I received an invitation from one of my partners to attend their Sunday service at Ecclesiax, a church in downtown Ottawa, and out of curiosity, I attended. It was an interesting visit, and I’m glad I added this unusual event to the series of religious presentations I have personally experienced. Like all the others, though, it’s not one I’ll be repeating if I can avoid it.
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Too Many Lights
My relationship with holiday decorations has always been tense.
Answers for Parents with Transgender Offspring
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
A trans person, probably a trans woman, has parents. Those parents are a predictable yet incomprehensible medley of bigoted toward transgender people, ignorant of queer and transgender topics, and uninterested in learning more, and think “acceptance” means that the telephone shouting matches have mostly stopped and they haven’t severed all ties with their transgender descendant. There’s very little else they get right, and they think that their progress is measured in “time since they heard.”
There are a lot of specific things they get wrong, and they’re frustratingly defensive about getting corrected on any of them.
So here are some answers.
CN sexual assault, suicide, violence against women
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Cracking the Closet Door: Covert Transition
The time between one’s first questions about their gender and the resolution thereof can be anxious and scary. Transition is a big deal, and contrary to the bigoted idea that it’s something we do on a lark or for fun, most of us agonize over that decision for a long time, for many reasons. Many of us fear how our social environs would react if they knew we harbored such questions, and especially how they’d react to us deciding to transition. Another lot of us figure out what we’d like to do long before we’re comfortable doing it, and must exist in that dysphoric hinterland until our circumstances free us.
For this in-between group I inhabited for years before I recognized where I was heading, there are options. There are many ways to explore one’s gender or assuage dysphoria until one feels safe acting on it in larger, more visible ways, discreetly and at one’s own pace. What follows is specifically from a transfeminine perspective, but will contain occasional nods to transmasculine variants.
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When James Met Jane
This is a story of alternate universe in which Jessie and James find their way.
A Kanto for my Amantes: My Lovers Reimagined as Pokémon
A Kanto for my Amantes: My Lovers as Pokémon
There’s an idea, somewhere between a running gag and a stereotype, that some people collect lovers like a Pokémon trainer collects pets. This concept grades into ugly objectification here and there, up to and including people maintaining de facto bingo cards of the demographics they’d like to bed, but it’s also an interesting thought exercise for the polyamorous lady.
Going it alone is not how this world works. None of us is invincible, nor are we all best at everything. Humans are interdependent, and we need each other. Sometimes, we are each other’s accessibility devices; other times, we’re each other’s levees, holding up what can no longer stand on its own. We look for, and find, people who fit with who we are, and we grow fond of and interdependent with people who can accomplish the things that we cannot. In the best scenario, we’re not just lovers: we are family.
A person and their partners, then, can be rather like a well-balanced Pokémon team.
So, here are the members of my polycule reimagined as Pokémon.
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Ask Alyssa Anything
This week, I expanded my blogging horizons by giving my readers the option to ask me questions they’ve been curious about. The result was a mix of questions about me and things they hope I write about at greater length in the future, and it’s been fun to read and to contemplate.