Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

But first: Murphy's Law dictates that I sleep poorly the night before I need to go to Lambert House. Between five hours' sleep and waiting a total of 45 minutes for the two buses home, I was light-headed from fatigue by the time I got home around 2300.

The trans youth at Lambert House seem to be bearing up remarkably well to... all this. Better than I am, possibly. Or so it seems: I've heard from B the volunteer manager that one or two of them have been having severe difficulties. But as I told him, I wouldn't have guessed if he hadn't told me, at least not last night.

My other job at Lambert House is as database monkey. Ken the director wanted me to run some queries to help him decide whether to continue with Discord, but I crashed Microsoft Access (ew) and then B showed up to kick me out of the "house". Luckily, it isn't as urgent as the quarterly report.

Oh yeah: the "house", if you'll recall, is Lambert House's temporary location in the carriage house at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral. They were flying a Trans Pride flag when I showed up yesterday evening. Darn you Episcopalians, almost making me weepy as I got off the bus. We're supposed to move back into our real house in the first half of next year, and there are some things I'm going to miss.

I don't know if you folks heard, but somebody tried to organize a boycott of large corporations yesterday. I had half the day off, so I spent it... shopping.

Hey, I was out of some produce, so I hit PCC, the Seattle co-op (yeah, I'm tempted to put quotation marks around that) with hippie roots. I think that's OK with the boycott.

Yesterday was, for better or worse, the annual ladies' night at the hardware store not far up the bus line from my place. 20% off. Free wine & popcorn. I'd made a shopping list weeks ago because of course I did.

The line to get in wrapped around the corner. I wouldn't say it was bananas because we're talking about north Seattle ladies here, but it was a little like being in a submarine. The hardware store is part of the True Value chain, and I paid with my trusty credit union debit card. Is that consistent with the boycott? Wayell, not completely.

I wasn't the only trans woman in the store, so yay? And speaking of trans girls and organizations that are cool with them, the Girl Scouts were selling cookies a few doors up the street. For the first time in my life, I bought a box, purely as a political act. No, really. My favorite: the peanut butter sandwich cookies. So I guess you could say I bought an indulgence for my sins from the Girl Scouts.

I went to the protest at Seattle Children's Hospital yesterday afternoon. SCH complied in advance — you know, that thing you're not supposed to do with fascists — with one of the executive orders and stopped all surgeries on trans kids. Screw that.

The good news is that turnout was several hundred people, spirits where high, and the small marching band ("Assigned Gay At Band") was good. We spread out along more than a block of Sand Point Way with our signs. There was speechifying through a bullhorn with an ASL interpreter.

At one point a speaker asked how many of the people present are trans. I'd guess between a quarter and a third of us raised our hands. I find that heartening, too. Much honk. Very wave. And one dude in a pickup with Trump cap on his dashboard who did not honk or wave.

I'd showed up late due to poor planning on my part. It was just as well, though, because thanks to Raynaud's I couldn't feel my toes after an hour despite the second pair of socks.

The rest of the day? House cleaning.

But then, Dancer had asked me to go to the fiftieth birthday party of one of her friends as emotional support. The party was OK, I guess, in a bar waaay up in Seattle's north end. And two of the four people I knew there including dancer were Temptress and her boyfriend, jengalicious's vile ex.

There was karaoke. Temptress sang "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend"*. I said into Dancer's ear, "Oh, the fucking irony." Dancer, who'd said earlier that we weren't going to stay that long, chose that moment to bail. I don't think she quite approves of how I feel about those two, often mentioning "other people's business", but I reject that categorically. If you fuck up badly enough, it's everyone's business.

As I told Dancer on the way home, I've been in a weird head space this whole week for the same reasons as many of you. She said she was worried about me, which is sweet. She's done other sweet things for me lately that don't belong in a public post. But sweet only goes so far when assholes are running amok.



*How is she as a singer? Distinctly meh.

I discovered that my vinyl nun/maid outfit, pictured in the user pic, had started to disintegrate, probably from hanging in the mildew-ridden closet at the old Devil Girl Pad. Sadness. I hadn't worn it in years, but one of the best photos of me ever taken, at SEAF, was in that outfit. RIP. Shall I make another one? I have no plans to. Honestly, I'm just not as enthused about costuming as I used to be.

