Workshop preparations; Abandonment fears realised again

Last year I participated in the NDCTechTown conference, which was held in Kongsberg, Norway. I gave a talk at that time, on why I thought that Ada is a pretty nifty programming language, which inspired many. I also had a good time there, which made me think that maybe giving talks at conferences might be a fun way to get both my professional side 'out there' a bit more, and to ease into socialising in a for me rather safe setting.

This year of course there was this pandemic thingy, so all conferences went online or were cancelled. The SuperCon that was to be held in Belgrade in July this year was cancelled. For NDCTechTown, I got asked whether I wanted to do a workshop, since that was supposedly going to work better with the online format. I was hesitant at first, but after repeated urging by one of the organisers, I figured I'd give it a try. I did find it somewhat odd how almost forceful the signing up process was, with me being put on the list and website even before I had agreed to do anything.

Regardless, I was going to do a workshop on Ada, specifically on Ada for embedded platforms, with the Cortex-M-based STM32 as a target. Whereas for a talk one would mostly need to have some spiffy looking slides, a smooth voice and perhaps a few practical examples or two, a workshop requires some materials for the students to use and work with in order to follow along. Thus I set out to put together a basic framework for STM32 development, for which I extended my Nodate project [1].
The idea was to first write a framework using which one could elegantly use the GPIO ports and interrupts using nothing but C++ code. That way I got the basics together in a language which I know the best. Then I would port the C++ code to Ada, as a way to get something still Ada-like, while hopefully saving some time in the process by doing the troubleshooting with the hardware on the C++ side.

In the end this strategy worked out okay. Between the beginning and end of August I had something together using which I could at least do the scheduled 3.5 hour workshop. The hours before my workshop started I would then spend putting the slides together, managing to get everything ready and set up just in time. That's when I fired up the Cisco WebEx instance, logged into the room, ran through the sound checks with the NDCTechTown staff and sat back to wait for my students to pop up into the virtual room.


An interesting point here is also that basically the sole reason why I was able to commit working to these workshop preparations pretty much full-time during the month of August was because there was a monetary compensation, with each student providing one with a set amount of money. I figured that even with a modest attendance, I would be able to consider this workshop as just another wonky freelance gig.

This just added to the shock when the starting time for the workshop came and went, and nobody had joined. When after ten minutes or so a staff member popped in, we decided to give it another twenty minutes, then cancel the workshop if nobody had joined by that time. After twenty minutes nobody had joined, so that concluded the workshop. I had been asked whether I wanted to give a talk instead the next day, however. It would not pay me a cent, but it'd at least give my work some exposure, I thought.


Yet, when giving it some more thought, I began to notice a few things. First of all there was the exhaustion from the grind of working day and night, including weekends on getting the workshop set up. This especially during the last two weeks as time became a bit tight. It had gotten so bad that I'd be dragging myself out of bed in the morning, start crunch time, then by midnight I'd pass out on my bed after I began to feel dizzy and sick from exhaustion.

Secondly, there was the initial way that I had been roped into the conference which hadn't felt right. Then the crushing sense of abandonment and shock when absolutely nobody showed up with the workshop. Even though there were some hints that people might show up for the talk, I felt so physically and emotionally destroyed the next morning that I just cancelled the talk.


So what next? This month there's the need to push myself to make up for the income not generated last month, of course. It may take a while to recover from that hit. While I do think that I did a good job with the STM32 framework, and learned a lot, it's not something which I'd want to use for commercial projects yet, if only because it's still so incomplete. Yet I did spend more time on it this month, and I feel that I got something out of it at least, if only for my own (hobby) projects and as a few points on my resume.

I also still want to do educational blog posts and videos in the (near) future, which could definitely include topics like Cortex-M development. It's hard to plot out a path there, though.

At any rate, I feel that I'm completely done with conferences for the foreseeable future. Maybe it could have worked out if it had remained by talks and in-person conferences, but with the way things went today, I think it'd make a lot more sense to put all that time and effort into building up something else, instead of propping up some conference by putting myself on some death march grind session.


I'm a lot more worth than that, after all.


Maya



[1] https://github.com/MayaPosch/Nodate

Why I'll never buy another Clevo laptop (Clevo PB51RF-G rant)

Last year I was in desperate need to replace the laptop which I had bought in 2013. Although that laptop was still zippy enough, it had developed a number of faults, including a partially defective mainboard where pressing to one side of the keyboard would randomly disconnected and reconnect USB devices on one side. Thus it was that I decided to splurge on a new laptop from Schenker (MySN, now BestWare), as part of their XMG range of gaming laptops.

Expecting to use this laptop for at least six years like my old laptop, I wanted something that would still be relevant by then, so Intel graphics were out. The XMG Pro 15 laptop that I ended up getting is a rebadged Clevo PB51RF-G. Clevo is a large OEM who design and manufacture basic laptop configurations which can then be customised by assemblers and sold to end-users.

The laptop as I ordered it features an Intel Core i7 8750H (6 core/12 thread), 16 GB dual-channel DDR4, 15" 144 Hz FHD display, NVidia RTX2060 video card and a 250 GB Samsung 970 Evo NVME (PCIe x4) SSD. All for a cool 2,000 Euro. Upon receiving it, I intended to add a 2 TB 2.5" HDD for additional storage. That is also where the problems started.


Whoever designs these Clevo laptops really hates end-users. Although marketed as being end-user upgradable, the actual procedure for getting this laptop open involved removing a whole range of screws from the bottom, then hidden screws underneath the keyboard which required forceful removal of the keyboard. Instructions for this procedure are few and far between and required me to first figure out which Clevo model it is so that I could track down disassembly instructions. Two days after I had received the laptop the SATA HDD was installed.

The BIOS on these Clevo laptops is utter trash. I thought I had seen useless barebones BIOSes after more than two decades of messing with DIY and OEM systems, but this one takes the cake. Providing only the most minimalistic UEFI BIOS, it makes it impossible to install anything but Windows 10 or a Linux distribution which offers an installer that does not rely on any 'legacy' features in the BIOS like a VGA driver. There are barely any options in the BIOS to configure... well, anything really. I guess it does allow you to change the boot order. Yay.

The keyboard.... it's junk. It's a cheap chiclet keyboard with horrible squishy tactile response and all the flex in the world. After a few months of use some of the printed-on letters began to wear off already. It's got RGB lighting embedded in it, which courtesy of the worst BIOS in the world cannot be disabled, will always start full blast on every boot in the most annoying sparkly rainbow fashion possible. It makes me ashamed to turn the system on in public because of how garish it looks.


After installing Windows 10 on it, performance was poor. Despite all the tweaking that the crippled BIOS allows, the system would soon start chugging while performing a few parallel tasks, like browsing in Firefox and editing a document in LibreOffice while running a compilation (single thread) in the background. When after a few months of this I was able to get my 2015-era PC (Skylake i7 6700K-based) back out of storage and use it as my main system again I was surprised at how zippy this PC feels, despite having only HDDs and zero SSDs, SATA or NVME.

The final kick in the teeth was the battery life. Despite using Windows 10 and confirming that the Optimus switching between the NVidia GPU and built-in Intel graphics worked as intended, battery life when using the most frugal battery life settings was even worse than that of my old 17" gaming laptop that used to get just under 2 hours of battery life when I set Windows 7 to use its 'low power use' profile. On this Clevo laptop I can get an hour if I'm lucky, rather nuking the point of going with a smaller display and it being a laptop.


In hindsight I should probably have returned the laptop in disgust shortly after receiving it, but personal circumstances didn't allow for this and part of me was happy to not be using a slowly dying laptop any more, so that I ended up just living with the frustrations. That said, I'm at the point now after more than a year with this laptop where I would gladly sell it for any reasonable offer.

This isn't just buyer's remorse, but more like feeling frustrated at having bought something that is so clearly a very expensive lemon and a joke of a laptop. Even if I cannot find another victi^Wsucker^Wbuyer for this laptop, I'm sorely tempted to get a new laptop once I got the funds scraped together. Just so that I can use a laptop that gets 8+ hours of battery life, doesn't have anaemic IO performance, a fatally crippled BIOS and the worst RGB keyboard joke ever inflicted on an end-user.

And it sure as heck will not be a Clevo laptop again. Because clearly they are the burning trash fires of the laptop world which make me dearly wish that I had just gotten a Dell or Lenovo instead.


Maya

Vlog: What being a woman and intersex means to me

Why I don't like talking about suicide

If you want to see people get all awkward quickly, few topics work as well as that of suicide. For those who have not had to deal with it in any way, it's a topic which they'll either avoid at all cost, or they'll readily insist that 'talking about it' or medication are somehow solutions.

