A podcast about gender, identity, orientation, and all the life that happens around them! George is an FtM transgender man, Jess is his pansexual genderqueer wife; they talk parenting, work, and such.
Episodes
Saturday Feb 06, 2016
Saturday Feb 06, 2016
Men are often allowed more assertiveness in social interactions, expected to behave more aggressively in competitive situations, and allowed more ownership of their self-presentation. These longstanding holdovers from centuries of patriarchy continue to affect our lives today, as exhibited in the experiences of individuals who transition. When one transitions, however, is it possible to forget what one used to have, what life had previously been like, and what privilege one has gained or lost? Does privilege become assimilated as one becomes more accustomed to one's new place in society? And why the hell do guys tell guys stuff they wouldn't tell girls, even when the information is inherently ungendered?
Saturday Jan 30, 2016
Saturday Jan 30, 2016
Western culture has certain expectations of individuals based on their gender. These can cause benefit to those who naturally fit them, and detriment to those who naturally eschew them, but how do these expectations shape our overall experience in binary society? A woman's face and body are subconsciously considered by many to be "public property" to be commented upon or directed to behave in "ladylike" ways, even by complete strangers. Men are naturally assumed to have competence in their chosen endeavours, and when they prove themselves incapable of achieving their goal then other men will often "coach" them to succeed. The cumulative effect of these and many other similar differences are what we mean when we say "Male Privilege".
Saturday Jan 23, 2016
Saturday Jan 23, 2016
We got guests again! Our Jesus Friend from Ep#111-112 and our Lawyer Friend from Ep#128-129 sat down with us to discuss male privilege. In the first of three episodes, we start with some definitions and a little intersectionality, how male privilege is enhanced by being tall or straight or white or masculine, and how privilege can be used to benefit others who lack the benefits that three of us have as perceived "straight white guys". Men aren't as heavily policed with regards to their appearance or social habits, and are given the benefit of the doubt much more often than women with regards to professional competency.
Saturday Jan 16, 2016
Saturday Jan 16, 2016
As HRT has done it's work on George's body, it has changed his libido and the way he handles physical intimacy. Some of these changes are physical and others are mental, but the experience as a whole has been one heck of a ride for both of us, regardless of who's being ridden...
Saturday Jan 09, 2016
Saturday Jan 09, 2016
Why do some people "make such a big deal" of gender? When is it okay to make gender a "big deal"? When ought it be just another mundane aspect of our existence? We discuss our relevant experiences and opinions.
Saturday Jan 02, 2016
Saturday Jan 02, 2016
We finally got around to Christmas, and the school break that surrounds it... Parenting hijinks ensue. Such is the "life around transition", but don't worry, transition is still happening and will be featured again soon.
Saturday Dec 26, 2015
Saturday Dec 26, 2015
Our Christmas preparations are underway, with all the people we care for in tow. From George's mom's house to Child#2 & Child#3's school, our world is a winter wonderland of holiday cheer. And by cheer we mean insanity.
Saturday Dec 19, 2015
Saturday Dec 19, 2015
George finally got around to calling the gynecologist, and the experience was much more pleasant than some of the horror stories we've heard. Even with an open-minded physician and a very professional office staff, he's still the guy at the gyno, which still feels a tad awkward...
Saturday Dec 12, 2015
Saturday Dec 12, 2015
The holidays have begun. They kind of began back in October with Halloween and Child#1's birthday, and the entire end-of-the-year always becomes a hectic shuffle from one event to another. Throw another happy event in on top of it (you'll have to listen to find out what) and we just don't get any rest. But our house is bright and rainbow-tastic, our family is warm and well-fed, and we have each other, so life is good.
Saturday Dec 05, 2015
Saturday Dec 05, 2015
There are actually people, functional human beings, who have never, ever, not even once, considered that their body might not fit them, that their brain might not match their body, that their gender might be something different than assigned. They just go about their lives with complete integration of their sociocultural place, their body, and their sense of self. That's kinda crazy.