And the top half of a nice outfit — a burgundy taffeta top with a bat wing hem, appliqués, back laces, and velvet cuffs — has gone from kind of tight to uncomfortably and unattractively tight. I'm not sentimentally attached to it, but it's a nice piece. It needs to go to a good home. Yay boobs? At some point my boobs may force me to get rid of something I really like, and that's going to be some bittersweetness, boy howdy.

Maybe you knew and maybe you didn't, but I'm an alumna of the University of Washington. The UW Alumni Association has been happy to take my cash for a couple of years. Yes, there are perks like museum ticket discounts, but today I finally got attempting to (Foreshadowing!) get my hands on something really nifty: an account on their library catalog.

So I type in my name & UWAA number. Problem the first: they want my student number. Gosh, I lost it sometime in the thirty-odd years since I last used it. I've changed sex since then. And name. So I call up, prove that I am who I say I am — a Zoom call was involved — to the poor young man fielding the call. He gives me my student number. Great!

But that doesn't suffice. The UW's computers, as a collective, believe that I am two different people. If only. Hours pass, and I don't get the promised email.

So I call again. I get what was apparently a different young man on the phone, and he suggests calling the number for the UWAA. I do, and I have to leave voice mail. Their outgoing message does not inspire confidence. They did not return my call yet. This time of year was probably a poor choice on my part, now that I think about it.

I'm a woman in later middle age, only with a deep voice and above-average height. Don't make me go full Karen on you, young men.

Last night was a second mad dash to St. Mark's, the temporary home of Lambert House. Everybody seemed to be making an effort to talk about everything except politics, which is a deeply unpleasant subject for trans people in the US right now. In case you didn't know, arguments about a Supreme Court case, US v. Skrmetti, which could get rid of affirming care for trans minors is on the docket. You know they won't stop with minors.

I'm ambivalent about avoiding the subject: we're talking about teenagers here. They need the comfort, but they also need to know what's going on and to process what they're feeling about it.

Once again, no youth showed up for the group in person. The cool weather and inconvenient location may have something to do with that. The sooner the renovations are done to the house, the better.

How's the bod? Fine, as long as I don't kick anything or try to do leg lifts. I probably shouldn't get back on Miss Indigo Bike until after the next bunch of rainy days, though.

Yesterday afternoon, a former co-worker of mine, M, messaged me and asked if we could get dinner or something. He lives on the east side, so that's a long drive for him on short notice. I picked a place that's a) cheapish, b) has free street parking within a couple of blocks, and c) is very close to my place.

Here's the thing about M: he's a devout, Evangelical-with-a-capital-E Christian. But he's actually taken the part about loving your neighbor seriously. And he's never asked to go out to dinner with me before, so I think he was (justifiably) worried about me.

I've never talked about the Bible with someone who knows it backwards and forwards before. He's of the opinion that the second half of Romans ch. 1 isn't as queerphobic as everyone thinks because the very next chapter says, in essence, therefore don't judge or else you'll be judged. I went back and read the relevant passage and I'm not sure I agree with M, but good on him regardless.

In fact I asked him, "What do other Evangelicals say when you tell them I'm not the bogeyman? Because I know you do."
"That's why I left my church."
That must have been hard for him. I'll say it because M won't: fuck those people. M is a good guy. As I told him, if they won't listen to him, they won't listen to anyone.

I wanted to shave my armpits this morning. I haven't shaved anything on my body in months if not years. I couldn't find my razor. It feels like a victory.

Friday: hit Trans Pride at the Volunteer Park amphitheater. Attendance was at least as big as last year, but the folks running things seemed to have done a better job of laying out all the booths so that I didn't have to elbow my way through. I also liked the performers that I heard better. The Tickler and I observed independently that Trans Pride is turning into quite the fashion show. It feels weird to say it, but Trans Pride seems to have come of age. (Arguably, it already had in its pre-pandemic march incarnation. That isn't happening anymore because the organizers don't want cops around.)

Saturday: hit the street fair on Broadway, the historical main arterial of Seattle's gayborhood*, Capitol Hill. Went on a successful quest for pasties. Saw Vienna La Rouge, Burner buddy J, and fellow Merc regulars J & K. For me, that's the best part of hanging out on the Hill on Pride weekend.