For those who have lost someone because that person committed suicide, they can feel anger at that person, some level of understanding or just plain sadness. Depending on the circumstances, one may feel anger at those who have driven the person to take their own life. Yet it's not something anyone wants to dwell on.

Unless one is among those who attempted to end their own existence, but didn't succeed. To say that it is an experience which changes a person is an understatement. You do not just embrace the thought of your own existence ending right then and there, and then wake up again in the hospital like you just had a bit of a fainting spell or something.


I can still remember much of the years that led up to my suicide attempt. Looking back now, I can also see the threads of previous trauma interwoven in those fresh traumas. My childhood abuse, the years of getting bullied and physically assaulted during primary and high school. The loss of my childhood home and safe environment after my parents divorced. The mounting uncertainty about myself. About my own body.

Then finding out about being intersex. Getting raped. Being rejected by doctors and psychologists as they lie about me being transsexual. Struggling to get my body acknowledged. Losing another home. Trying to move countries and failing. Finding myself falling back into an endless cycle of psychological torture by medical professionals and kin. Ending up in an abusive relationship and suddenly facing homelessness.

No hope. No expectation of improvement. No control over my life. No help.


Of course I tried the 'talking' thing during the last months before my suicide attempt. I talked to my GP, to various mental health professionals, etc. I got offered anti-depressants. Therapy sessions.

Therapy sessions and drugs don't fix homelessness. They don't fix an existence that is devoid of hope and colour. They don't give answers. The SSRI anti-depressants I tried just made me feel even more depressed and filled with despair. And talk about what exactly? How there's no point to my existence because I am not even allowed to exist courtesy of the medical system? How the healthcare system just wants me to go away, intersex organisations don't give a damn, the media just lap up the controversy and to everybody else I might as well not exist, or if they do care, they're as helpless as I am to fix anything?


...


At the end of all that anger, all the frustration, all of the helplessness and feelings of just being a toy to others to with as they please, at the end of all that there is just this complete sense of calm and that of absolute control which comes with the knowledge that no one can stop one from ending all of the pain and suffering. To someone who has never been there, it's impossible to describe the feeling of complete bliss and relaxation when one has made that final decision, prepared all that needs to be prepared and just has to do it.

It's the end of madness and insanity, and the return of sanity and one's humanity.


...


How many will truly grasp the words that I have just written down? What it feels like it? How empty it makes one feel after one wakes up in the hospital after one's preparations just weren't good enough? That sometimes ending one's own existence is the only choice that society has left open?

Of course I do not wish to insinuate that suicide is somehow a positive thing. Nobody should ever find themselves in such a situation. Yet at the same time it is, tragically, sometimes the best way forward. Sometimes it's the only way one can preserve one's dignity. And that just shows how horrific things have to get before one reaches that point of no return. I can only hope and pray that I'll never find myself in that moment of bliss again.

And yet, it's something that's so incredibly hard to talk about. You can talk about people getting killed, about murder and people being tortured to death. But do not talk about suicide. Killing yourself condemns your immortal soul to burn in Hell forever, after all.

I do not wish to talk about suicide, because of all the unpleasant responses it gets. Of people who cut off contact after you have tried to take your own life. Because it offended them. Of the countless 'why didn't you just...' responses. Talking about suicide just reveals why suicides happen.


Yet, much like how one can somehow find oneself at the end of one's existence in that one last moment of defiance, so too is it sometimes inevitable that one feels that one has to address a topic that is so readily ignored, even if it is this very act which perpetuates the tragedy.


Maya

Adulthood: The grey twilight between hope and suicidal despair

Whenever it is mentioned that someone is 'coming of age', it is usually portrayed as something positive. To grow up, to gain new rights and responsibilities. To have the world open up to them. That's the romantic version at least.

For too many of us it never manages to reach that 90s sitcom levels of endearingness, however. The main feelings that I find myself struggling with at having accomplished reaching adulthood by staying alive, are those of disgust with humanity in general, and a mix of despair and terror as I contemplate my own safety and future.


It should be obvious to anyone who is even mildly sane that humanity as a whole is far from sane. With the widespread beliefs in religions, cults and things like hoarding property, with wanton violence and destruction by the biggest bullies in the playground, all that the adult world is, is a daycare centre's playground without the requisite adult supervision.

Those who rule the playground through might and usually a clout of lackeys are the ones who set the rules, who determine who lives and who dies. Because this isn't just your local daycare centre's playground, no. On this playground the children kill and are killed. Even as no one seems to be able to truly explain why any of it is happening, the playground is a near-constant warzone when it isn't filled with the sound of bickering and suffering.


Normally a child can grow up in relative safety and oblivion from this adult playground. Others are not so lucky. I still cannot remember exactly what was done to me or by who back when I was five years old, but that first introduction to the world of adults has left a lasting impression. I never want to be an adult. Not if it means becoming like those people.

Never truly having been granted the right to exist, with psychologists, doctors and others having made it abundantly clear that I'm also insane and also an abomination with this body of mine and also am imagining everything, it feels like being that kid in PE class who didn't get picked by either team and has to sit it out at the sides. Before getting beaten up after said PE class. For being weird. And wearing glasses. And reading books.


I don't like the world which these so-called 'adults' have made. I note the violence, lack of tolerance and respect, the enforcing of baseless views upon others and so on. It shouldn't feel so dystopian, but at the same time one can only admit that the care-free life with the happy ending is reserved for films and sitcoms. And yet this is the only world that is offered to one.


To me the main question I guess is then whether after more than a decade of surviving the medical system and related, how much do I want to struggle through this adult playground? Carve out my spot and somehow stay safe from the bullies. None of that sounds like particularly fun to me. I can feel my mood swinging between careful optimism and despair. Nothing about it seems particularly easy or fun, yet it's hard for me to tell when something is truly that bad, or when it's my PTSD blending in with reality.

As a veteran of the War of Dehumanisation, I have become maybe allergic to any system that does not acknowledge people as such. Call it bureaucracy, regulations, the law, etc. All of it is an easy shortcut to not have to think about people as living beings with their own feelings and dreams. It were humans who made up rules, nations and bureaucracies. We humans get it wrong more often than that we get it right. That's why it's essential that we are always ready to revisit any rules and systems we created to improve them.

This is sadly also exactly the part where humans fail so badly. Call it cognitive bias or any of those other cute psychological excuses for humans refusing to use this supposed 'human intelligence' for intellectual purposes. In the end the result is that tragically, the average child is more perceptive and fair than the average adult human.


Maya

Society's attitude towards intersex is a psychological disorder

A few days ago on social media there was a bit of a kerfuffle about biological sex on account of someone apparently having made the statement that people cannot change between (binary) biological sex. The resulting lawsuit and online drama resulted in a number of people with anti-intersex views venting their spleen as well, such as in one particular Twitter post where an individual insisted on using the anti-intersex term 'Disorder of Sex Development' (DSD), also referring to intersex as a 'less accurate term'. This particular post being about discounting intersex as of any relevance in the debate on biological sex as it's a mere fluke.

Suffice it to say that reading such a statement, and the resulting feedback to the response I posted to said statement was quite upsetting. Not only is one's existence discounted as a statistical fluke and one's biological relevance erased, but in addition it is hammered home that one is a tragic sufferer of a medical disorder, so why hasn't a caring surgeon yet 'normalised' all that is so clearly wrong with your genitals and the rest of your body?


Maybe it's just that over a decade of attempts by doctors and psychologists of trying to convince me that I should normalise my body, whether it was by outright denying my intersex condition, or by attempting to convince me that I was the tragic sufferer of gender dysphoria and that I actually really wanted to have them turn me into a beautiful woman, removing those unsightly 'male' bits. This could have made me somewhat sensitive and conceivably slightly traumatised when it comes to this subject.

Over the past years I have learned very well that my body is exquisitely healthy. I have no genetic disorders, no allergies, nothing worrying in my family that could come haunt me later in life. And here I have a bunch of cretins insisting that there is something wrong with my body. Not just those cretins on social media, but those medical 'professionals' equally so. Can I please love my body without their blathering?


This obsession with binarism, of this imaginary division between some illusionary 'male' and female' element in genetics, the human brain and the human phenotype in general is rather worrying. It's a kind of obsession that goes beyond an every day obsession straight into a 'delusional disorder' [1] diagnosis. Those affected persist even in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that the brain is unisex, that genetics do not dictate even physical sex (e.g. in the case of CAIS) and that the overall complexity of genetics and the resulting phenotypes make any attempt to categorise it as either 'male' or 'female' is foolhardy at best.

