we married all those years ago I was realistic enough to know that it was a possibility that it wouldn’t last forever but I did never, ever think about the possibility that the state was going to force us to divorce and that we wouldn’t have any plan to separate when we divorced.

But now it is here. The last anniversary. Guess we are going to celebrate some other day in the future. The first date-day or something like that or maybe start celebrating our divorce day. But today we are going to celebrate. Presents, good food and good wine.

I have nothing to say but; weird…

Thanks for these years hubby-soon-to-be-boyfriend-again.

So now I know who I really am…

My favorite podcaster, the funny and way too bright Joe G just posted a entry called I am the hanged man where he told us that he became the hanged man in a What Tarot Card are You-test. He linked to the test and I took it…

You are The Devil

Materiality. Material Force. Material temptation; sometimes obsession

The Devil is often a great card for business success; hard work and ambition.

Perhaps the most misunderstood of all the major arcana, the Devil is not really "Satan" at all, but Pan the half-goat nature god and/or Dionysius. These are gods of pleasure and abandon, of wild behavior and unbridled desires. This is a card about ambitions; it is also synonymous with temptation and addiction. On the flip side, however, the card can be a warning to someone who is too restrained, someone who never allows themselves to get passionate or messy or wild – or ambitious. This, too, is a form of enslavement. As a person, the Devil can stand for a man of money or erotic power, aggressive, controlling, or just persuasive. This is not to say a bad man, but certainly a powerful man who is hard to resist. The important thing is to remember that any chain is freely worn. In most cases, you are enslaved only because you allow it.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Maybe I have found my true self now. But i like goats and I can live with being “a powerful man who is hard to resist”. I will just sit back and wait for that business success and some money. Maybe I will use my unresistible charm once in a while to.

Male mumble

Today I got locked in by my inflexible personality and bad habit of questioning what should be unquestioned.

I referred to someone as “biomale”. Then I got confused. Does a permanently attached dick right from birth or i a Y in your chromosomes define your biology for the rest of your life? What makes me less bio then others? Last week when I went into the men’s locker room to change clothes and a whole lot of naked men walked around and was comfortable with me being there. Quite a few of them actually knowing I am trans. If I had only opened the door to the woman there would have been quite a few screams. My biological appearance as they saw it was all male. Or at least man enough. I am not only a man, I am a bio man. All male, even if my dicks didn’t came at birth.

So what to call them? The male ones that never did any changing? Birth-males? But I have known forever that I wanted to be a boy and research tells us the transconfusion probably comes long before we are born. So transdudes are birth-males as well.

XY-men? Well, there are quite a few men that have Klinefelter with XXY or other variants. But just to call them Y-men, nahh, thats just not right ether.

Dickdudes? Well, most transmen has dicks of some sort. PenisRightFromtheStartMale? Doesn’t really goes well with ether speaking or writing. And I’m tired with all the genitalia focus. Besides, having a penis doesn’t make you male, I know lots of woman that had or have a penis.

I think I have painted my self into a corner. Non-transman-male? NtM…

Hate labels. Obviously I can’t live with them and I can’t really see a reality without them.

My spell check didn’t know all words in this post. Never could have guessed…

The perfect democracy

So now we have it on paper. Sweden is the closest thing to a perfect democracy. At least according to The Economist and this article

Sweden, a near-perfect democracy, comes top, followed by a bevy of similarly virtuous northern European countries. More surprising are the relatively modest scores for two traditional bastions of democracy—Britain and the United States. In America there has been a perceptible erosion of civil liberties related to the fight against terrorism. Long-standing problems in the functioning of government have also become more prominent. In Britain, too, there has been some erosion of civil liberties but also a shocking decline in political participation. Britain’s score in this area is the lowest in the West and is reflected across all dimensions—voter turnout, membership of political parties, willingness to engage in politics and attitudes towards it.

US came 17th and GB scored surprisingly low: 23th place.

