Here We Go Again

I am catching up on various emails and tasks that I have been ignoring for the past few weeks. 

I opened my diary (an actual physical book, not Outlook) and the silver ribbon is firmly stuck in the week of Wednesday 22nd May. Nothing has been written in it since then.

That was a good week. I was just back from a gorgeous few days walking a teeny tiny bit of the Camino de Santiago in Spain with two mighty women. This had been preceded by a fantastic 24 hours in Madrid with another raft of fabulous females, which had come just after the Medical Women's Federation conference in Cambridge where I met loads of lovely people. 

I had been showered with gifts and cakes from work colleagues, as I prepared to do a little job-crafting and switch back to more GP-ing and less laptopping. 

Life was good and I was in control. 

Funny how the scanxiety that plagued me for years had miraculously disappeared, and I had almost forgotten the CT that I had had two weeks before. I tootled into my oncologist's office with absolutely zero expectation of anything other than a nice catch-up and a natter about our mutual areas of interest. 

I couldn't figure out why he looked so bothered in himself. Must have had a rough clinic, I supposed; a family of 4 had gone in before me, and that is never good. Still though, he usually perks up when I come in, because he gets to show me my scans from November 2014 and compare them with now and we both applaud the wondrousness of the miracle that is my recovery. 

This time, though, he didn't show me the old scan. He showed me the new one. He started talking about my liver, and saying words like "unfortunately" and "sorry". He still wasn't smiling. My brain began to make a bolt for the door. I realised I couldn't follow after it. I had to stay and nod and agree and pretend I was fully engaged with this fascinating conversation, which was clearly about someone else. Poor divil had got me confused with another non-miracle patient. He thought I was a person who had to have chemotherapy again, but sure of course that wasn't true. 

Well, clever clogses, you guessed it. It was of course true. It was me, my liver, up on that screen, with a blob of stuff in it that shouldn't be there. It needed to be doused in toxic gack, soused and marinated and drowned in nuclear waste until it accepted its fate (again) and scuttled back into its little corner. 

Trouble is, the rest of me gets soused and doused and marinated too. And even though I had only vague memories of what that was like, I knew that it was going to put a very large spanner in the exciting works I had planned for myself. I had to slam into a sharp reverse on my route to the next stage of my career. I had to let people down, and ask for favours and forgiveness. I had to tell my family that their summer would be spent looking at bleeding pustules on my face, while I veered from steroid madness to abject fatigue. 

But onwards and upwards. None of this is new, or surprising. There was always going to be a day when I would have to deal with this again. At least now I know when that day is. 

It's today. 

I put it in my diary. 

Back for a Rant

I haven’t written anything here for a long time, and it’s hard to say what is the real prompt for me to break my silence today, but here goes. 

When I was busy having various cancer adventures, I always felt better after I spewed out all my thoughts and worries onto the keyboard. It’s funny how much easier it was to be open about my fears and concerns about cancer, than it is to talk about anything in the ordinary humdrumness of life. Besides, no one is particularly interested in the interpersonal and professional vagaries of a middle class middle-aged woman, so I have wisely spared you all the details. 

Today, though, is an irritating day, and I have decided to rant about it publicly. 

It is March 8th, a date which used to mean nothing to me, another than being in the middle of a rash of family birthdays and therefore a time of brain-wracking and Smyths Toys Superstores overspending. Then I became a “women’s rights” type person, and suddenly International Women’s Day seemed to be bigger news than Christmas. Maybe it was always this hyped, but I feel like it is just in the past 5 years or so that the pinkwashing around it has exploded. I love the premise behind it, and I like having “19th November” ready as the answer to the inevitable corollary question. I have attended some great events celebrating the day and met some fabulous people. My own little family has posed for pictures and pledged our support for the designated theme each year. 

This year, however, I may have hit IWD-fatigue. There is no doubt that its collision with Mothers’ Day on Sunday, and the slapdash referendA today, have tipped me over the edge. 

Let’s gets this referendum business out of the way first – is it referendumS or referendA??? 

These are the Cambridge University Press’s thoughts on it all: 

The pluralization of referendum is a perpetual orthographic conundrum. Should we use referenda or referendums? Potentially, the plural in English of referendum could be either referendums or referenda. In practice, political science prefers referenda. We estimate that political scientists are three times as likely to use referenda than referendums. In the journals we examined, seven of 10 articles chose to use referenda over referendums. In the field of journalism, the pattern is much different with the standard practice in major media outlets being to use only referendums. Journalism, it seems, has arrived at a different answer to this conundrum than has political science. 