And meanwhile intersex individuals like yours truly feel like they're being hunted down on social media and in society, because one side claims us to be the absolute, One True Proof that somehow legitimises things like transgenderism, while some feminists and others push hard to make it clear that intersex is an aberration, that just proves that binarism is the One True Religion. For the rest of society... intersex is so poorly understood that it seems to be mostly associated with things like pornography and cross-dressing actors in those flicks. Oh, and nobody ever talks with us.


I guess that after years of this, combined with my own experiences in the medical system, along with the sickening awareness that intersex genital mutilation (IGM) of infants is still a daily thing, it's hard to feel like being intersex doesn't somehow dehumanises you. Do I feel invisible? You bet. Do I feel like anyone is free to attack me and others in the most cruel way possible for being intersex without repercussions? Absolutely.

There's no punishment for calling intersex an aberration, a disorder or abnormality. Not the way that other minorities are protected. While society cheers on the binarist conversion of children (because they want it), the non-medical 'normalisation' surgeries (IGM) on intersex infants continue unabated, with nobody caring about their views, opinions, or the large number of them who (oddly enough) later turn out to feel unhappy with the choice that was forced on them by those adults. Because we intersex individuals are apparently less than human and our views, feelings or opinions do not matter.


This most recent confrontation with the traumatic part of being intersex has made me realise just how horribly sick society is. That I can have a body that is healthy and yet I end up being traumatised like this. That a healthy infant can be born, yet only to have it receive genital mutilation before it's old enough to speak its first words. That somehow being born intersex means that society will do its utmost to shame, humiliate, normalise and ostracise you. Just because.

It shouldn't be me who has the therapist to work through these traumas and somehow learn to trust doctors again despite all the abuse that I have suffered. It shouldn't be me, or all those others who are suffering needlessly. So many millions of individuals who could have lived happy, carefree lives, but who got crippled and marked like this, simply because society refuses to acknowledge that it has a problem. Why are we even trying to please the rest of society when all we get is this kind of wanton cruelty in return?


I'd really like that restraining order against this delusional part of humanity at this point. I'm not into that kind of abusive relationship, even if they're still convinced that people like me should be okay with it.


Maya


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusional_disorder

Identity unknown

Everything changes. I feel myself dragged along with the changes.

A home. Work. Fading stress.

New questions. Restless feelings and emotions.


Every day trying to convince myself to do the work that needs doing, yet feeling ever more unsettled by feelings of hopelessness and despair.

What's the meaning of the work I do? Of the projects I do in my spare time? Though it feels okay while I can push myself into doing some writing and programming, it's hard to see it all go anywhere. To see a future.

I cannot even see myself any more. Or maybe I never really did. This body of mine sometimes feels like that of a stranger. Other times I can just feel helpless rage and incredible sadness when I consider this body. When I consider being intersex and the many years of doctors and psychologists forcing the identity of a transsexual male on me instead of listening to me and performing medical tests, I just want to scream and cry.

The traumas and confusion of the past decades blur together even as I can still see the good memories during those years through my tears.


Every day I can feel that something isn't right inside my body as it goes through its monthly cycle. The constant distension that keeps worsening along with weight gain. The pain and discomfort in the lower abdomen and perineum that only subsides briefly after each cycle.

I should go to a doctor with it. Just like I have been trying for the past years. Last year started off with me getting exploratory surgery to investigate these pains, but like with every examination attempt but the proper surgery in 2011, nothing ever results from it. I cannot motivate myself any more to consider going to a doctor at this point, as it'd only add to the pain and trauma.

I have had a few people contact me who told me that they're intersex. They invariably ask for advice and help. Yet what can I offer there? Just tales of trauma and disappointment. Of decades wasted on ignorant, arrogant doctors and kin, and a lifetime of regrets for having wasted so many years on what turned out to be fruitless? I failed to find help. I can do nothing more about this intersex thing except hope that it doesn't cause real medical problems beyond chronic pain at some point.

Life would have been so much better if I wasn't born intersex. If intersex didn't exist. If it all just went up and vanished. Just like all of this other gender and sexuality and related nonsense. All it means to me is pain and suffering. I hate all of it. I wish I could just rip it out of my body. Become just a human being and leave the suffering behind that come with those disgusting things.


In some parallel universe I guess there was a me who did write that autobiography, didn't waste years on the useless medical system and who is doing pretty darn well. As for the me in this universe, I guess that person will be struggling month after month to keep up the energy to make enough to pay the rent and food, while still dreaming of a future in which everything will be better, without struggling and worries about health and such.

It's nice to be able to lie to oneself to not lose all hope.


Maya

I'm completely alone as a hermaphrodite

Now that the immediate urgency of being homeless, various legal matters and health issues have subsided or vanished with me having moved into a new apartment, it seems only fair that other matters would suddenly push into the foreground. Such as this little matter of me being intersex. And not just a weird little genetic gotcha like (C)AIS or XXY, but in the form of a full-blown chimeric condition called a true hermaphrodite in medical terms.

Which is to say that in Western society I do not exist. Theoretically there should be more people like me around in the West, and thousands around the world. Yet I have never met anyone else like me. Among the dozens of doctors and other medical specialists none of them had ever encountered one either, or they had merely opted to ignore the details and just 'normalised' the babies or infants born with both male and female genitals.

I guess I am an oddity in that I managed to reach adulthood without getting tossed into the hellscape of 'intersex treatments' [1] first. Yet as an escapee I still will not learn answers to the many questions I have about my body. About this second puberty that I'm still in the midst of. In how far the abdominal pains that I suffer are normal for someone with a mostly female phenotype. Why old scars are suddenly vanishing and I seem to be getting younger in appearance over the past few years since this second puberty started.

With no answers forthcoming, I'm left to try and live my life. Even ignoring the childhood and other assorted traumas that I got handed, it's so incredibly lonely and frustrating to feel that one is the only person of one's kind in this world. Though I managed to at least improve the dissonance by having my official sex changed from male to female, it's not a fix. It's still not who and what I am.


Because of the many negative experiences I have had over the past decade, I feel both cursed and stuck with this body of mine. True, one is still a human being, but by not having my intersex and hermaphroditic nature acknowledged, it feels as though I'm only allowed to partially exist. As long as I pretend that I'm just a regular woman who has had a regular youth and regular female puberty, I can get along fine. Since I'm physically primarily female, suffer through the same joys of monthly periods and everything as every other woman, I can share in everything minus the part where I have to admit that I was born infertile, let alone that I bleed internally because my labia have merged.

It's as though I am two people: the part that society accepts, and the part which will not ever be acknowledged.


The same thing is true in any relationship. There's always the feeling that there's this cultural divide, with either side growing up in a different world. People will often tell me that they 'get it' what my life must be like as a hermaphroditic intersex person, but do they really? The many years of confusion and fear as one's body does things which do not make sense as puberty kicks in, along with an increasing dissonance as the image society tries to project on your body becomes more and more mismatched.

Naturally, the only way that I could have grown up as a 'girl', officially, would have been if it was discovered when I was born that I am a hermaphrodite and they had opted to chop off the penis and not rip out the vagina and other female bits, which would be roughly a 50/50 bet. That my current situation forces me to consider myself to be 'lucky' is possibly the saddest part of all. I made it without suffering genital mutilation.


There's the knowledge of what still has been done to me, as well as the questions which I will likely never have answered, not to mention the cold certainty of always feeling like a one of a kind, sort of freak of nature. All of this makes me seriously consider whether life has much to offer to me. Whether I'll ever be truly happy, or whether it'll always be this intense feeling of loneliness and sadness that fills my heart. It often hurts so much just to live through another day, let alone for me to consider my future.

Maybe if humanity decided that we could let go of this 'male' and 'female' distinction, and just treated everyone as a human being, without having to conform to unrealistic labels. As things stand, however, all I can do at this point is play along with society's game even as my heart yearns to finally be allowed to be myself, along with all others who are like me.


Maya


[1] http://mayaposch.com/intersex-controversy.php

Why transsexuality hurts intersex people

It's been nearly fifteen years now since I first visited a gender team. This was in early 2005, when after an extremely confusing puberty I deduced from online references that I was most likely intersex. Part of the evidence involved my skeletal features and my general physique. I figured that I would get medical help with this matter soon. Yet as it turned out, I'd be forced to be my own physician for a lot longer than I had imagined.


My skeleton is absolutely that of a female human, with its wide, tilted pelvis, that causes the thigh bones to rotate inwards to effect the female way of walking. It also causes the inwards curve on the lower part of the 'S' that forms the spinal column. I also have the outwardly set lower arms, which presumably evolution engineered so as to allow lower arms to not hit the sides of the wider hips.