I have one thing to say: Welcome to Sweden!

I don’t know what to do with my money

I like that title. But no, I am not as rich as it imply, well I am rich but not counted in money, my assets arent material.

Still, the title is correct, I do have a problem with what to do with my money.

My parents like their parents are pentecostals. Growing up inside that movement being trans or gay wasn’t an option. Maybe as an adult I could go back and consider being open but I can’t see that it was a possibility back in my teens. Jesus and Satan was all that mattered. They where both two very real persons lurking about all the time. Everything good was of Jesus and everything bad or great was of Satan. Yes, everything great. Not only was everything bad that happend evil, even the really good things was bad. I remember when a big role model to me said she wanted to eat a whole block of chocolate, they come in 100 gram/3,5 oz blocks here. She knew she was a model for me and the moment she said it got devastated that she had said something so stupid. Of course a Christian wouldn’t and shouldn’t do or even talk about something like that. So we prayed that Jesus would take care of her craving that Satan given her.

Now, I know that I have some different readers and I think I can devide you into three groups. The first group will shout out or maybe laught ot a “what?!” and if I tell you about the first exorsism I attended was to drive away Satan from a 13 year old boy because a pastor found a Metallica CD you will stare at me trying to see if I am making fun of you. The second group are the ones saying “wow” and think back on your own expiriences or people you knew who reasoned that way and remember the fear and frustration is gives to live with so much energy focused on living as perfect as possible. The third group are the “well”s and you will follow your well with a explanation how sugar is bad for you and that eating a lot of chocolate really are bad for you and that it is always good to pray. Her behavior was pretty normal to you and I am pretty sure you will pray for me today.

I don’t have a clue how many of you what, wow and wells that reads this and thats why I have written 2169 caracters so far and not even begun to explain the title. I just want you all to follow me.

There was many sermons about giving and how you had to pay you tithes gross or net. There was a lot to learn. You had to give more then others who were in the same economical situation as you but it was never allowed to ask how much others gave. You had to give with a loving hart and was never to feel like it was a obligation but you where obligated to give at least more then you saved every month. If you felt obligated it was because you didn’t love Jesus enough. Satan was in control of you. This was such a big thing that people made a habit of spending all money at payday and repent the day after just because it was to hard to understand what the Church really wanted you to do.

When I started to question Evangelicalism, that was about two years ago, I started to question the tithes, the shame I had regaring the requirements to give. I have felt shame regardless if I have given 2 or 20%, no matter how much I give there is always someone who has less and do I really need 12 forks? Maybe I should give some of them… When I questioned my guilty conscious about giving I stopped giving money and I was afraid that alone would chrush my faith but I was sickend by always thinking about giving. When I did my grosserys it made me go crazy. Should I by the more expensive local goods to satisfy my will to reduce the environmental pressure or should I buy the Brazilian honey to get some kronor (the swedish currency) over to give away to the poor, the poor needs the money more then the Swedish farmers. Okej, the Swedish honey, but what about the beans. Is it okey to buy Chinse soy beans? Soy doesn’t grow in Sweden… It easily becomes 500 questions during one day and the two things I knew for sure is that I have to be obsessed in order to figure all the unwritten rules and that it is wrong to obsess. So I stoped giving anything. For the first time ever I felt blessed and money was given to me from strangers and I could feel that God liked that I put the fear of not giving enought behind.

Now when I have found peace with not giving anything a more healty need to share of my surplus has grown stronger. And at the same time I have realized that money is a small matter, what really matters is what I do with my other talents.

