Happy Accidents

The coolest mistake happened today.

I got an email from a judge I knew in 2011/2012. With an article that is from 2011. So I emailed him back.

I met him way back in 2005 or 2006. I was a "witness" for a trans friend who wanted to legally change his name. After I testified and the judge approved the name change, he invited us back into his chambers. He wanted to celebrate this change! He said he spent a lot of time in his court dealing with hard and painful family law stuff like divorces and state custody. He gave us candy and said he celebrated my friend's change.

Then he wrote this article he wrote in 2011 for the New York Times about all he went through to get two people married, one of whom was dying. Liz found it, and I was like, I met him! 

She wrote him in 2011 to convince him to work to vote down an amendment in our state constitution to make marriage between one man and one woman. We won that fight in 2012. He retired a couple of years later.

Now it's 2025. I get this email about the 2011 article.

I wrote back: Hi! Long time no hear. I hope your retirement is going well. Why did you send me this article 14 years later?

Oops, he said, he was deleting old emails and must have hit SEND instead. He didn't remember our connection, and I got to tell him all the ways we knew him. He was delighted!

We've exchanged cell phone numbers. 

The lives we touch and those lives that touched ours are always worth revisiting.

A Unicorn in Healthcare

 My oncologist is AMAZING. 

I've known him since 1994 when he was my bone marrow transplant doctor. He introduced himself to my friends when they visited while he shook their hands and said, "Hi. I'm Greg. I work for Jeanne."

He's currently my oncologist and manages my care.

Yesterday, I woke up with a very bad sore throat and worried about COVID. We'd gone to the state fair to an outdoor concert, masked. We rode public transit to and from, masked. But I heard that bad sore throats can be a signal for the current COVID variant.

The home test was negative but they're nose swabs. And unreliable. I wanted a PCR COVID test. They're pretty easy for me to get during the day, during the week. I call my oncologist's nurse and they get me in the same day. 

But yesterday was a Saturday. The beginning of Labor Day weekend. So I called my favorite clinic system and yes, one of their urgent care clinics has PCR tests, but they take 8 days to get results. 

My oncologist clinic takes 24-48 hours. WTF.

So out of desperation I emailed Greg in the off chance he was in the office on a holiday weekend. I had NO hope he'd respond.

I called another clinic system to see if *their* urgent care clinics had a PCR test. Yes, yes they did. So I made my way there.

On the way, my oncologist responded. From his phone. He was going to order one, at the clinic I was going to. When he returned home from wherever he was on this lovely day.

He responded. Away from his home. On a holiday weekend.

He understands how much COVID would be a threat to my life.

Yeah, Greg *still* works for me.

I am so lucky.

The Impact of Nature*

I'm reading the book Nature and the Mind by Marc G. Berman. And it is blowing my mind.

He's a scientist who has studied nature on our minds. He talks about his own story integrated into his research and he gives exercises to try, so I've been trying things.

So many findings make a lot of sense. I love being by the water, especially if it's moving in some way like waves or burbling creeks or waterfalls. I love being around trees--they feel especially powerful to me. I feel my breath easing, I feel my heart rate slowing down, and I feel my muscles relaxing when I'm around nature. 

Science is affirming my experience as someone who has ADHD. I know about my problematic executive function and my issues with focus. He says nature can restore executive function and focus. He says directed focus like watching films or using social media can use up executive function. I didn't believe him until I started journaling about my experiences.

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time quietly focusing on the lush trees outside our house and on our street. There are a lot of different heights, colors, and forms. The wind was moving gently moving the branches around. 

And last night, I found a return of my executive function and I got a bunch of things done that I don't usually do at night.

Let me be clear, I thought having good executive function at night was not attainable because of how my brain is.

I'm blown away.

Today I had hard conflict with my spouse so I went out into nature. I was just sitting in our car, looking at the trees right in front of me. I was situated in a way so that other things wouldn't take away my attention.

I started journaling and got so clear, so quickly, about where my part of the conflict came from, and what I was going to ask of her. 

On top of that, I'm writing this at 9:21pm. I'm clear headed, even though I'm very tired. A loud thunderstorm woke me up shortly after 7am this morning.

I need nature in my life every day.

