Real Life and online

I contribute to a thread on Urban75 called "Three positives from your day" so we can pick out the tiny crocks of gold from our dog shit days; and these are the ones I wrote for Sunday

Boss has been away this week. Which takes a lot of pressure off me. As an Aspie I hate the feeling I'm being watched while I'm working, and I know I am. I also need to have pressure release activities for when I reach a point where my thoughts feel jammed up or I feel overwhelmed but the boss has decided this is just me avoiding doing work. It pisses me off because everyone else in the team get up and walk about and have inane chats about shit, while I am stuck at my machine because i don't do inane chatter. Sometimes it feels like i have been tied down - every urge within me says get up and walk or change activity now and i know i can't. I am definitely less productive because of it.And being penalised for being less productive too.

On Monday I was taking on transphobes on Twitter and had the absolute joy of seeing this lady, who claims to be sympathetic to trans people but still thinks that women with a penis like me should use the men's. She's on there pontificating about how trans women should do this and how we should do that. But she wasn't able to listen at all. I had to block her because I lost patience.

Also, the Green Party of England and Wales appeared to implode over trans rights. In fact what happened was an attempt by women in the Green Party to make it clear that trans women were women and would be regarded as women within the party ( also an attempt to being inclusive to non binary people) backfired when TERFs seized on an extremely badly worded statement that seemed to imply that women were just non-men. Even feminists within the GP such as the awful Beatrix Campbell leapt on it to attack trans allies.
I tweeted on this and criticised just about everyone involved - except Aimee and the LGBTIQ group. I'd seen this coming. For me its a failing of the GP leadership who just avoided dealing with trans issues, offered us fuck all support and now this has happened.  I'm just glad to be out of it.

On the mental health front, re my social anxiety, week has been OK. CBT is pushing me to do more inane chatter (being sociable) and boss is all for it, and has noticed. So i appear to be in boss's good books. Since my anxiety has been manageable - i don't know why. CBT, new hormones, use of mindfulness and other changes i've made may have all helped.

I'm a lot more chatty now which goes against the grain cos I'm an old curmudgeon who likes her own space and thoughts.

So at work my big meeting came up - third party trees - and I feel that I did a good job of facilitating. It's about having a robust process for dealing with hazardous trees that aren't on our property. I took Network Rail's process and adapted it. Managed to get people from Legal, Customer services, and a couple of engineers who deal with risk to our assets from third parties on board. I have hopes for this one.

On Tuesday I was an idiot and let my Twitter account get hacked. Ended up spamming thousands of my followers. I guess I was lucky not to lose any.

Three positives from Tuesday 

And then mid week I decided I wanted to set up a Transgender Equality Party. How this goes I don't know. A political party may not be the most appropriate medium for bringing about trans equality but we need something that can unite all trans people and allies - LGBT does not cut it any more.

On Wednesday I was incensed by this: This dishonest and transphobic reporting from The Sun. There is very much a campaign on at the moment to discredit and demonise trans people. It runs from denial that trans is a thing right through to insinuating that we are child abusers, and extremists with an evil agenda. It's an alliance of the right wing press, old Tory MPs, transphobes and bigots, men's rights activists, and TERFy feminists.

Three positives from Wednesday

And it was the week where the death of a hero of mine - Victoria Wood, occurred, and then Prince too. It's only April and the death list of 2016 feels overwhelming already.

then on Friday travelling home had a couple of incidents both of which have been reported to the police now.


Blast from the past selfies:

    

This is me from 2014, on the left after having my hair done by Lucy, and on the right trying to be Chrissie Hynde.