Nook of the Transcendent Neko

Diary

  • My new Blåhaj, Cedar

    Since I’ve started following the transgender community a bit more, one particular plush shark has popped up repeatedly, and ultimately, I gave in and had to purchase my own!

    Blåhaj has become something of an LGBTQ+ icon, following posts on social media, and IKEA’s same-sex marriage ad campaign.

    In most places, I have seen Blåhaj referred to simply as Blåhaj, but I like to give even my stuffed animals names. I’ve chosen to call mine Cedar because the name symbolises strength and resilience, key attributes of the community for which they’ve come to represent (and of course, their pronouns are they/them).

  • M

    That’s the letter that appeared on my passport when I received it on Thursday. It would be an understatement to say that I was disappointed. Disappointed but not surprised.

    I’ve been reading stories for the past couple of weeks of trans people getting their passports with the wrong gender, even in cases where they were renewing their documentation or updating only their name (having corrected the gender already).

    Still, I hoped that, somehow, it would work out in my favor. Maybe some agent would check up on my information and see that my birth certificate, my driver’s license, and my social security information all list me as female. Maybe I would get lucky, and my passport would arrive in good order, but that wasn’t the case.

    I refuse to sign it. Instead, I will resume waiting and watching as Orr v. Trump works its way through the system. I can only hope that it delivers an injunction against the State Department’s new guidelines and, importantly, that the current Administration, and by extension, the State Department, follow the court’s ruling. If they do, I will take that opportunity to put in for a correction.

    Of course, at the end of the day, nothing has changed. Receiving this document doesn’t make me any less trans; it doesn’t make me any less of a woman, either. What it does do is make my life more difficult. What happens if I try to use a document that doesn’t match my identity or any of my other identification? What sort of undue processing will I need to endure if I try to leave the country, or more worrying, if I try to return?

    More troubling than all of that is what will come next. Especially if the challenges to this Administration’s executive orders aren’t successful, or respected if they are, how will they further erode our rights? Bathroom bans put a stop to hormone therapy, dictating how we dress or wear our hair. When the rights of one group are curtailed, we all suffer.

    The attempted erasure has already started, and there’s no way of knowing where it will all end or who will be next.

  • 15 years together

    Lilli and I had a lovely Valentine’s Day and anniversary celebration this past weekend. It’s wild to think that fifteen years have already passed. It’s been a long journey, not without its challenges, but I couldn’t ask for a better partner to navigate them with me.

    We had a lovely breakfast, followed by a quiet drive up to the Middlebury College Museum of Art, where we got to see some familiar exhibits, as well as take in Rania Matar’s SHE exhibit, whose portraits offer a glance at the stories of young woman throughout Lebanon, France, Egypt, and the U.S. After we headed back down to have a nice dinner out together before heading home.

    Pictured below is the family portrait I illustrated to present to Lilli, as well as a gorgeous bouquet she got and floofed-up for me, my first!~

    Family Portrait
    Bethani’s First Flower Bouquet

  • When things go well

    One of the goals that I set for myself when I relaunched this blog was that, among other things, I would treat it as a digital diary. Well, as it turns out, that’s much easier said than done.

    I still find myself struggling to know how much I should share, how much I am comfortable sharing, and… how much anyone is even going to want to read. Once I’ve run through all of these questions in my head, the result is that I am not writing anything.

    That said, I have been working on writing more offline, at least while I work out what I can and want to share. Once a week now, I sit down with one of my favorite pens and a journal, and I write… No filters, no pressure; just a quick synopsis of the last week and what’s going on inside my head. I’m on week three now. It’s not much, but it’s a start, and It’s been very therapeutic. (quick shout out to my counselor, who told me I should be doing this a couple of years ago).

    One of the things it’s helped me to realize is a particularly self-sabotaging behavior; it isn’t one that happens when I’m feeling down and out, but quite the opposite.

    Today was a very good day, in fact, the past few days have treated me well. I’ve been blessed with a calm sense of serenity. Despite the dubious direction our world seems to be heading in, my immediate world appears to be doing alright. I feel calm, I feel loved, I feel OK, confident, almost like I can take on the world.

