Michaela Sue

I vaguely remember seeing, years ago, one of the handshake memes with text something like trans women/trans men/worried they sound weird peeing. I remembered this because I've been recently getting comfortable with using the women's room and while I understand that in reality no one is carefully listening to try to clock you by your tinkle, the thought still came up because of course it did.

I figured out I was trans years ago and, over the years, on and off, thought about new names, but back in my earlier transition days no one actually thought I was a woman so the obviously-masculine name wasn't causing any problems or anything, other than I wasn't sure how much I liked it. But I could never find one that I did like.

Well, things changed and people were genuinely confused by my name, which was fun but also it was clearly time to come up with a new one because that also causes problems. So after great thought and search and contemplation came up with...a name which is like the old one but with an "a" on the end. The important thing is, I actually do like it. But also, I did joke at the time that if one person thought it was just a typo it would totally be worth it.

We're having a problem with one of the nanoflow liquid chromatographs on one of the mass spectrometers (stay with me here) so I called up tech support at Thermo Scientific and they're going to send an engineer to fix it. But of course the person I was talking to had to look us up in the system, get the serial numbers, look up our service contract, and of course note me as the contact person. I'm already in there as the usual contact of course, going back years. (You can see where this is headed.) So I gave my name, spell out my last name, he asks about the spelling of my first name, I note that it's like Michael with an "a" on the end, he says something to the effect that it's just "Michael" in the system for some reason, he'll fix that. 😄 I'm not 100% certain he didn't figure it out and nicely not make a fuss, but it's entirely consistent with him thinking dang, this probably happens to that woman all the time!

I picked up a new prescription at a new pharmacy and ended up having the experience of hearing the patient, who is in fact me, referred to as "he" in the third person repeatedly. Presumably the Michael dude who it's for couldn't come in, and whoever I am, his wife or girlfriend maybe¹, am picking it up. Whenever this kind of thing happens I think, do I want to explain this? No. No, I do not want to explain.

Honestly I have these thoughts wondering if they know and are jerking me around in some sort of deniable way. Like, they might get into trouble with the management if they actually said a slur or something but if you just act confused what can anyone say? But I spent years being just obviously a person with a beard wearing dresses, and no one hassled me about it, no one pretended to be confused or made anything difficult. So having had that experience, I think people really don't notice, are actually unaware. I never expected that to actually happen!

Obviously I'm wearing a respirator, but today with two days of fuzz growth all around the edges because tomorrow is electrolysis day. I might have imagined a numbing cream specifically described in the prescription as for electrolysis might hint at the use but who knows, could be for all sorts of things I guess.

"Passing" is the weirdest thing.

1. To be fair, that dude probably would have liked a girl like me.

I went down to the lake shore to watch the Air And Water Show, featuring the Blue Angels. I had fun, and took about 43 gigabytes of photos. This was also my first time this year going out with a backpack and my SLR and a Large Lens, and thus my first time having my camera strap rub my nipple irritatingly! That never used to happen! But now I have breasts! And I thought, huh, my sweetie Joyce always used to complain about this. And now I know what it's like! And, yeah, it gets old very fast, but, I have to say, experiencing my very first time at age 51 with my breasts (finally) just starting to grow, it was really interesting, and very affirming. I really do have breasts! I mean, I never imagined I could until relatively recently and now every basically irritating little thing that I encounter reminds me that I actually do get the joy of being able to have this body.