Stuffs And Bits

Allow me to start off with some positive news, namely that of my interview next week for the Dutch Yes magazine, which had previously been cancelled, a cancellation which got cancelled today due to the previous issue of a 'similar' article having been 'solved'. Got to love internal politics. Originally the interview was supposed to be on the 30th of March, so basically it got delayed by two weeks. It feels good that this contact is on again.

Yesterday I had a second appointment with my lawyer regarding the official name and gender change, the issue being that while a name change shouldn't be any problem considering my situation, a gender change would require solid medical proof and support that I am intersexual, at which point Article 24 can be invoked, which unlike Article 28 is aimed at intersexual people. This means that Pieter sent an email to the UMCG to see whether they're prepared to assist in this. With some luck the gender change can be done this year as well.

Somewhat of an issue is that the judge would really like to know the same things I wish to know about my own body, namely whether or not I have a vagina or similar, and whether there is further anything unusual, specifically a mixture of male/female characteristics about my body. It requires little explanation that when ignoring the genitals my body is that of a female, the issue is more that this needs to be backed up by a doctor or two, accompanied by as much other evidence of my intersexuality as possible. This may be quite an ordeal, still.

Emotionally I'm pretty much dead. I have had a few pretty serious episodes again during which I either collapsed emotionally, or retreated into myself to the point that I couldn't move my arms, legs or even talk for ten minutes or more. What often triggers this is exposure to sexuality and relationships, be it in the form of text, spoken form, or pictures. Whereas for the average person naked pictures of attractive people evokes feelings of lust and such, I instead feel a sick sensation in my stomach, a rapidly coming up headache and a general feeling of wanting to run away, curl up and cry out my eyes. There are many moments when I loathe and despise the 'normal' people around me, including my friends who don't seem to have any of the issues I am having.

I just can't get over the treatment I have received all those years. I ask some simple medical questions and yet nobody understands and can or wants to help me. How do you think that makes me feel inside? Would it make me feel normal, accepted or even sane? At this point it feels like I'm just pleading for my sanity, that I'm not making things up and that my desire to kill any psychologist I'm left alone with for more than a minute is a direct result from my treatment by such people, not because I'm mentally unstable. If anything the treatment I have received the past few years is indicative of mental torture. At any rate now things at the UMCG seem to hinge on whether or not they can treat me not as a transsexual but as an intersexual person. This means forgetting about that retarded transsexual protocol, talks with psychologists and just getting down to real science instead of hand waving.

In other news, work-wise things are going pretty well. I got the welfare extension until September, so I won't have to worry about my income until that time. Progress on the ECD game is proceeding well, even if it still seems like a lot of work. By the end of next week the dust should have somewhat cleared on this, though and maybe we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I have also resumed development on the Lilium FPGA/ASIC simulator. With a few days more work I should have the first prototype ready for debugging and hopefully soon after that benchmarking, also against the solution of the competition. I have set up a dedicated system for this purpose, making my room resemble even more a server room. I hope to have the benchmark results come in at around 10% of the competing simulator, as that would mean that a few basic tweaks would get my simulator just as fast since this first prototype is hopelessly unoptimized. Anyway, that's enough of making the competition nervous ;)

I must say that I'm really enjoying doing some real, honest-to-god C++ programming again, especially with such a fun project as a heavily multi-threaded, asynchronous application where one typo will make the entire thing blow up in one's face. There's nothing I loathe more than boring projects. If it doesn't make my brains hurt thinking of solutions to problems and questions I encounter, it's not worth working on :)

On a sidenote, what I notice is that I'm at the moment pretty much sliding back into the pattern of 6 years ago when I was still heavily withdrawn into myself. Back then I'd be working on fun, challenging projects virtually all day, with nary a thought of emotional matters. I did feel the desires of the flesh at times, but mostly felt annoyed by it, considering it no more useful than the need to scratch an itch. Beyond that there were only intellectual pursuits, with me avoiding anything related to emotional matters, or my own identity.

With everything other than those intellectual pursuits being pretty much a complete disappointment over the past years it has led part of me to believe that it absolutely doesn't serve any purpose and that I'm best of as how I used to be, a cold, unfeeling, logical machine. It wouldn't matter whether I'm human or not, whether I might be male, female or intersexual. I wouldn't have to worry about friendships other than purely platonic, intellectual relations.

The world would also be a cold, colour-less place. I will not forget being able to experience smells and the full range of sounds again after having had this blocked with a mental blockade for over a decade. Yet at the same time I do not feel like I can get to like the world of humans. They're like how I used to be, only worse. I could never hurt anyone or ignore the needs of someone as doing so would be irrational in my eyes. If anything I have become more cold in that respect. Maybe exposure to other humans does that to one.

It'd be nice I could just know what in the name of the nineteen hells I'm seeing when I look in the mirror. I'm absolutely sick, emotionally and rationally, from the sheer incompetence, ignorance and cold attitude of medical 'specialists'.


Maya