Add to this the lack of any masculine features in the skull, such as an eyebrow ridge, and it's obvious that my skeleton is devoid of any features that are masculine. The other features, however, are all secondary female characteristics that would have developed during puberty. This all seemed to point strongly towards the conclusion that despite the outwards appearance of my genitals, I was in fact not male, but had to be intersex.


At the gender team, however, my opinion wasn't shared. Though first seemingly accommodating, a blood test for testosterone levels and a urologist appointment were scheduled. The first would supposedly show that I had regular male hormone levels, and the second ended with me being told by this urologist after some unenthusiastic external prodding that no sign of me being intersex had been found by him.

Quickly this situation devolved into me being pushed into the transsexuality protocol, with numerous discussions with psychologists and kin revolving around why I'd not just simply accept that I was not intersex, but transsexual. After two years of this, the final drop was a fake-out where a previously extended offer - to start on hormone therapy towards a female hormone balance and skip the transsexual protocol - was brutally retracted and with me subjected to a ten-minute monologue of how I'd have to stop being so difficult and that following the transsexual protocol towards gender-reassignment surgery was the only option for me to get what I want.

Suffice it to say, that was the day when I decided to become my own doctor again. Getting hormone level tests via my GP was easy. Obtaining the hormones via the internet was too easy and even affordable. Calculating the right doses took a bit of effort, but was doable. That was the moment when I figured out that I had neither typical male, nor typical female hormone levels.


Testosterone was being produced at elevated levels for a female body, but not significantly so, while estradiol would be high for a male body, but on the low end for a female body. I also paid out of pocket for an MRI scan of my abdomen. That scan showed me to be a hermaphrodite, with both male and female genitals present, though with a closed-off vagina.

While initially thinking that this MRI scan in 2007 might change things, this quickly resulted again in my getting stonewalled in the Dutch medical system, with doctors there insisting that nothing could be seen on the scans, and that I was just male, and transsexual. After shifting gears in 2011, I would focus on getting my official gender changed from male to female using a Dutch law aimed at intersex people, to finally put an end to the mass-confusion in waiting rooms due to this official gender not matching my phenotype.

I managed to get the required orchiectomy ('castration') that the Dutch law required to prove that I could no longer be fertile as the old gender. The resulting biopsy of the removed testicles showed that they were underdeveloped, explaining why they had never produced significant amounts of testosterone. This just added to the body of evidence about me being intersex, along with the exploratory part of that orchiectomy surgery, where the surgeon opened the perineum and found the entrance of the vagina.

Fast-forward another eight years, and the same pattern repeats over and over. I can try my utmost to find solid evidence about me being intersex, but it will be denied and I will be pushed back into just giving up, admitting to being transsexual and playing that game. Giving up, getting my body cut up and my spirit broken. Never being allowed to just be myself.


When I say that I hate transsexuality [1], it is from the above described perspective. If transsexuality didn't exist, would I have had to spend fifteen years (and counting) suffering through this non-existence with a condition that is more than real to me? Will there ever be an end to this? Is giving into what feels like the tyranny of transsexuality the only option that's being provided other than to simply end one's life? I question this.

And I'm not the only intersex person to feel this way. A good (trans) friend of mine mentioned recently on Twitter how she had been told the same thing by other intersex people she knows: how the insistence of the medical system and society to force intersex people to be like transsexuals is harming them. It feels both positive (confirmation) to hear this from others, though it also makes me feel terribly sad that so many of us intersex people are affected by this.

I will never judge a person for something what they are. I will however judge anyone based on their actions and deeds. I will judge those medical professionals and kin who caused me and so many others like me such untold suffering and trauma. They made us feel disgusted and have our traumas triggered at the mere mentioning of 'transsexuality', and who made being confronted with transsexual people such an awkward and at times traumatic experience.

As mentioned in the linked post as well, I would love to be able to find a place for this trauma, but I cannot do so while the cause behind it hasn't ended. Transsexuality is still hurting us intersex people, and those hateful, ignorant doctors will keep inflicting that same blunt instrument of transsexuality on us intersex people until we finally all submit to it, giving up our own identity.

I cannot find medical help for my intersex condition, even as it changes, causes discomfort and pain, with possible harmful long-term implications from the closed-off vagina. All I can be to the medical world is either a regular woman/man or transsexual. As I'm neither, I do not exist.

Here's to being invisible and hurting in so many ways.


Maya


[1] http://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/06/torn-between-hate-love-and-hope.html

Life is that game where nobody tells you the rules and everybody laughs at you

As I already alluded to on Twitter over the past days, things are going somewhat sideways, currently (still?). When I rented this one apartment for two months, it was in the expectation that I would be able to find something new and permanent during those months. A house in the Alsace, naturally. Because I had been told that this would be easy and thus I trusted it would be.

That notion I quickly got disabused from, downgrading my expectations to 'just an apartment will be more than fine', but with landlords and real-estate agents either not bothering to return a response, or just telling me that the place had already been given to someone else, time began to run out quickly.

Now I'm supposed to be out of this current apartment by early next week, and I do not have an alternative lined up. Worst case it's going to be putting my stuff in storage and me roughing it on the streets. This week I'm still trying to find alternatives together with a friend, but it's going to be tough to impossible.


Worst of all has to be the constant accusations, whether spoken outright or not, that I have simply done things wrong. That I didn't put in enough effort (alongside establishing myself as a freelancer), and simply should have been more proactive (despite dealing with severe PTSD).

It all makes me feel so very sad that I didn't just get hired at one of those many places where I interviewed at last year. That I could be living in California, Spain, Sweden, Scotland or somewhere else, and would never have gone through any of this.

Clearly because I did something wrong.


Is it truly so amazing that someone in my position is struggling to feel a shred of positivity when it comes to being alive? When nothing seems to work out, and all you can get are snide, hurtful remarks from people. People who consider you to just looking for an 'easy way' when you ask them for help.

The general attitude I have encountered over the past fifteen years no matter which kind of life struggles it comes to is that people just don't care. They don't care about you being homeless. They don't care about you being in pain. They don't care about you being unable to find medical help. They don't care about you living in poverty. They. Don't. Care.

For people who live the easier lives it's hard to imagine just what it feels like to have everything from one's own body to one's living situation constantly go sideways, without any explanation given. Just that one should 'try harder'. Basically don't make any mistakes in life, or the wolves will eat you.


I'm desperately trying to stay optimistic and hopeful that somehow that this will work out, but the weight of pretty much half my life so far spent trying to survive is weighing heavily on me. If I keep screwing up this badly, and things will not get any better as a result, then maybe it's time to just quit trying, no?


Maya

On not having a place in this world

Imagine, you're standing on this hill, surrounded by trees which are filled with blossom, as Spring moves towards Summer. You can smell the wildflowers on the air as the sound of birds and other critters mixes with the gentle rustling of the tree leaves in the breeze. As you close your eyes and lift your face towards the sky you can feel the warm sunlight caressing your skin.

This is the moment when you realise that you're in a place where you're home. Where it's safe and everything is all right. Where in a moment you'll return to the house where you live alone or with others, but it's all because that's the way which works for everyone.


It was around the beginning of this century, probably around 2001 or thereabouts, that I last still felt somewhat like that. After that my parents began to grow cold towards each other and the atmosphere in the house changed. Not long after that my parents divorced and first together with my mother, then alone it was a continuous journey from one house and apartment to another, in search of a home.

At this point I'm staying in a temporary apartment, trying to figure out what to do next as the last weeks at this place come and go. My grand plans of moving to the Alsace region of France have run into the harsh reality of supply and demand. How will this continue? I do not know. I wish I knew.


Similarly, my struggle to get a job last year and early this year didn't result in anything. Supply and demand, I guess. In the end it's not about you as a human being after all. It's just capitalistic reality. Essentially it's about us being merely the cells in this organism called 'Society'.

For all my dreams and hopes I had as a child and beyond, the cruel reality is we humans have made for ourselves is that the value of a person - much like that of a cell in an organism - is determined by their contribution to the system. My situation isn't even the worst imaginable, and it pains me to imagine the situations others find themselves in. There's so much pain. So much unfairness and so much suffering that those affected try to ignore. Plastic smiles.

Are any of us truly happy by living in small, cramped, concrete or stone hovels, practically on top of each other? With small, grimy windows opening into an environment that is choking with the exhaust fumes from cars, trucks and buses, mixed with the acrid smells of cigarette smoke and stale beer.

Is this place where our children play on streets near traffic, breathing in polluted air and only ever seeing the blue skies when they look up at this small strip of sky between the towering buildings. Is this place 'home'?