    That’s where I found it, in the back of my head, a nagging voice hissing at me, “You know this won’t last, right? You know something bad is going to happen.” …and you know, it’s probably right. Eventually, all good things come to an end. It’s inevitable, but it isn’t today. Sure, it could be tomorrow, but it isn’t today.

    I’ve spent so much of my life waiting for the other shoe to drop; frankly, I’ve grown weary of that. So what if tomorrow sucks? Today doesn’t, and today’s lesson is that I need to enjoy today and not worry about the unknown that is tomorrow.

    It’s just a thought~

  • Leaving Facebook

    It’s no secret that I’ve never been the most active Facebook user. In fact, most of what gets posted to Facebook involving me is due to my partner who is quite active on the platform, but I have been on Facebook for a pretty long time now.

    I remember when I started, it was around the same time I started college. A group of friends there encouraged me to sign up because they were all using it, after all, it was the thing to do. At the time, Facebook was the social media platform for college students; you needed an email address that ended in .edu just to set up an account. Mostly my friends and I just sent stickers to each other, and some of us played the games it offered.

    As time went on my friends list grew. The platform opened up to a broader audience (read: everyone), and eventually business pages became a thing, No longer the quiet little social network of friends, Facebook had grown into a messy behemoth… dominated increasingly by advertisements, misinformation, and all the political noise I was brought up learning that polite people don’t speak about.

    Still, I maintained a bit of a connection with it wishing friends and family happy birthdays and the like. I had even resolved, since coming out as trans, that as part of my broader objective to step out into the world more I would post more…

    Then they changed their policies on hate speech in such a way as to make me feel demonstrably unwelcome:

    [Under Insults deemed to be Hateful Conduct on the platform:]

    Mental characteristics, including, but not limited to, allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words such as “weird”.

    Not only does this clearly not offer any protection to LGBTQ+ people, this policy specifically goes out of it’s way to carve out an exception; it explicitly allows what would otherwise be deemed hate speech to be directed at us. For example: it is perfectly acceptable for people who disagree with us to call us mentally ill, but if we want to point out that they are similarly ill for their weird obsession with how we live, that would be going too far.

    It’s clear where this all is coming from, and that their CEO is zucking up to the incoming president… so all that’s left to do as far as Facebook is concerned is to walk away.

    If you want to follow me someplace I’ll be on BlueSky instead (though I don’t promise to post much): @bethie-yume.bsky.social

  • 2024 Winter Lights

    For the second year in a row Erin, her mom, and I got to visit the Shelburne Museum for their annual Winter Lights display.

    This gorgeous light display spans across much of the grounds of the Shelburne museum, and goes until 5 January 2025 for anyone in the area interested in checking it out. Make sure you stop by the Weathervane Cafe for delicious cookies and decadent hot chocolate!

  • It’s official

    My name is now legally Bethani! ^^

    That is all.

  • A new home for earrings

    After almost two years of collecting earrings (and making a couple myself) I’ve found myself with a fairly substantial quantity… and the box that used to hold them was getting a bit small and unwieldy.

    Using some spare resources I had in the basement, and some decorative trim I got special, I made a custom earring frame to hang on my wall for all my french hooks. Here are the results!

  • Hello, my name is Bethani.

    So much has changed since I last posted to my previous blog that it’s difficult to know where to start…

    First, a quick intro…

    My name is Bethani, I’m a thirty-something pagan trans-fem, and I live with my partner in Vermont.

    I enjoy video games, spend an inordinate amount of time on Second Life where I’m a creator, and I like to dabble with illustration, beading, and the occasional sewing and wood-working.

    For work I administer a number of systems for a college, most notably our virtual learning environment, and on the side maintain my own consulting and graphic design business.

    That should about cover the broad strokes, more will undoubtedly be reveled in later posts.

    So what even is this blog?

    I’m not really sure yet. I’ve had many iterations of this blog over the years, and none of them really went very far. This one may not be any different, except for one notable factor:

    This time, it’s personal.

    In the past my blogs have been disconnected from me. Sure I wrote the pages and posts, but they centered around things I liked or places I’ve gone with little personality, little of me. With this one I have two objectives in mind.