Saturday Nov 28, 2015
Saturday Nov 28, 2015
Holidays can be hard. But you can help someone who's struggling with depression, frustration, alienation, or all those other unhappy things that happen too often this time of year. Tell us your happy stories of "life around transition", and we'll compile them into an uplifting episode. While we won't "ban" transition or coming-out stories, remember that for many who are still struggling to achieve their gendery goals, they may find frustration in hearing someone else gushing over achieving what they can't, so our suggestion is "life around transition", like many of our own stories are.
Saturday Nov 21, 2015
Saturday Nov 21, 2015
Sometimes our kids frustrate us, other times they make us proud. This week we finally catch up with them, but parenting while sick is no fun. George still doesn't feel much better from last week's episode, and so needed to go back to the doctor.
Saturday Nov 14, 2015
Saturday Nov 14, 2015
When one of your best friends gets married, but plans it last-minute, and life doesn't let you go, you do the second-best thing: take a vacation to Minnesota in the cold! It's a good thing we got a break, because when we got back, George got sick and our kids' other parents couldn't take their visitation. Transgender fun at the airport *and* the hospital? Just another week in the life!
Saturday Nov 07, 2015
Saturday Nov 07, 2015
Mansplaining, manspreading, manterrupting, all those tongue-in-cheek terms for stereotypically masculine habits take on a new meaning when one has transitioned to male. Having been the victim of them for decades, we both take a queer look at the way man-ness affects the way others perceive our presence and presentation.
Saturday Oct 31, 2015
Saturday Oct 31, 2015
Why does it always have to be Friday? This time around, work stress got George to a place where he wasn't able to keep dysphoria from getting to him. The oddities didn't stop, though, the bizarreness of Friday didn't end with Friday.
Saturday Oct 24, 2015
Saturday Oct 24, 2015
George got his blood tests back and the results are potentially concerning. While we manage that, he also had another revision to his top surgery.
Saturday Oct 17, 2015
Saturday Oct 17, 2015
As we continue to settle into our new house, we needed to call our handyman for some help. Our handyman who hasn't seen George since before he started transition. But he's an old hippie, fairly open-minded, a pretty cool guy... how awkward could it get?
Saturday Oct 10, 2015
Saturday Oct 10, 2015
After over two years on testosterone, George's second puberty is well underway, but have his hormones started causing him trouble? While we wait for his blood work to come back, we discuss how Jess' hormones have also caused her trouble, and especially recently. We round out our conversation of hormone stuffs with the thought of both of us preparing for our respective visits to the gynecologist.
Saturday Oct 03, 2015
Saturday Oct 03, 2015
Chair (n): A piece of furniture designed for supporting the human body
Saturday Sep 26, 2015
Saturday Sep 26, 2015
Kids are back to school, and they're making life-around-transition interesting. But that's kind of the usual around here. Jess is back to school also, so as we manage these changes along with finishing the move (see last week's episode), life-around-transition has experienced some gender-y things, and some parent-y things, and even some gendery-parenty things.
Saturday Sep 19, 2015
Saturday Sep 19, 2015
We moved. George was able to accomplish more things, more easily, as a man, than he ever could pre-transition. Jess is mildly jealous. But he did lots of the moving-stuffs while she was working or doing homeworks so we're even.
Saturday Sep 12, 2015
Saturday Sep 12, 2015
For our fourth round of QnA, we have four questions ranging from parenting an autistic teenager to genderqueer dysphoria, and from coming out to our heroes or idols. Actually, not really "from" or "to" those things, nothing between them, kinda just those four things. Send your questions or feedback below!
Saturday Sep 05, 2015
Saturday Sep 05, 2015
We've long known that Child#2 is our "most special" of our special needs children, but we do our best to help him achieve and enjoy life as much as possible. That often involves some extra resources and effort, in this case to give him a vacation to visit his cousins. As usual, hijinks ensue.