This reality of 'making the best of things' isn't that different from that scene in George Orwell's famous novell 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' where this woman outside the main character's window is hanging up the laundry while singing one of those auto-generated tunes that play on the radio. Obviously poor, the woman finds a reason to sing even though she lives in a rundown building, in a state of abject poverty, just like practically everybody else.

Just like in that world which Orwell described back in 1948 in the midst of post-war reconstruction, there are the haves and have-nots. The reality is that the handful of people who have practically everything are perfectly happy with keeping things the way they are. They are doing fine, so why would they care? Why would they care about the rest of the population? Those just exist to do their duty. Like any good skin, liver or fat cell.


How many of us consider the impact that 'our' decisions have on the rest of our body? On the tissues that are suffering because we had to do that late-night party, that copious consumption of alcohol and the many cigarettes that got smoked. We do not pay them mind, because we expect them to bounce back. That's what they're there for, after all.

In that sense it's only natural for the rich and wealthy to not care about the have-nots, I guess.


Sometimes I think about what it would mean to me if suddenly I found myself among the rich and famous. It's something that could theoretically happen after all, depending on how well my upcoming autobiography (and the associated Patreon [1] ) do. Say, with the support of a legion of patrons I get my autobiography done and published, and it turns out to be an international best-seller.

Suddenly I find myself being flown around the world for talkshows in places I haven't been to yet, while the money comes pouring in. All of a sudden all of my worries about financial stability and a place to live evaporate. What would I do?

The answer to that is pretty much summed up by the first few paragraphs of this blog entry. I'd want nothing more than to have that happy home for myself, and everybody else. I'm beyond sick of this world in which human lives are essentially meaningless, merely feed for the machine, as relevant as a single skin cell that will reach the end of its lifespan and gets discarded.

I do not claim to know the answer to everything, but I do feel strongly that the world I want to see is one in which there can be room for actual happiness and self-exploration instead of this top-down enforcement of how we should be living our all too brief lives.

Because either life is precious, or it is not.


Maya



[1] https://www.patreon.com/MayaPosch

Why we hate humans so much

I grew up on a farm with a few hectares of land, along with some cows and sheep that needed tending. Together with my two brothers we would spend much of each day outside when the weather was nice, whether by ourselves, or with friends from the village, though during winter some work still needed to be done on the farm to get everything winter-ready. In our village it was quite normal to live on a farm and have this amount of space.

Not everyone in the village lived on a farm, of course, and they would have less space than us farmers did. Still, everyone had their own house, a garden and especially in the original village section (not the new construction), people tended to know just about anything about each other. For much of my life I grew up not really knowing or caring who of the people in the village were or weren't family members. We'd share everything anyway and be there when anyone needed help.

That all dramatically changed when my parents divorced and I moved together with my mother into a house in the nearby city. That was the beginning of what has now been more than a decade of city life. It has convinced me that there are virtually no redeeming qualities to living in a city.

It's not just me, either. Report after report shows that cities are polluted death traps which shorten lifespans [1][2][3], in addition to causing severe stress- and disrupted sleeping pattern-related health issues. Living in a city, or raising children in a city is pretty much one of the worst things that we humans have inflicted upon ourselves over the past thousand years.

Another massive problem that cities perpetuate is that of poverty [4], with those children being born in poor neighbourhoods generally being out of luck unless they can somehow escape from those environments.


All of this does raise the question of why we hate ourselves and our fellow humans so much. Why do we lie to ourselves about what is obviously a massive health issue? Why do we dream of moving up in society while simultaneously trampling others down as we try to move upwards? Why this rat race?

The general way of thinking is that a single human being simply has to do with less. Nobody needs an apartment that's more than about twenty square meters or so. They'd go by just fine. Just cram lots of sub sixty square meter apartments into a few massively tall blocks and stuff them full with people.

Which is exactly what we have been doing with livestock over the past decades, with battery cages for chickens, cramming pigs into cages just barely enough to hold them, turkeys and other poultry on the floors of massive halls with no room to move.

They figured out at some point that dimming the light to about 10 lux caused chickens in battery cages to not inflict as much physical harm on themselves, as these low light levels would trigger resting behaviour. As pigs that got crammed together in small spaces would start resorting to cannibalism - eating the ears, tails and other parts of their fellow pigs - their tails and ears would be preemptively removed, along with some of their teeth.


To me the way humans and livestock are being treated kind of blurs together. The whole bio-industry with their industrial levels of animal cruelty exists because the old ways of raising livestock was too expensive and inefficient. So they optimised those inefficiencies away without any consideration for animal well-being.  But cruelty-free/reduced cruelty meat, poultry and eggs cost more, so it'll likely always remain a thing.

Similarly, one points at how inefficient the average human being is. When not at an office doing useful work, or otherwise participating in the economy, they are just a drain on resources, filling space that could be filled with more humans. There's nothing to be gained by making it affordable for the average person to buy a house with a garden, and allow their children to grow up surrounded by nature instead of inside glass, concrete, stone and asphalt-lined cages. That's just not productive.


On our farm, our cows and sheep would spend time outside as much as possible, to eat the fresh grass and otherwise do their thing. We'd bring the cows in only for milking and during the night. Of course, we were painfully aware of this not being efficient. Other farmers had already begun to stop letting their cattle graze outside as much as we did, instead keeping them in the stables and feeding them either dried grass or cattle feed.

These days there's more of a market for meat, poultry and eggs that comes from animals who actually have seen some daylight during their lives, so it's more realistic to farm that way again. For humans there's no such hope, however. Most farmers have already quit their business and sold their farms to mega farms that are run by large companies.

Unless one is rich, this means that one will have to accept that the future for themselves and those around them means less living space, smaller apartments with more restrictions, more stress and more concrete and only a miserable patch of half-dead and dying plants surrounded by muddy grass (commonly referred to as a 'public park') to serve as a way to 'escape the city'.


Makes one wonder whether dimming the light inside cities to 10 lux might be a solution, along with the removal of any appendages which its inhabitants do not need to carry out their jobs anyway. Could solve all crime and violence issues in one stroke, while increasing productivity many fold

Maybe this is the perfect time to consider a career in being livestock..


Maya


[1] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/health-impacts-of-living-in-a-city/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/13/warning-living-city-seriously-damage-health
[3] https://www.who.int/sustainable-development/cities/health-risks/en/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4570570/

To let oneself be carried off by the current

Working long hours, rushing to make deadlines and still not feeling like one is getting anywhere. Going through job interview after job interview only to get rejected. Dealing with the crippling psychological impact of a looming eviction and the prospect of abandoning everything once more and resorting to the charity of others. That's my day to day life for months now.

Somewhere in the background is still the constant pains and discomfort of my body, even as it keeps going through physical changes, from the gradually vanishing scars and subtle changes to my face and skin in general, to the general development of female secondary characteristics. None of it explained, none of it making sense, no clue as to what will happen in the end. Is this just a normal puberty?

I can feel my sense of self, my ego, vanishing in the midst of this. My body is in flux, nothing around me in my environment is fixed or certain. I know what person I think I am, and what I want my future to look like, but all paths have been closed off, with no way forward. There's just waiting.

It feels so pointless to keep struggling, to wish for a better future. Even after so many years I have come little closer to my goals, or found a home.


Two weeks ago I found myself taken to the local psychiatric clinic by the police because my social worker was worried about me after a few remarks in an email I sent to her. I ended up staying two nights there, because they were afraid that I might hurt myself, or worse. I was let out during the day of the second day there, however, with the promise to return by dinner time. I was let out again on the third day, with the recommendation to visit a psychiatrist at their walk-in clinic.

Honestly, I do not want to hurt myself, or even end my own life, but this sense of pointlessness and futility is making me feel ever more disjointed from this body and my perception of reality. Thus I feel torn between the fun and interesting things in my life, the future I want to work towards to, and the strong desire to just give up and let all of those who wish me to vanish get their desire.

This body feels like a hindrance. I don't want to have to think about where to house it, how to feed and clothe it. How to deal with its changes and pains. Its mortality. I cannot comprehend human society. It all feels so wrong and distant, like a tune that's ever so slightly off-key.


There's still my third book to finish, a job to find, a home to find and move to. An eviction to avoid and chronic stress, PTSD and worrying abdominal pains to ignore. The question of whether this is possible at all doesn't apply, nor whether I still have the energy to continue. There's no choice, no freedom, no pity or empathy. Just the choice between continuing this struggle and giving up.


I'm still struggling and hoping, but it's so hard.