Anyway, since the whole thing kicked off, I have had to keep turning off the radio every time I hear the word referendums, so that hasn’t helped my understanding of the precise constitutional changes being proposed. On the face of it, it seemed like a no-brainer; let’s remove the bit where Dev and McQuaid decided to squish their thumbs down hard on the head of those uppity women who thought they should be heard as well as seen. But instead of recognising that all labour has value, and that the labour associated with care has even more value and should be supported and remunerated, the wishy-washy brigade with their eyes on the big juicy prize of re-election have decided to say “well done ladies, you’re doing great work altogether” and pat our little heads, and say they’ll “strive” to do better. Sound. 

By holding the vote on a Friday, and using primary schools as polling stations, they very literally took women out of work and back into the home for the day, to mind their children. Sure it’s fierce handy though, because it gives the mams a chance to catch up on all the washing and ironing too. Win-win. 

And Mothers’ Day. What’s not to love. Take a look at any advertising over the next few days that purports to sell you “just what Mum wants”. Baileys. Flowers. Chocolates. Electric foot spas. Anti-ageing cream. Smelly candles. All pink. All so lovely. 

I know it’s drab and I know it’s boring and I know I should shut up about it, but being able to earn the same amount of money as a bloke would be an absolutely super little present. Oh and to not get murdered so much. Please. 

 Thanks!

Gender

 “I am aghast and appalled at any people who decide that another group should not have their rights. We’re all each other’s people.” - Maya Angelou

I have only met a handful of trans people in real life. I have no great knowledge or insight into the intricacies of their lives, other than to know that any mention of transgender issues, or even using the word “gender” on social media, can spark a flood of contrary opinions and occasionally fairly savage vitriol. This is a touchy subject, which appears to be ironically very binary for those who voice an opinion on it - black or white, yes or no, sex or gender, women or men. 

I have spent quite some time trying to learn more, and read more, and open my heart to all the nuances. I have read about the issues with sports and prisons and toilets and changing rooms. I have read about the rates of self-harm and suicide and murder and hate crimes. I have watched Euphoria and been disgusted by my own instinctive need to know what Jules’s genitals look like, how she has sex, how can this be?

And I think I have figured out my core belief on this one. I cannot align myself to people who are filled with hatred. That’s pretty easy. I need karma on my side, and hatred and karma do not mix well. So what about the people who I otherwise admire, who are generally Good People, and who say that their concerns for trans people come from a place of love? They do not want to see children who may be confusing gender dysphoria with any other dysphoria being funnelled down a clinical pathway which results in them having potentially irreversible damaging surgery, or being counselled in the direction of gender reassignment to the detriment of their overall wellbeing in the long term. They also state that the society is “at the mercy” of men who choose to represent themselves as women, in order to gain access to protected spaces and inflict harm on women within. They voice concerns about the erosion of what it means to be a woman, and very much dislike the use of inclusive language such as “menstruators” or “people with a cervix”, stating that this reduces women to their anatomical body parts. 

So they are against bad medicine, unethical psychological therapy, violence against women, and the improper use of language. Me too. 

They are against inherent unfairness, or downright cheating, in competitive sports. Me too. 

They are against violent protests or threatening behaviour towards people who choose to publicly state their concerns on these matters.

Me too. 

What I do not agree with, however, is the dehumanising of people who are just trying to live their lives in contentment. Or the assumption that trans people are going through their life-changing personal journeys without serious consideration of the effect their choices will have on their future selves, or on those around them. And I simply cannot get on board with any kind of narrative that excludes a fundamentally disadvantaged community from accessing the health and social care they need. 

We know that trans people avoid doctors and healthcare settings, because of the difficult conversations that can arise. If you knew there was a chance that your doctor fundamentally disagreed with your core beliefs, even if they were “nice” about it, you would wait until you were really very sick before you would engage with their system. If you have spent a lifetime wary of physical violence, like most members of minority groups, you are going to find it hard to be sure when a situation is friendly or not. 

I am not, cannot, bring myself to be exclusionary. I am easily swayed by all sorts of arguments whose basic premise is “think of the children”, but I have not been convinced that denigrating and excluding a group of people is the right way to go about it. 

When the world has changed to a point where gender doesn’t matter, then it won’t matter what your genitals look like when you are born. But we are a long way off that, and in the meantime, I want to support people who are frequently unsupported, simply because of how they choose to live their lives.