Both "biological sex" and "legal gender" are considerably more nebulous than you're assuming.

Let's say you define "biological sex" by genotype, seems unambiguous enough, right? It's a pretty good bet someone is 46,XX or 46,XY based on sex assigned at birth, but generally people don't actually know for sure.

Likewise, in many jurisdictions, you don't have a legal gender, you have a collection of gender markers. Ironically, trans people are often the only people who actually have an explicit declaration of their gender by a court or other legal mechanism. For cis people, the fact that it's a fractured mess generally doesn't matter.

Please don't. If there's some of particular interest, link to it with some commentary.

Southern Europe generally isn't particularly progressive. A number of southern European countries are quite conservative in the sense of "things are slow to change".

I normally hate posts like these--they're almost inevitably too "I'm now the expert" but I actually thought this one was lovely, I think because it was mostly reflecting on the author's experience.

And, really, part of me aches for the world of fifteen years ago where trans people were ignored. One of the great lessons of my transition was that people are generally decent and will try to do the right thing and treat others well, and I don't know that that would happen today--clueless cis people can default to being decent, even though they're steeped in a transphobic society, but a lot of those once clueless cis people now have been primed to actively hate trans people.

That doesn't mean it's not tiring.

But also, why does the norm need to be hetero vs "people are varied". Sure, most people are straight, but that doesn't mean it automatically has to be the default assumption, that's just a choice made by a... heteronormative society. Most of the time, we aren't in situations where we actually need to assume someone's sexual orientation, so we don't need to play the odds, as it were.

There's also "too old" in the sense of "too old to give a shit". I don't think my grandad "gets" me being trans, but he had definitely decided he is too old to care and was like "Okay, name, pronouns, got it, don't bother explaining" and proceeded to be the only family member who was perfect at it.

(It's actually kind of fascinating to see what language he comes up with on his own. Somehow, he has never learned what "transition" is and says things like "When he was being a girl..." which is simultaneously "getting it" and kind of cringe.)

Call you GP and make sure they actually sent the referral and get the specialist's information. It would in no way shock me if the referral was never sent, not out of malice, but out of incompetence or overwork.

Depending on your province, there may be one or two clinics seeing all the trans people, and there's nothing stopping you from phoning them and trying to self-refer--the worst that can happen is they'll say no, and even if they do, you can go back to your GP and say "refer me to these people please".

I'm guessing what they're referring to is that it waits to fetch the next page of the timeline until relatively "late". There's a definite hitch in scrolling for me when it's fetching more posts.

That said, I'm perfectly satisfied with Jerboa.

I realise it's kind of unhelpful to say "labels don't matter", but... labels don't matter. Or, perhaps more precisely, they come with time.

A lot of the time, as a (presumed) cis person, you get a trans 101 that is really simplified, where genders always fit into neat boxes and everyone "just knows" which of those boxes they fit into and they care very much about being in that box. Even the non-box, being non-binary, gets made into a box. But really, gender is this whole universe of possibilities, and we each have our own. We live in societies that clump that infinite array of possibility into two, or if we're lucky, three categories, but that doesn't mean your own individual gender fits neatly into one of those categories, nor that your gender is just like that of people who ended up in the same category as you.

You have the freedom to figure out what your own gender looks like, to figure out how you do gender. That can mean experimenting with clothing, makeup, names, pronouns, whatever feels interesting to explore. You might be trans. You might be a gender non-conforming cis person. You might be a cis person who's just not particularly strongly gendered and going with the flow. But you get to define how you do gender and if you figure out that that comes with a label that's useful to you, great. If it doesn't come with a label, it's a bit tiresome, to be honest, but you've not done something wrong.

It's weird. There was a time when I would desperately read any trans memoir I could get my hands on, and then by the time my transition was "done" (inasmuch as we can ever call transition "done"), I had moved to really not caring about other people's trans narratives, especially as they tend to be written for cis consumption. But I actually do want to read this one. Perhaps because he's roughly my age.

There's very much a whole theory/literature around queer time (see the reference to Muñoz in the article) -- being queer frees you from this sort of linear heteronormative progression through stages of life. This JSTOR blog post might be of interest. The argument isn't that this sort of non-linearity is specific to queer people (see the bit in the JSTOR post tying the economic precarity of millenials to the notion of "adulting"), but rather that it is an extremely common queer experience precisely because the markers of "progression" through life are heavily rooted in hetero- and cisnormativity.

It's only quasi-blocked, though. You can dismiss the overlay, though it does come back. I can't remember if it stops being dismissable eventually (either after N pages or N minutes).