Now I do have a will to give some money, even if it is not much, but I don’t know where to put it. During the last years when I have found out more about who I am I have gotten maybe too picky. I want to support some organisation that knows that woman are people. I want “my” organisation to know something about LGBITQ-issues. They don’t have to be perfect but if I give money to a orpanage in some African country I want to know that a teenager can be openly gay inside the orpanage. Sure, I knoe that I can’t have to high expectatios but at the same time, if nobody never had high expectations nothing would evolve and get better. Money is power and if I can I want to give that power to as good organisations as possible. I don’t like the way it is now, giving my money to organisations I know haven’t dealt with those issuses yet and just pray to God that my money wont go to some missionary who preaches that homosexual persons are demonic. I give some money to Swedish political organisations just because I know what they will do with it but personally I want to give my money to some organisation or just someone who are Christian. But I would get to sad if I realized that my money supported the opression I felt in my early years.

Maybe I have to buy fair trade chocolate for every single krona I have and just glutton. It would be stupid but I am glad to know that my salvation aren’t at risk by the amount of chocolate I eat or how much I enyoy it.

Umeå

Yesterday I woke up around 6.40 am and had a looong day even before 4.50 pm when I started to drive for more then 12 hours and arrived 5.20 am the morning after. Then I got about* 3 hours of sleep before I had to wake up. I hope I will get some sleep tonight. On sunday night I am going to drive back home so I don’t want to be this tired then.

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* today I am trying to speak like Ninja and Special K so the abouts are more like a boat. Love that accent (or is it a dialect, i have no clue where you draw your lines).
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So, driving for 12 hours with a car I hadn’t driven before and a quite large trailer is enough to complaint about but I will go on for a while longer: It was foggy and the first 200 miles it rained and then it started to snow and got really slushy.

Well, I like driving my car, I will get some sleep tonight and I am happy to be here.

Here in this case is Umeå, the city I will call home in january. I moved to Umeå when I turned 16 and lived here for a couple of years and it feels good to come back. It is much colder here and I am not that in to cold, winter and such but it has other advantages. I like how people are up here, it is very different from Linköping. It is just (?) 500 miles apart but culturally the differences are huge I think. It’s on the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska but the climate is more mild because of the Gulf Stream. It is covered with white snow but right now it is actually raining which is rare, usually it is below the ice point from middle october and then its covered with snow to late april or may when everything explodes in greens and the summer is short but very beautiful.

The dark side with Umeå is the dark… The sun doesn’t really like being here and it is just sunlight for a few hous. At 3 am it will be dark again and unfortunally my body is a bit more continetinal, because it thinks that it is time to sleep when dusk had done its thing. It is hard to stay awake. But in the summer we get al the lost hours and it is light 20 hrs/day

Times are changing

I have some identity issues. Today I have done something that may affect me for ever. I don’t really know how to relate to my self any more.

It was in April 2005 I did it for the first time. I didn’t really know how to do and I didn’t have any experience but it came sort of natural and it felt so good. But now what? Everything just feels up side down. I thought I knew who I was and that things were going to be the same forever.

Well, I know that change can come and that you have to try not to understand it to much but just to follow and work your way through what ever comes ahead.

But who am I? How will this affect me? Am I the same today as yesterday? What am I suppose to write in my profile?

Maybe it doesn’t really matter. What matter is that I love him more then I ever loved my first and that he has almost everything I ever dreamed about. I will pick him up in two hours and tomorrow we will hit the roads and go 500 miles up north. Me and my new car, a Chrysler Grand Voyager. I am no more proud owner of a 18 year old Volvo, I don’t even like him anymore. I loved him so much when I bought him last spring and it was great to finally have a car. Before that we always used public transport, which is much better in Sweden then in other parts of the world but still quite hard with three kids. Today I’m going to pick up our Chrysler with seven seats, a lot of space and with roughly the same milage as the old Volvo.

First time with a automatic instead of stick shift for me. I had to ask the salesman how to do but I think I will get use to it. It is very unusual with automatic, it mostly taxi cars that has that.

Helsingin Valituskuoro

I found this video at Neil Gaimans blog and I love it. The complaints choir of Helsinki really shows a lot of the mentality of the Nordic countrys. Enyoy!