Maya

Chronic pain and exhaustion as excuses for procrastination

When I wrote my earlier blog post today, I was in a considerable amount of physical pain, with my right side hurting in an intense fashion. Currently just my right arm hurts, there's a numbed burning sensation in my right side and that's about it. While writing that earlier blog post the pain was much more intense.

I'm not sure whether it's just the pain that's making me sleep so incredibly poorly for months now. Using the bracelet that I'm wearing I can monitor how restful my sleep likely is. There I see that most nights I wake up repeatedly or at least am incredibly restless, without any recollection of this. By the time I wake up I'm feeling drained, exhausted and just want to get some sleep.

Most days I can force myself to get out of bed, get dressed and go to work and such, but I cannot remember the last time that I actually woke up feeling well-rested and energetic. Even after getting a solid seven hours of sleep in.

During the day will also suffer from these pains. They're distracting and drain my energy. As a result my ability to focus on things like work or projects has become ever more limited over the past years. Basically normally one would start with a full charge after a night's sleep, but for me it usually feels like there's no more than 10 or 15 percent available.


Then there's the effect sleeping poorly and stress in general have on psychological trauma and kin. When I'm exhausted I have almost no defence against anything negative. It feeds depression and negative thoughts, which in turn make one sleep worse again, and so on.

I'm currently not feeling the intense pain and agony as I did when I wrote today's first blog post. I'm still feeling decidedly depressed and anything but happy, but beyond a headache and a head that feels as if it's stuffed full with cotton, I'm otherwise more or less okay. Just really tired.

While talking with a number of people today who responded to the blog post, it was made clear that they do not think that I'm doing so poorly at this point. Walking in another person's shoes and all that, I guess. I'm still trying to figure out how much of my problems are just inside my own head. I know that some parts are not rational, such as my intense fear and distrust of others and feeling of being useless and worth absolutely nothing.

Trying to convince myself to beg others to maybe accept me for a job might take a while at this rate. There are so many options, so many companies and so many positions out there. I don't know what might be best or what to try, or what would work or what not. Yet this is still simple next to the Hell of real-estate, I guess. There one doesn't even have to begin to pretend that one can trust others there.


I should be fighting for my place in this world, but I'm so tired, and every time I close my eyes I see and feel those same nightmares again, of how people abused and hurt me.

If someone stood up and guided me through this process it might be easy, I guess. It should be easy for me, but everything out there seems to be aimed at overwhelming and/or demotivating a person.

One friend suggested that maybe I should move into academics. To that I replied that I could maybe see myself doing that, but that I would prefer R&D. Something science-like and gritty, with scary mathematics and horrific implications if one gets some detail wrong. That would be challenging.

Yet try finding something like that. Everything just has to be exceedingly dull, it seems. Sometimes it feels as if society is designed to drive people towards a depression from the sheer boredom.


I like things which can be reasoned and are logical. Things where one can see from the beginning which steps are roughly needed and where one knows what works. Things like a job and a home on the other hand seem like working on a project where you have to select from fifty-million different suppliers, most of which will deliver a sub-par product, yet there's no way to figure this out beforehand. I'd rage-quit such a project because it would be ridiculous.


I guess next week I'll talk things over with my therapist. See what his thoughts are. Maybe I'm truly just whining and it's all in my head. Maybe I'm the problem, or at least a significant part of it. Yet at this point nothing makes sense to me yet, let alone which steps would make sense. All of which feed into this depression and so on. Darnit.

*Hits the reset button on her life*


Maya

The many ways in which I'll die this year

Once you lose hope, it's all over, they say. Having hope is a good thing.

It's all relative, I guess. If there's still an inkling of a possibility that things will improve, it's fine to have hope. But for example for someone who is terminally ill, with mere weeks left to live, what's the point in holding hope? There won't suddenly appear a miracle cure that will fix everything. You can only make peace with the fact that you'll be dying soon.

In some ways I wish that I was suffering from some terminal illness. It would make things so much easier to explain. As well as give some definite shape to my life.

Recently the psychotherapist who is also acting as my medical coach informed me that she doesn't see any point in scheduling new appointments as all of the medical contacts through she tried to find medical help for my intersex condition either turned up nothing, or she didn't receive a response at all. She will contact me again if she has something to report.

What should I expect there? Nothing. No hope. No expectations. Just nothing. It's nearing thirteen years now since I started searching for this mythical medical help and neither I nor others have managed to find a single doctor or related who could or wanted to do anything for me, with only a few minor exceptions. In the end I'll just have to accept a body which I do not understand, which hurts more and more each month, with previous methods to reduce the abdominal pains and numbness in my leg failing to offer much relief any more.

It seems that those thirteen years were basically wasted. Or maybe not wasted. I did learn a lot about myself. Including that I'm not human. Not this body of mine, nor myself. It's all too alien to be human. I see lots of humans every day, and they are nothing like myself.

Especially now that my body is seemingly reverting to a younger physical age, with previously dormant ovaries suddenly beginning to function, old and newer scars suddenly hurting and vanishing, including the two big scars on my lower abdomen from the 2011 orchiectomy. Nothing about this is normal. Nothing about it something that should happen. Yet it is happening, and it's up to me to deal with it somehow, because nobody is going to give me answers about what is happening, or why.


During the past summer I was able to briefly forget about some of my worries. The contraceptive pill successfully held off the worst of the monthly pains, and mostly prevented the numbness and pain in my right leg. The whole eviction business had been pushed back to the end of the year, which seemed a small eternity away.

Yet the latter starts again by the end of next month, with the inspection at the apartment. I'm wearing headphones or earplugs almost full-time again while at the apartment because of the noise from the heating system and other noise sources. Along with the rapidly dropping temperatures this makes it hard to put thoughts of this upcoming event out of my mind. Just being at the apartment is enough.

Last month I found out that the contraceptive pill isn't helping nearly as much as it used to either, so that's a lot more physical pain I have to deal with as well. To some extent the pain and numbness can be dealt with, but even when maxing out the ibuprofen, so much of the pain and discomfort remains. Worse than the pain and numbness is not knowing why any of this is happening, or what it'll lead to. It makes it easy to despair.

And what will the eviction case result in? The acknowledgement that my assessment of the defects was correct, hopefully. This would give me all the time I need to find something better, maybe even buy a house, without the pressure of being forced to leave. At this point I'm absolutely not capable of doing anything there. The last attempts there (last year, and early this year) resulted in me struggling through a severe suicidal depression for a weekend.


That's one of those points where I'd wish that I just had something visible, like cancer or such. Something that people understand. 'I don't have the energy for it', or 'it causes me emotional agony', or 'it kicks me into a suicidal depression' are things which the average person does not understand and consequently does not accept.

Even for myself it's hard to understand this level of emotional distress and trauma. Or even what will trigger these suicidal depressions, or why. The most basic explanation is probably that I can deal with intellectual, purely rational topics just fine, but not with anything involving emotions or feelings. Dealing with an irrational system such as what humans have put up for the process of procuring or renting property is beyond merely stressful for me, even before taking into account that all of those people you deal with are looking to screw you over.


What I do hope for is to reach a point where I can have my own house, away from other people, and as few negative interactions with people as possible. I think I have had my fill of humanity. From the abuse I suffered as a young child, to being constantly bullied and harassed, by fellow students, doctors, psychologists, and many others over the years. Society's systems which have failed me over and over again. The constant feeling of not belonging in this world. Of being unwanted.

I carry no love for humanity as it continues to seek the end of my existence. Even as my thoughts are occupied with thoughts of escaping my situation through suicide or just passively giving in through an action such as just getting up, walking away and continuing to walk until I'll either die or something happens. Or just letting it all happen to me, such as when they advise women to not resist when they're being raped, because doing so will 'make things faster and easier'.

I wish for happiness. I hope I will find it. My current reality is of the same old war being fought for my very survival.

There's no room for hope or dreams in the midst of a war. Just strategy and continuing to fight long past your body's and mind's endurance.


Maya

How feminism made me loathe Wonder Woman

I never really was into super heroes as a child. Mostly because most of them were so unrealistic that I could not imagine how they would appeal to an audience. Regardless, over the years I have caught up on this craze through watching various films and cartoons featuring these characters.

Of all of these super heroes, I like the anti-heroes the most, to be honest. Especially characters such as Dead Pool and Wolverine. They feel like real people, with a real background and personality with whom you can relate. The X-Men series in general appealed to me because it features characters who were just thrown into that role through genetic fate, causing lots of struggles as they came to terms with their condition. Many of these characters are quite relatable as a reason.

I have seen a few Super Man films as well, but as with characters such as Captain America and kin, it never felt real. With an unrealistic premise, ridiculous forced character development and a cardboard cut-out for a personality, such films never connected with me. I definitely liked the Bat Man films more there, as Bruce's character was relatable in its imperfections.


