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When I did some treats with my son today I thought about my non Swedish readers and thought I would write a post to you.
Every single Swede instantly knows what is on the photo. It is probably the most common pastry we have. It is made with rolled oat/oat flakes, chocolate, coffee, sugar and butter. Rolled in nibsugar or coco flakes. Simple, delicious and beyond common.
Nowadays most kids know them as Chokladbollar, chocolate balls. But when I was young and to most old people and even in one of my cookbooks from 2001 has the traditional name Negerbollar. Yes. That would be the n-word balls in English. It is not at all strange if a christian lady in her 70’s asks for a couple of n*balls to her coffee. When I grew up it never occurd to me that the name could be offensive. In 2003 a person actually sued a bakery for ethical discrimination (denied though) by calling them negerbollar and since then all people selling them has change the name to Chokladbollar.
Today my daughters had their big first roll call in school. Tomorrow they start school.
Over here kids start school the year they turn 6 in a preschool class that is not obligatory and then the year they turn 7 they start first class. My oldest starts first class and the six year old starts the preschool class. There is little difference besides the legality. I haven’t heard of any kid not starting at age of 6.
Right now I am taking a small break from the mountain of papers and forms we got today. One of the forms is a contract the kids sign that says that they will obey the school rules. Just as last year we will not sign them. The rules are as follows:
*I do my best and tries to be positive
*I do not violate others in word or action
*I respect everyone
*I behave politely and nicely in every situation in school
*I arrive in time and have the right equipment
*I behave in a way that no one is disturbed in their work
*I am careful with our school and keep our things in order
I have such a problem with letting a six and a seven year old signing a contract promising to follow all that. It is not because I want my kids to trash the school or disturb everyone else. But seriously, could you who read this follow all of these rules for a year in your workplace? To always respect everyone? To always do my best? I can try but to sign a contract that I would? I know I won’t do my best every hour of every day at work and will never expect that of a kid. So I am going to keep being the uncomfortable parent and not sign it this year too.
12-15 years ago I read a The Far Side comic strip about some one visiting Sweden and I don’t at all remember the joke but some part of it was that Sweden had a pickled herring for every season. I remember how I thought that was unfair. We didn’t have a special herring for every season. Several of the bigger holidays can be celebrated with the common pickled herring and we only have two pickled herrings that are bound to a certain season and one of them is fermented and not pickled. And we do have at least one big holiday when pickled herring isn’t an obligatory piece of food at the table.
It took me until this year to finally understand that our pickled herring habits made Gary Larson’s joke in The Far Side very reasonable. Most cultures does not have pickled herring to most of the holidays.
As long as I only spent time with other Swedes the omnipresent herring is rather odd. It is just not a prejudice. It really is everywhere. At the roll call today the kids also sang two songs and one of them is a song that every Swedish kids know with the title “Sill i Dill” with sill being pickled herring the title reads pickled herring in dill. When I came home I read the lunch menu(1) for the fall and on it in fine print it says that every time fish is served pickled herring is also served as an option.
Three or so years ago I saw my herrings as a part of the normative sides of myself. Now I have a broader perspective and see how it is something that many people regard as somewhat odd about my cuisine.
*Coming out as trans has forced me to take another perspective on a lot of things. I had to break up with my old faith and church and find new ground to stand on. With the new perspective i learned that the faith that I saw as the normal kind of christianity was in fact a very small fraction of how christianity is practiced.
*I placed myside outside of the standard core family and not until then I saw that most families isn’t just a mom, a dad and their two or three kids.
It is interesting to see how little of the normativity actually is common. But mostly: It just damn fine to grow up and form my own life according to my own likings.
Well, that’s my thoughts for today.
I suddenly feel an urge for pickled herring. Or even better fermented herring. But to be kind to you I fought my urge to put a pic of a delicious herring here and instead you got my son with some chocolate treats I made last week and a photo of a proud mother that lives here with us. I complain with all the work of three kids but she has about 50 young ones right now…
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(1) In our very fine school system all schools both private and public has free lunches for all kids until they end the 12th year of school. It has a very high standard in most places with high demands of nutrition and taste. At our kids school it follows the usual form with a hot meal, a sallad buffe, several kinds of crisp bread (one organic), organic milk and water. For every child under the age of 12 a free breakfast is served if they arrive an hour before the lessons start. No sodas, sweets or such are allowed in school until the 7th year of school.