*I'm aware that all of this could be the placebo effect. He tells me it's going to work, so it does. One thing he says over and over again is that you don't have to like the nature or enjoy it to get its benefits. I really really do not like the rock formations in the southwest. In our May trip I got very tired of the same rock formations over and over. Yet my resting heart rate went down ten points. 

How Star Trek Saved Me

I had a rough childhood. Recently, I've been doing some *more* healing about that and I am exploring helplessness.

My therapist used somatic methods to find where the trauma felt like in my body and focusing on that as I journaled brought me here.

As a child in the 1970s, my brother and I watched the original three seasons of Star Trek first on UHF and then in the early 1980s on cable. Many times.

The world of Star Trek is filled with people who face their fears, who try to find solutions to their problems, who fail and move on, who succeed and move on. They:

"Seek out new worlds and new civilizations and boldly go where no one has gone before."

I so wanted the Enterprise to come back in time to rescue me from my home. I didn't understand this then, but I know now, I had the power to rescue myself.

I stopped something bad happening in my childhood home. I ran away from home four times. I left when I had enough money to do so. I moved to a new state. I cut off ties from the abuser. 

More than that, I sought therapy almost from the moment I left home. And I've been in and out of therapy my whole life and am currently in therapy. 

For sure no one in my family has gone there before.

I connect with others about mental health and trauma. I have been in support groups. I've read books about healing.

All new metaphorical worlds and civilizations.

Currently, I'm diving into when I feel helpless. Recently, it was about access to food at an event. I asked for gluten free food but there was only one thing on the menu I could eat. I had to work hard to advocate for myself and I was successful.

Last week it was the helplessness I feel about the poor air quality due to climate change wildfire smoke. We had days and days of it. Because of my physical health issues, I can't go outside without a mask, and can't stay outside long without injuring my lungs and heart. 

I felt so helpless and sunk into depression for a couple of days.

What I know about things I can't have any control over is that if I focus on them, I go right there, to anxiety and depression. I changed my focus last week to knit something complicated. It engages my brain and it releases the depression.

But I want to do something different the next time the helplessness shows up. I want to feel it in my body. I want to recognize it before depression sets in. I want to remember that I'm not helpless at all, that I can feel it. I want to trust that I can find a way through it, even if I don't know the way.

I've watched and loved most of the Star Trek franchise. I especially loved Star Trek: Discovery and am currently really loving the reset of history with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

I want to be in Starfleet. I want to understand that even when the navigation panel is offline, and there are always new things to try to get where I'm going, people around me who can help me, and strange new worlds and civilizations to explore. To live long, and prosper.

A Conversation

I don't know how to start this, but you might need some context. Know that this post isn't about me or my health. It's about a conversation I had with my doctor.

I've known him for some time. He's my dermatology surgeon. He removes basal cell cancers and I have a lot of them, so he knows me well and I know him too. So we trust each other. I have his cell phone number!

Yesterday I saw him and he asked me about the lesion he removed from my breast last month, as he was taking a biopsy of a very likely site on my belly. I said it was fine but a little lumpy, and he said it was because of the movement of the skin of the breast.

"Yeah, I've heard from trans friends who have to wear tape for a few months after removing breasts because of how that tissue moves."

He paused a beat and asked, "How do you know trans people."

"Um, I'm queer and in community and have friends who are trans?"

I talked about folks in a faith community I was in, the queer org I worked at in the early 90s, the queer homeless youth host home program we were in. Then he launched.

"What do you think about the explosion of trans people right now?"

Woah, I thought. Is this what cis people think?

"Well, is it an explosion or is it just that it's safer to be out about it than it was 20 years ago? I bet people thought there was an explosion of gay and lesbian folks in the 90s and 2000s."

Then he was done with the biopsy (they never take much time) and he left. I'd brought my knitting because it's usually 15-20 minutes before he comes back to either take out more or to sew me up. So I picked up knitting and turned on some music on my phone.

Within two minutes he was back. Instead of waiting elsewhere for the slide to be read and analyzed, he wanted to talk. He seemed curious and he had opinions.

"I think it was a mistake to push for trans kids to be on sports teams."

I talk about how movements form and react to pushback and learn.