    First and foremost, this is a place for me to talk about whatever is on my mind. A personal tool to help me process and analyze my experiences, thoughts, fears… you name it.

    So why make it public? Well, that speaks to the second objective, and that is by putting myself out there and talking about my experiences, maybe some good will come of it.

    If even one person reads something that makes them feel better or less alone in this world, that’ll be worth it.

    Why the restart, and why now?

    *deep breath*

    I’ve gone through a lot of changes in the past couple of months, and it’s resulted in a lot of introspection that I’m still piecing together, but most notably that my egg finally shattered… I know I’m trans now, but it wasn’t a quick journey.

    …and so I wanted to talk about that a little bit…

    My transgender journey in short(ish)

    Growing up, transgender was a concept I was familiar with, but it was not nearly as talked about, or accepted, relative to today. I spent the first part of my life trying to be the boy, then man, I was expected to be. Sure, I had realized I was bi, but I was still a man.

    By my twenties I knew something wasn’t quite right. I liked dresses, and pretty things, and with the support of my partner we started picking things up from thrift stores. Initially it was a little here, little there, but soon it became a nightly ritual. By day I went to work identifying as a male, but by night Bethani came out.

    It was a new type of freedom. Sure, I never left the apartment like that and when people came to the door I hid, but that was okay… I was just gender-fluid, right?

    In my early thirties a lot of things happened all at once… My job of the past decade closed it’s doors and I needed to find new work. At the same time my partner and I had an opportunity to start renting our home with intent to buy. Then a few months later the world was rocked by Covid-19 and I began working from home.

    In that time I was re-introduced to Second Life. I’d been there before, but I never stuck around, so I dusted off my old account and logged in. The first thing I did was change my name to Bethani, and I started interacting with virtual communities for the first time as a female. That was how everyone I met knew me, that was how everyone saw me, and it felt wonderful. Of course, it was only a “game”, I was still the same in the real world, or so I thought.

    I met all sorts of wonderful people, friends who would become an essential support structure for me, but a problem was brewing just beneath the surface that I couldn’t quite understand. As the years passed I felt increasingly more comfortable in the virtual world I found than I did in the real world. I grew more reclusive, more uncomfortable, and more angry.

    Working from home gave me the freedom to be Bethani more because people didn’t see me everyday, only in meetings, but I was still hiding in the real world. Meanwhile, on Second Life I had no such restrictions, Bethani was all I was in the virtual world. That dichotomy caused no shortage of issues in my life, but I brushed most of them under the rug. I was just gender-fluid after all.

    Very slowly I started to play with taking Bethani outside a bit; in my own yard, on vacation in hotels where I wouldn’t run into people I knew. A trickle of my true self slipping through the cracks until finally the dam burst, my egg shattered.

    After much internal consideration, and a healthy amount of liquid courage, I finally told my partner that I wanted to try hormone replacement therapy.

    It was a tough conversation, but she took it well and was supportive. We scheduled a gender affirming appointment at Planned Parenthood to see what I had to do, and it was the most freeing experience I’ve ever had.

    Overnight, I stopped hiding. If I was to start a transition process, I reasoned that Bethani was no longer a secret I could keep… no longer a secret I wanted to keep. I started preparing for the life I wanted to lead ahead of my appointment. When the day came all went well, and soon, I was on a new round of medications to align my body with my mind.

    It turned out to be the single most positive shift I’d ever made in myself. Suddenly I wasn’t carrying around this weight anymore; I didn’t have the fear of being found out. Suddenly I could think more clearly, my memory improved, my mood vastly improved, I’m not as angry as I was before, and I actually leave the house more.

    For the first time I could remember, I finally felt comfortable in my own skin.

    There are still challenges of course, it certainly didn’t solve all of my problems, but as I heard someone else in a similar situation once say, “it made my problems feel worth solving”, and I live by that every day now.

    I am forever thankful for my partner who has supported me throughout every stage of this process, my counselor who has helped me unpack some of these issues, and my friends, without whom I’d probably still be stumbling around in the dark.

    Moving forward, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but what I do know is that one way or the other I’m never going back.