I am writing this in as I sit in waiting room at the Swedish National Board of Health. I am meeting with their Legal Council today. Waiting room is maybe to nice a name for this. It is the xerox room with some chairs in. A rather small room. The chairs are nice but the xerox machine is huge, makes a lot of noise and it is probably 90° in here.
I drove down from the northern parts of Sweden to the capitol Stockholm two days ago. It is close to 400 miles to drive here. Will drive up again tomorrow.
I came to this meeting an hour ago. First I got to meet dr Andersson who will present my case to the Legal Council. Now I have to wait for them to get to my case.
I am here because I have applied for:
* A legal sex change in the government database
* A name that fits my gender
* Castration
* SRS (Sex Reassignment Surgery)
In Sweden all citizens are registered in a national database at our Skatteverket (IRS). Every citizen has a number called personnummer (person number). It begins with the birth year, birth month and then birth day. For me born the fifth of June 1979 have a personnummer that starts with 790605. Then we have the important last four digits. Well, three of them are just to make sure two people wont have the same number but the last one indicate sex. Even numbers for women and odd numbers for men.
This personnummer is the written on your drivers license, in your passport, on your journals, in every database ever keeping track of you like in schools, at work, in most clubs and organisations.
To get a new personnummer you have to do a 2-5 year long inquisition that is lead by a physiatrist. When that is done that physiatrist will approve that you apply for a new personnummer. But to get the new personnummer you need to be castrated and had your SRS. For transmen the SRS is sort of optional but women has to do it. But we can apply for all that at the same time. As I did and that is why I’m here.
In the nearest hour I will be called into a room with the Legal Council and they have already got my papers and read them thru. dr. Andersson has already said that I am genuine and will pass. So this is just formalities.
Oh, thats another thing. Being genuine. That is what it is all about. For a transsexual to get a new personnummer and everything that comes with having paper telling the right gender you have to be “Genuinely Transsexual”. It is classified as a sickness. I have yet to meet a transsexual person that don’t find that term horrible. Are you genuine enough or a bit to false?
So everything you chase for during several years is to get the label genuine put on your papers. That can mess any insecure person up. That can mess any stable person up. Am I genuine enough? Will they see that I’m genuine? If I walk like this, will they discover I’m genuine sooner? Several years of trying to prove that you are genuine enough. The inquisition is made just to find the ones that are not and sort everyone out that has any faults and aren’t genuine enough.
I started my road to this room in may -05. In a matter of minute dr. Anderson will come and get me. We were three people here today. One woman that went in first and came back just 10 minutes later a minute ago. She came back absolutely radient. Now a man sit across for me and looking fairly calm but I guess he is as nervous as me.
Just to be here means your papers are in order. I will pass, I will get everything approved and as soon as the hospital will do my surgeries I will get my name and my identity. But never the less I am shaking and sweating. So much hard work to get here.
Now dr Anderson came and called for the quiet man infront of me. You can hear a couple of seconds before he comes because of a locked door with a code on it. Will it only take 10 mins for him too? I need to go to the bathroom. Should I wait or should I go? Why didn’t I bring my bottle with water? My mouth is dry. The xerox machine just quieted down. I want a cigarette. But I quit. Or did I just run out of them? I haven’t decide. It was a while ago so I guess I have quitted. As most I smoke one pack a month so it isn’t that easy to know when you stop and when you just don’t do it for a while.
The other man just came back. He is glowing like the brightest star. Took him only five minutes.
I just took a photo of myself here in the xerox room. Here it is:
Is it minutes or seconds left for my turn? How will it go? What will they say?
Now I hear the beep from someone pressing the code at the door. It is just seconds…
A year ago our Swedish Integration Board published a study about Swedish values in regards to other cultures. It showed that Swedes have the most different values of all countries. Or “atypical and deviant” as the study said. The values that we have that the study metioned was:
How we reject strong leaders and fights for representative democracy where the leaders truly listen to their voters.