"It's easy to look at that in hindsight and judge it, but what if it created enough pushback for these issues to be a national dialogue and balloon the movement?" Then I talked about Bayard Rustin's freedom ride in the 1940s that in many ways was a disaster. But it taught folks in the civil rights movement, including Bayard Rustin, the architect of the March on Washington, how to do it better. How the violent pushback from southern institutions emboldened even more people to want to do something about racism.

I also talked about the history of sex verification at the Olympics and all the times they've tried, it's been problematic. How hormones and genetic testing reveal that there aren't standard norms for "women" and "men" and how gender is a social construct.

We moved onto his own experience of his kids and their experience of young people. "It feels like an epidemic," he said. "No, not a disease...but a lot of my kids friends are changing their gender. I asked my kids if any of their friends changed their pronouns back and they say no."

Then we returned to how it's safer now for kids to express who they are in a way folks in our generation (we're close to the same age--he has kids in college, so maybe a little younger). He said he had trans patients but not many. I pushed back.

"That you know of. Lots and lots of people hide who they really are for a long time. I did. It took me a long time to come out to people in my life, let alone doctors." 

We talked about safe places. He talked about New York City and The Castro. I talked about how Pride is a place where I feel more completely myself than I feel anywhere else.

"I'm just afraid the pushback to trans people will get [REDACTED] elected again."

This. This is what he's afraid of. Fascism. I wanted to tell him that fascism isn't caused by movements for justice. I wanted to tell him that fascism breeds well in fear. But then the slides were done and he had to go check them.

He returned to sew me up, which also doesn't take long, and wanted to know about surgical stuff, which I know little about, other than it's out of reach, financially, for so many people. Then he was done.

I think I'm going to text him this article about the first NOTSEE book burning at the Institute on Sexology, how attacks on queer and trans folks was an easy rallying cry and testing ground for fascism. I wonder what he's going to ask me about when he takes the stitches out.

No Eulogies

I didn't write a eulogy when you expected me to do it. I grieved for a long time and wrote eulogies to my therapists, my lovers, my friends, all the people I loved. Over and over until the wounds scabbed over. Until they were torn off again and again and healed over until there were scars. I grieved for decades, wrote eulogies for years until I was loved enough to love myself and didn't need to write them anymore. So you're not getting one from me. They were all for myself. My grief. My wounds. I don't need to grieve anymore.

Names/Identity

March 10th is Middle Name Pride Day. In 2009, the TSA started requiring that the name you use when you buy an airline ticket match exactly your state-issued ID or passport. I understand the need for it, and I even have come to accept it. But because airlines haven't updated their databases in decades, their fields are limited by the number of characters in a name or in a collection of names (as in, First Middle Last), they only print the first name.

I don't go by my first name. I've never gone by my first name. Most of my friends don't even know what my first name is or even that I have a name other than Jeanne. And I'm not alone in this.

Because the TSA doesn't understand the difference between a name and an identity, and because airlines are clueless, here is how some famous people (who go by their middle name) would appear on their airline tickets:

Christopher Kutcher (Ashton Kutcher)
William Pitt (Brad Pitt)
Laura Witherspoon (Reese Witherspoon)
Hannah Fanning (Dakota Fanning)
John Ferrell (William Ferrell)
Marvin Simon (Neil Simon)
Walter Willis (Bruce Willis)
Robyn Fenty (Rhianna)
Henry Beatty (Warren Beatty)
Troyal Brooks (Garth Brooks)
Francis Fitzgerald (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Navarro Momaday (N. Scott Momaday)
Lafayette Hubbard (L. Ron Hubbard)
Lyman Baum (L. Frank Baum)
John Hoover (J. Edgar Hoover)
Manoj Shyamalan (M. Night Shyamalan)
James Quayle (Vice President J. Danforth Quayle)
Thomas Wilson (President Woodrow Wilson)
James McCartney (Paul McCartney)
Thomas Connery (Sean Connery)
William Maugham (Somerset Maugham)

My name is just a name, but it's also my identity, much like Paul McCartney or Woodrow Wilson is an identity. When a faceless government agency and a behemoth airline refuses to let me use MY identity, the name I choose, my LEGALLY GIVEN name, I feel like a vital part of me has been blacked out, redacted as if it's a danger to national security.