One of the few characters whom I had not seen in a cartoon or film before in any significant fashion so far is Wonder Woman. She just seemed like yet another one of those 'me too' ridiculous over the top American super heroes with truly one of the most ridiculous outfits (easily beating some of the more extreme Cat Woman outfits). Fighting in such an outfit? I'd have trouble merely catching a bus wearing it.

So then there was this Wonder Woman film this year, and people got all excited about it, because it was supposed to be really good. And presumably it was. Yet I doubt that I'll try seeing it, because I can't get this grimy taste of smug, third-wave feminism out of my mouth whenever I think of Wonder Woman now.

What mostly repulses me about Wonder Woman in general now is that she has been made into this feminist symbol which will inspire young boys to always be nice to girls and women, and young girls to... grow up to wear costumes which show off lots of cleavage and
come to prefer hot pants. Or something. Or to not take cr*p from anyone while wearing such a ridiculous costume. I guess.


I have always been quite frank about my dislike for feminism, just like my mother. This mostly due to the inherent discrimination in third-wave feminism. My mother saw it all take shape over the past decades while growing up as a young woman. My generation now has to live with its consequences.

As some may have gathered by now, I wasn't raised in a traditional female role. Courtesy of having been mistaken for a boy due to my intersex condition, I initially got brainwashed into the stereotypical (for the Netherlands) male role. Thanks to having been raised by my parents in a gender-neutral fashion, I was able to transition fairly easily into a female role instead after I discovered that my body is primarily female (just with male genitals as bonus).


What irks me the most about feminism as a result of my experiences so far is just how self-centred and self-serving it is. Albeit supposedly feminism is supposed to be about 'equality', in reality it is anything but. Although I'm also a woman, I'm in the first place a human being. Secondly I'm a hermaphrodite. And I do not feel that I am included in feminism.

Feminism is about enforcing the gender binary. About segregating people into 'men' and 'women'. About assigning stereotypes and allocating victimisation quotas. About telling young girls that they should be 'proper women' and being different from 'those men'.

Feminists do not give a fig about us intersex 'women', or the troubles (and genital mutilations) we suffer. Few Western feminists even care about the troubles suffered by women in non-Western countries. Instead we just get Western feminists cheering over a fictional character in a fictional universe somehow going to pull 'those men' into line and somehow inspiring 'girls' to become whatever. Not like a character such as Ripley in the film Alien from the 1980s being a far more realistic role model. I thought she was pretty rad, at least.

But really, if it's about equality, then it should not matter which genitals, gender, sexual preference or such a role model has. If it does, one merely discriminates. All that should matter is the person themselves. How they treat others, expect to be treated by others and their goals and path in life. An idol has to be stripped of such mundane attributes which ultimately do not define them as a person. Things like genitals.

I could have watched the Wonder Woman film the way I watched the Super Man films: as a way to stay updated on popular Western culture, and maybe enjoy a film, similarly to how I watched Dr. Strange recently and found it to be an interesting film. Yet it has become impossible for me to watch this new film now. It has become too tainted due to these connections with feminism, ruining any chance of me enjoying the film.


This rant sums up the basics of my feelings on this subject. I have long thought about whether I should write this at all, because I have seen the flak caught by those who dared to object to Western third-wave feminism. As an egalitarian and humanist, I do feel that people like us should speak up more often, to stem the populism of feminism and its damaging effects on society. For the sake of equality and egalitarianism.

I do not think that feminists are terrible people, just misguided. I think that they truly believe that they are doing good, but they haven't gone through the same life experiences as others. Sometimes they really need to step back and reassess their interpretation of reality. Maybe realise that their version of reality does not include a large group of people, and likely butchers biological facts into an overly simplistic interpretation.


Maybe then I could finally just be able to watch films without all of these unneeded connotations.


Maya

Mental health: you must, even if you cannot

It'll soon be exactly twelve years since I started looking for help with my back then only suspected intersex condition.

I remember all too well how completely done I was with everything and life in general after only two years of hitting brick walls and dead ends with the Dutch medical system. One night I was chatting with an American friend when I pretty much just broke down. She already knew about my situation, which made me feel that I could open up to her. About how horrible I felt, yet also about how I felt that I could not tell anyone.

"Why not just tell everyone?"

That one question, asked by her, pretty much changed my world. The positive feedback from those who learned about my situation - barely more than strangers - enabled me to make it through the next ten years. With this blog of mine I have been able to put down most of my feelings of frustration, but also of small victories. It's been already over nine years since I started this blog.


What sticks with me the most of the past years is how much of it involved around losing all hope and motivation to live, only to get up and try again. Fall down. Get up. Try again. Fall down. Get up. Try again. Fall down. Get up. Try again.

Over a decade of not giving up. Even when I could not do it any more. Even when I did not want to any more. Even when I would rather want to be dead than continue trying.

Even after I tried to commit suicide and failed, I continued trying. Trying to believe in humans. Trying to believe in myself. Trying to find help. I continued trying because I had to. Because I wanted to. Because I did not have any choice. What else was I going to do?


After twelve years it might finally be working out, depending on next year's results with the new surgeon.


I may have made it. Only at the cost of severe psychological trauma. Forcing myself constantly well past the point of what I could mentally take and suffering countless traumatic experiences at the hands of psychologists, physicians and others have left me in a state where I can barely function in society any more. I have lost the ability to trust others. Every sense of naivety has been beaten out of me.

I'm still hurting inside of what I went through. I'm bleeding inside. I'm a wreck emotionally and psychologically.


And I am being forced to do it all over again.

Some people who are supposed to be my friends, heck, even my own mother keep pushing me to actively seek a new place to move into because of the legal issues with my current apartment which are making me feel suicidally depressed. Seeking a new place requires trusting people. Requires taking risks which may have me end up in an even worse situation than the one I am currently in. I should know, because I have had multiple experiences over the past years where a place I had rented or was about to rent turned out to be absolutely not what was promised.

I do not trust people. I want, no must live somewhere quiet. Somewhere without people. Without worries about people. I hate people so much. They're dangerous. Untrustworthy. Yet I need them. I cannot live without them.

I cannot proceed from where I am currently. There is no way out. I am blocked by my own past. Yet nobody around me can see it. Or understand me. Or help me.

I am hurting so much inside. Hurting more every day. I'm feeling more often suicidally depressed these past months than I have felt since that last suicide attempt. I wish desperately there was a way out. Maybe I have to try to do this on my own again, yet when I take the first few steps towards finding that better place I break down emotionally again, feel terrible, cry and want to hurt myself.

Yet I must. I must. I must. Get up. Try again. Get up. Try again.

I cannot.

I cannot. Not any more.


I want to tear open this skin of mine. Scratch it until it bleeds. Break every bone. Bleed profusely. Become outwardly crippled in some way to match the hurt I feel inside. Maybe then people around me can see and understand. Maybe.

More likely they'll turn away and ignore me. The way they ignore everything which doesn't fit into their tiny, happy worlds with countless small, irrelevant worries. Worries which people like me would love to have. Just those silly little things as part of a boring little life. A life without any real pain.


We are all just left here. Alone in the darkness, with our own pains and worries. Faintly working up the courage to just bloody finally end it all instead of keeping up this charade of appearing happy and okay because it's so not okay to be mentally not well. To have mental problems. To not being capable of making it through a single day but doing it anyway.

Just us here, with our plastic smiles and dead-eyed laughter.

We will continue. Because we must. Because you force us to. Because we cannot live, but cannot die. Because we do not understand any of this yet, but hope we will some day, against our better judgement.


We will be bitterly disappointed.


Maya

Being good just makes you into a punching bag

After yesterday's highly unpleasant lawyer letter, threatening me with eviction and the forced payment of large sums of money, I sent a response back, highlighting that the building owner has not seen fit to fix the outstanding issues in the apartment. The response I got from the lawyer was brief: the owner believes that everything has been fixed, has the bills from repairmen to show for it, and that I should be paying up and moving out as soon as possible.

Only problem with that is that there never was any feedback from me, or communication from the owner's side about the issues being fixed and the reduction in rent being discontinued. This leads to the stance where I can easily point out the remaining issues in the place (rusty water, poor insulation, noisy heating system, lack of sound insulation with neighbours), and where the owner insists there are no more issues, or as her representative put it: "It's an old building, those things are normal."

Long story short, I have to get that lawyer ASAP, who will hopefully make short work of this matter. I have also registered with an organisation for those who rent their apartment, house, etc. and contacted them. Hopefully they'll be able to advise me as well.