How we wants everything to be open and accessible especially when it comes to political decision making.
We also had the worlds highest level of trust to others.
But they failed to mention how Melodifestivalen affects us as a people. If you are in a representative sample of Swedes and want to chit-chat and ask them what their team they support most people will laugh. Sport isn’t that big here. Some love it but most don’t. If you ask what church they attend most will say “none” and it will be sort of true. Religion is supposed to be a private matter and we often are described as a totally secularized country. In that matter I just want to add that even if people say no Swede goes to church we are described as a country where going to the movies are very common and there are more visitors to churches than to the movies so it isn’t entirely true that we have no church goers and most people are believers at heart, they just don’t go to church.
But if you ask that group what they think about this years Melodifestvalen contributions you will get some reaction from everyone. There will be four distinct groups. The one that are first to tell you that they hate it. They will later on still tell you what tunes they hate especially much and probably knows the lyrics to many of them. Then we have the group that tells you that they don’t really like it but the half-time show can be fun to watch and it will turn out that they watch every minute of it. Then there are always some who really don’t watch it. Then we have the final group, we who adore it. All gay men are assumed to be in this group and that is fairly true.
But no matter what group you are in every Swede has seen the Melodifestivalen many, many times. Many families have traditions of what to eat during it.
Until a couple of years ago there was only one show every year. Now we have a system with five parts before the big final show. Yesterday was one of them. Two winners from that show goes to the big show in Stockholm.
After the Stockholm winner has been televoted to success they go off to the big Eurovision Song Contest. When I was little we won that now and then but nowadays the eastern Europe does better there so we are more focused on the Swedish parts.
A big part of the Melodifestivalen are all the bad contributions. Either with people who can’t really sing or just doing something that was supposed to be crazy fun but just became crazy embarrassing. Without those contributios the Melodifestivalen wouldn’t be the same. Sometimes the absurd and strange songs wins. Last week was one of them times. No one could really believe it was true when this came on: (Don’t miss it when the dancers pull out flags from their ass in the end.)
Then we have the really good contributions that everyone just love for real. Yesterday was one of those times. Two identical twins that we just fell in love with immediately. They are known as backups singers to a childrens band in Sweden and they have worked with music in many ways for years but this was something new that we all loved and they immediately got a place in the big final:
The reason why Melodifestivalen are so lovable is because we both get to listen to our biggest stars and get to see new stars rising. It was this way ABBA became famous. Many times it isn’t about the winner, many stars has been born just by being on Melodifestivalen.
Before 2002 everyone had to sing in Swedish and then they translated the winning song to English to sing in the Eurovision Song Contest.
There are so many reasons to love Melodifestivalen. One is that it is so easy to dislike. There will always be several songs you just hate. There are always some really strange dance or clothing. Some really good parts besides the music, the glamour, the fun or beautiful half time shows, the perfect mix of newcomers and veterans in the game, the families and friends gathering is that when we look back on the winners we get such a nice journey through time.
To round this up I will do just that and you will get the Swedish and the English version of a schlager every Swedes knows and most in my age know every single word and nuance by Carola, one of our most famous Melodifestivalen artists. She has won it three times and one time she also won the whole Eurovision Song Contest. She had a contribution yesterday that wasn’t that good but here are the song Främling/Stranger the winner of Melodifestivalen 1983. First in Swedish and then English.
No pressure but if you want to make it in the gay scene in Sweden you just have to learn this:
Well, now I am off to a quaker meeting. I will tell you all more about that later. If anyone in the Umeå area is interested to know more about quakerism in Sweden you are welcome to Rågången 2C at 14.00 today Sunday Feb. 17.
(A short breakdown for you who likes this: Melodifestivalen are the words melodi (melody) and festival (festival) put together with the definite article “en” in the end. We like to do longer and longer words so the melody festival becomes melodifestivalen. In the same way we can make any word. The trans blogger becomes transbloggaren (bloggare swedish for blogger). We share many words in Swedish and English but the grammar is rather different)