Tacoma Girl was volunteering at a booth until 1700, at which time we jumped on a train to the U-District, reasoning correctly that eetz would be much easier to obtain there than on Broadway, where the fair was still nearly in full swing. After devouring dinner and perhaps a beer too many at Big Time** we shopped for Korean instant ramen at H Mart. The U District does have its charms.

I took the train down to SoDo and got rained on as I walked to Orient Express, a Chinese restaurant in train cars. And why in the hell would I do a thing like that, you ask? Because a venerable house music monthly, Train Car House Party, was having its very last night. I'd been meaning to go for many years and just never got around to it. So, it was my first & last TCHP.

That venue is so singular that it deserves its own paragraph. The cars TCHP used were basically a dive bar, and I'm not talking the gentrified version of a dive bar that you see elsewhere in Seattle, either. We're talking frank alcoholics, overly strong drinks, some kind of porn on a monitor at the bar (?!), and literal funk; SoDo is still pretty rough around the edges, and I hope it stays that way. The original brass luggage racks were (just barely) still attached in the train car that housed the naturally long and narrow dance floor. I think the house music crowd drove out the down-and-outers at some point, and I'm conflicted about that, boy howdy. I overheard one woman describe TCHP as a soft option, but that option is now gone. Le sigh. I actually liked the choonz, which were supplied by Riz & Rob.

Possibly for the first time in SoDo, I party hopped to the Monkey Loft because promoter Ramiro Gutierrez put me on the guest list! I figured I couldn't refuse an invitation like that. (Or the house music mafia might funk me up?)

Sunday: I didn't even make it out of bed until after noon because I woke up at 0630 and just couldn't face life without more sleep.

SFDs: black Stetson hat, black leather harness, blue silk plus-shaped pasties, my silk-and-leather Pride stripe skirt belt from Astral Chrysalis, leather thong undies so I don't get arrested, black patent Docs, Trans Pride socks so I can say I'm transsoxual, and a whole lot of queer and kinky accessories. Oh yeah: I tied black and gray hankies to the right side of the back of my harness.

Made it to the Seattle Center. Walked and walked an walked, which I figure makes up for the lack of bike ride today. The only person I ran into who I know was, unbelievably, Vienna la Rouge, looking totally casual and makeup-free as I'd never seen her before. Yeah, she's still devastatingly pretty that way. I asked her if there were any sunscreen globs on my back, and she smoothed them out for me. It didn't occur to me until several minutes later that this could be construed as flirting with the most physically attractive woman I know, who happens to be conveniently gay. Aw mayunn, that wasn't what I meant to do.

Went grocery shopping on the way home. Yes, in my hat, harness & pasties. I did laundry, made beans & rice, and took out the bins as usual on Sunday, and I'm still wearing my hat, harness & pasties. I'm really liking them. Happy Pride!



*Pike and Pine streets, which are parallel and one block apart, are perpendicular to Broadway are sort of the secondary main drags. There's actually more gay stuff on or near these two streets. They're collectively called the Pike-Pine corridor. The director of Lambert House once described them to me as a decades-old "shitshow". I know what he means, and he's not completely wrong.
**I used to go there all the time in my student days. The menu has changed a little, but the food and the beer, which they brew, is still right on. Totally a blast from my past.

I was scrolling through Bluesky — yes, Dreamwidth, I've been unfaithful to you because I miss Twitter-that-was — and one of the many trans women I follow there used a neologism that really got under my skin: "passoids", who don't understand "the brickhon struggle".

For you folks whose gender identities have always been congruent with your physiology, i.e. cis folks, I take "passoids" to be a mildly derogatory way of referring to trans women who pass, that is, who aren't visibly obvious as trans women. And "hon" has been addressed to me at least once; it's a term for... trans women who aren't passoids, usually older. And "brick" is one of "thick", "stick", or "brick", a trio of terms that came out of the Black community.

Now, trans women who pass have been absolutely beastly to those who don't. That was even truer in the past; I saw that for myself in the '80s and '90s, which is ancient history to a lot of trans women today. But that doesn't make being beastly in the other direction OK. Especially for trans women of color, passing is often a survival skill.

I know I don't pass, at least not most of the time. Would I like to pass? Sure, it would cut down on scary moments involving mass transit, and maybe more importantly, it would help alleviate my dysphoria. So if you're willing & able to pass, doing so is your own damn business. I would really like everyone, trans or cis, to internalize that.