Saturday Aug 29, 2015
Saturday Aug 29, 2015
Our lawyer friend had a metoidioplasty some months back. So of course, we pestered him to come talk to us about it, so all of you, our friends, could listen. Tangent topics include overeating, sex, and peeing on oneself.
Saturday Aug 22, 2015
Saturday Aug 22, 2015
Our lawyer friend had a metoidioplasty some months back. So of course, we pestered him to come talk to us about it, so all of you, our friends, could listen. Tangent topics include the absurdity of female clothing, the difficulty of finding male clothing for guys like us, his coming-out story, government employment, and STPs.
Saturday Aug 15, 2015
Saturday Aug 15, 2015
After two years of medical transition, George is regularly perceived as the man he is. This has caused Jess to be perceived more as a woman in his presence. Others' perceptions of us have recently highlighted just how gendered our culture is, and how the expectations of our perceived genders affect our comfort or discomfort with social interactions.
Saturday Aug 08, 2015
Saturday Aug 08, 2015
Finishing the story of a weekend of Cub Scouts sleep-away camp. Sorry, still no hummingbird story.
Saturday Aug 01, 2015
Saturday Aug 01, 2015
Part one of our recap of George's and Child#2's time at Cub Scout camp. Will TransDad George survive interacting with the traditionally homophobic/transphobic boy scouts? Will Child#2 learn how to wipe his own rear end? Will George be able to manage the Dick Patrol while sharing a tent? Will we get back to the hummingbird story? Tune in next week to find out!!
Saturday Jul 25, 2015
Saturday Jul 25, 2015
For genderqueer individuals like Jess, the "typical trans narrative" often doesn't fit, and neither do the "standard" understandings of terminology and experience regarding their transgender experience. Transition can be more complicated when one is going in neither of the expected binary directions, and a medical understanding of life outside the binary is generally pathologized. As a non-binary person, Jess has chosen not to transition, but does that mean she's "less trans"?
Saturday Jul 18, 2015
Saturday Jul 18, 2015
We've done what we can to help Child#2 adapt to his differences of development and manage his challenging behaviours for some while now. Since last year, that has included George taking him to Cub Scouts to (hopefully) engage some positive social skills. Between the history of the Boy Scouts and our child's unique challenges, we've done our best to keep the difficulties of being the TransDad to the 8-going-on-4-year-old to a minimum, but we can't avoid them all!
Saturday Jul 11, 2015
Saturday Jul 11, 2015
When George was young, he never thought he'd get married. Now that marriage equality is a (mostly) settled issue, we reflect on its impact (or lack thereof) on our lives as a hetero-gendered couple. The times, they are a-changin'.
Saturday Jul 04, 2015
Saturday Jul 04, 2015
George's transition has resulted in numerous changes to his body. Many of these have been clearly beneficial in more closely aligning his body to match his gender identity, and in assisting others to correctly perceive him as his identified gender. Some of these changes, however, have been less than convenient. From excess sweat and intolerance for higher temperatures, to changes in the functioning of his cardiovascular and digestive systems, to a decreased ability to swim, some adaptation has been needed to meet recent challenges related to HRT.
Saturday Jun 27, 2015
Saturday Jun 27, 2015
Queer spaces often have their own set of unwritten rules, expectations, or social norms that are based on a collective experience of being perpetually on guard for one's own safety and peace of mind. Lately we spend less time in queer spaces than we'd like, but we've recently had some refreshing experiences with "folks like us".
Saturday Jun 20, 2015
Saturday Jun 20, 2015
We got to see the beautiful and eloquent Laverne Cox speak, and it was amazing. She spoke on not just her experience as a transgender person, but as a woman, as a person of color, and as a human living all of these experiences at once. Intersectionality abounds as we reflect on what she said and how it touched us.
Saturday Jun 13, 2015
Saturday Jun 13, 2015
The madness never ends, and while George occasionally plans to make time for self-care it doesn't always work out as planned. Between naughty children and ailing pets and elderly parents, other peoples' problems keep encroaching on his free-time fridays.