Meanwhile I have applied for the first new apartment. If I get it, I'd be able to move next month. From the description it sounds pretty decent. It's a 1970s building, but fully renovated (my current place just had the windows renewed, poorly). It's even a little bit larger than my current place and should be very comfortable. Keeping my fingers crossed there.

Of course I'm still looking for new apartments/houses to rent in or near Karlsruhe. Same search parameters still apply: roughly 80 square meters, quiet, and some place for my bicycle as well as cable connection (for internet).  Please let me know if you know of anything there that's with a reputable owner.


Moving on, this whole thing definitely brings back a whole lot of unpleasant memories and thoughts. Once again I'm being accused of being something which I am not, through no fault of my own. I'm again left wondering what it is that people have against me, and then the nagging doubt of whether it isn't actually me after all who is the problem. Maybe I'm just thinking that I can manage this 'adult' thing but I'm in reality screwing up everything.

I spent over a decade 'debating' with physicians and psychologists whether I was just a feminine-looking boy, a male to female transsexual, intersex, crazy, delusional (actual phrase used by a psychologist), or just obsessed with proving that I was right. If it's often simply impossible to prove that your own, physical body is what it is and not what they say it is, then how does one deal with more abstract matters?

When years of such psychological (and physical) abuse finally took their toll and I blacked out in what was likely a dissociative identity disorder-related episode, I was blamed for the damage to a number of objects in that waiting room, even though I never wilfully chose to damage them, or was even aware of it. Yet how does one prove DID, or PTSD? You cannot measure it (except with fMRI scans, probably), or see it, only say with a reasonable degree of certainty that the person who claims to have PTSD, or DID blackouts, is telling the truth.


In essence, I got blamed for over a decade for everything bad that was inflicted on me, from the attitude of doctors and psychologists. My attitude was wrong, the German medical conclusions were mistaken, I was just being obsessed with the thing, I should admit the doctors were right and live my life as the guy I am. And so on. The disciplinary case I brought against the Amsterdam VUmc gender team was dismissed because they had 'done nothing wrong' in their assessment of me, this even after the first surgery in Germany and my legal gender change on the basis of being a hermaphrodite.

What have I really done wrong? I always stuck to the rules, followed the advice of professionals unless my own research made me question it. By the end of 2007 I was dealing with two completely conflicting medical conclusions, between me being a regular guy, or a hermaphrodite. Who wouldn't want to get the real answer there? Could anyone live with such uncertainty? Is it wrong to keep asking questions?


A while ago I had a collection agency after me because I supposedly hadn't paid Ikea for a delivery. That turned out to be fully Ikea's fault because they had never communicated to me that the automated withdrawal from my bank account had failed, because the delivery guy hadn't written down my information properly. Instead they sent me a bill and follow-up requests for money without further explanation, never responding to my emails to support. There the collection agency admitted this, Ikea admitted this, and I just had to pay the original amount. Their fault, their mea culpa, everything was fine in the end.

I'm hoping that something like that will happen here too. I am not aware of me having done anything wrong and from the (professional) advice I have received so far it does indeed appear that the fault lies solidly with the building's owner. Of course, my experience of being right and getting proven right is somewhat sketchy based on those previous experiences. The fear which keeps eating away at me is that despite being right, I'll still have to pay a lot of money, get evicted and have this marked on some permanent file, making it a nightmare to ever rent again.


Being the 'good guy' has to be pretty much symbolic with 'taking everything the less scrupulous throw at one', while only smiling and staying polite during the process. When one sees what others can get away with, it does make one wonder whether it truly pays to be good and whether the 'dark side' isn't really way more fun.

On the other hand, I think I'd make for a terrible villain.


Maya

Just want to know that everything is okay

The past weeks I found myself struggling with exhaustion, lack of and generally poor sleep, severe nightmares and similar, all of which made me wonder what was going on to make me feel so terrible. It felt like burn-out, depression and similar non-fun stuff, but I couldn't quite put my finger on the cause. That is, until yesterday.

All too often when something 'snaps' emotionally it's not due to a singular event, but the slow, gradual build-up of emotional stresses. Rarely is it even from a singular source, though they can be related. Looking back on the past month or so I could easily identify a number of sources.


Pregnancies, relationships and marriages. Three words which evoke primarily negative feelings and stir negative memories for me. Also three topics which played a big role at work lately.

Pregnancy? Never been an option for me, no matter which way. Painful reminder of how... different my body is.

Relationships, marriages and the like? Heterosexual relationships still make me feel ill at the mere thought. Relationships and marriages are an excellent reminder of how anti-social and secluded I have become over the years that I may as well not bother to fix this any more.


Then the million dollar word: 'home'. As in a place where you feel safe and comfortable. Something which I haven't had in literally over a decade. Something which I do not have currently and do not expect to have until next year at the earliest. If I can find the courage to expose myself to the potential to get hurt incredibly again. This is also the reason why I will never rent a place again.


I just want to reach a point where I do not feel threatened any more. A point where nobody is trying to scam me, where nobody threatens me even when I have done nothing wrong, where I feel that my skills are welcome, and maybe even where I can feel that I can trust people around me.

At this point I am unhappy, I feel broken and a misfit. Not suicidal or anything of the sort, but just very sad and somewhat depressed that life has to be so incredibly hard just for some when it would be so easy to make life easy for everyone.


Next week I expect to hear more about the potential reconstructive surgery, a surgery which should hopefully conclude well over a decade worth of searching for medical help with my intersex condition. A condition which has taken me well outside the bounds of 'normal society' and which unfortunately has forced me to confront aspects of it which are simply indescribably revolting.

Part of what I came to terms with yesterday is that the intense feeling of alienation I deal with on a daily basis is simply because that's the way things are for people like me: we are not part of human society like others. We don't raise families or have happy, care-free relationships. We don't get married or fuss about what clothes to wear to a party.

We deal with those parts of society everyone else chooses to simply ignore. We have to carve out our own lives, in our own way without an easy template to follow. This is also an incredibly tough and gruelling path to follow, yet we do not follow it because of some expected gain. We do it because we have no other choice.


This all makes it so much more important to reach those points where one can just sit up and realise that everything is okay. That one has an actual place one can happily call 'home', funds to live one's life and nothing major to worry about. To people like us such moments are more precious than anything else in this universe, simply because they are so incredibly rare.


Maya

What not coping with stress and PTSD looks like

After yesterday I thought that I'd be able to stabilise a bit emotionally, count on being able to negotiate away at least most of this sudden hidden fee for the new apartment and just wrestle my way through all the tasks involved in switching places. Today I learned that I was horribly wrong about that assumption.

From hitting my head repeatedly until I could taste blood, to having to force myself to not plunge that knife into my abdomen, to otherwise prevent myself from inflicting grievous harm to my body... it's been an eventful day. It also demonstrates in a most painful manner that I am not capable of dealing with situations like this, nor that I am in control of my PTSD. It shows just how dangerous trying to find a new place is as well. Without the self-control I displayed today, I'd now possibly be in the ER with severe abdominal wounds.

As a result of this I may have to concede that unless the situation with the new apartment resolves itself, I may end up not signing the contract and look elsewhere for further options. While my current apartment is terrible and the current owner (large real-estate company) tries its best to get me evicted somehow, it's at least something I have learned to somewhat cope with over the past years.

I have already let my contact person at the relocation service known that my trust in this new apartment owner has been shattered by this hidden fee. Tomorrow I'll hopefully learn what their response is.


With how much stress, pain and triggering of my PTSD this all causes me, it almost makes me think that those who recommend that I have myself checked into a mental hospital have a point. Maybe I'm just not capable of dealing with daily life and society at all. Maybe I do need treatment before I can pretend to be just a happy little cog again.

Still, having others take care of me and me not having to worry about a thing would be kind of nice... it would be like committing suicide, but without the 'permanently dead' thing.


This morning I even got an email from my psychotherapist, in which she spelled out her worries for me after reading yesterday's blog post. Unfortunately I wasn't able to send her a text message to reassure her as she requested (buggy iPhone refuses to send SMSes), but I did send an email in response, explaining that I feel that talking about all of this is pointless. What I need at this point are people who help me deal with this part in life.

Of finding a good place, of helping me move in and all the little details around it. Things which for others are easy and not fraught with emotional traps.

I also noted that I'll have to just try to survive the coming weeks, yet that I will not find happiness. The expectation is that I will become happier now that I have fewer things to worry about, but frankly I am not seeing it. This whole housing thing may ultimately be the thing which does me in, instead of the twelve years of fighting for medical recognition and help.


I do have to wonder, what is the point of living anyway?


Maya