403: forbidden

I was expecting this to happen eventually, but not soon.

I spent February in the UK with my sweetheart. ~80% positive experience even though I spent most of it either sick or grotty from asthma. It also served as early warning to update my passport (3yrs early), when the border guard got a colleague to double check that my face matched my photo ID.

At the same time, my interactions with officials on both sides of the international border—as well as occasional service professionals across the pond—were uncomfortably gendered. There wasn't any moment of hesitation to select a pronoun or honorific, as people had towards me in many U.S. contexts since the post-COVID reopening. It's about as dysphoria-inducing as being consistently "ma'm"d when other's default perceptions of me were feminine.

I still feel vastly better with my sex hormones balanced towards testosterone, but damn if I like the side effects.

..people make assumptions about my motives.

Rather than, y'know, asking. My blood family are the worst offenders here, in that they tell me, they're unwilling to accept corrections, and they're so damn smug about it.

This particularly comes up around traditionally "feminine" activities (which, by and large, should not be gendered).

I cook because I like it. I cook from scratch because I regard the industrial food system with great suspicion, and actively work to reduce the amount that I'm forced to rely on it. I cook from scratch because I'm a better chef than whoever developed the boxed tripe my folks rely on. (And while my stepfather is, on the whole, a decent person, when he suggests that I'm "turning into Betty Crocker" I want to break his face.)

I garden because I like it. I garden because HaMotzei is full of awe when I've watched some small portion of the grain grow in my own yard. I garden because Monsanto and their ilk can eat manure and die.

I crochet because I like it. I crochet because turning a random piece of string into a useful object by doing nothing more than tying little knots is mind-bogglingly cool. I crochet because "I made it" is something that I strive to have more of in my life.

See what's missing there? It's other peoples' expectations. If someone wants to stick a gendered label on my actions, by and large I can't stop them from doing so. But to tweak an old saying, it's not feminine as in nice, it's femme as in fuck you.