Saturday Jun 06, 2015
Saturday Jun 06, 2015
Government employment has its ups and downs. We discuss our experiences working in the public sector, the fun situations we find ourselves in with colleagues, and Jess' elementary-school closet. No, not the closet she was in as an elementary student, but the one she finds herself in as an elementary teacher. But now that school is out, transfer time is in, and she's hoping for another chance at moving into middle or high school.
Saturday May 30, 2015
Saturday May 30, 2015
Jess thinks in words, George thinks in pictures. That sometimes makes it difficult to communicate when the words are needed to share the pictures and ideas in his head. As George's body continues to change, and his place in our world continues to settle into the "man camp", he considers how and when to best express the unique viewpoint that his experiences with HRT, with the changes testosterone has brought, with masculinity and femininity, and with emigrating from the "woman camp" have provided.
Saturday May 23, 2015
Saturday May 23, 2015
Parenting is hard. There's no tutorial level, and difficulty settings are subject to change at random. One minute your kid is your trusty sidekick with tons of charisma points, and the next they're on a boss-fight level tantrum. One of ours is particularly difficult, by no fault of his own, and so we have started to hunt down a strategy guide or walkthrough.
Saturday May 16, 2015
Saturday May 16, 2015
Jess and George are fairly rational people. We prefer to use our brains whenever possible, but we are sharing our lives with other people who have clear limits to their sense of reason. Whether it's George's mom, entitled-genius Child#3, developmentally-delayed Child#2, or autistic-teenager Child#1, we often have to be the logical ones on behalf of those in our care.
Saturday May 09, 2015
Saturday May 09, 2015
George's body has changed a lot over two years on testosterone. In this "extra" episode, we detailed some specific measurements and how T has affected them. We pulled this content from the main "second man-iversary" episode because it only interests a segment of our listeners, so we didn't want to bore the majority of you, but we wanted to have this information available for those who find it interesting or pertinent to their own experience.
Saturday May 09, 2015
Saturday May 09, 2015
At George's second anniversary of HRT, we review how the past two years have gone, his medical transition process, and how he feels about the experience.
Saturday May 02, 2015
Saturday May 02, 2015
Continuing last week's discussion of Christianity and the LGBTQIA+ community, we talk about how our friends' lives changed as they moved in and out of religious employment, government employment, and the private sector. They could see the effect of their religious views and their love for the queer community in the way they fit (or didn't) into each step of their respective and collective journeys.
Saturday Apr 25, 2015
Saturday Apr 25, 2015
George's friend and his wife, the ones who lead the bible study we've mentioned, join us for another guest episode! We discuss their initial experiences at the intersection of religion and respect for the LGBTQIA+ community, and how they moved from a place of supporting "ex-gay" ministries to being genuinely supportive and loving toward the queer community.
Saturday Apr 18, 2015
Saturday Apr 18, 2015
Transition literally means a change from one thing to another. Prior to transition, we were perceived as our assigned gender, and until we begin transitioning we have to cope with a less-than-ideal circumstance and state of being. How we cope is unique to each individual, and how long we choose to adapt to our assigned gender is also variable. George's experience of adapting and his methods of adaptation to his assigned gender were effective for him... until they weren't.
Saturday Apr 11, 2015
Saturday Apr 11, 2015
When Child#2's special needs require a school meeting, it's naturally a little stressful. When we find out that Child Protection has gotten involved with him, it's a lot stressful. When we're a queer family facing these things, with relatively little experience so far with bigotry or discrimination, things might not be what they seem.
Saturday Apr 04, 2015
Saturday Apr 04, 2015
During transition, the way others see us changes. This often changes the way they interact with us, although not in ways we would have expected. Sometimes the changes aren't even things others realize they're doing, but we who have seen the interactions from both presentations can spot the differences.
Saturday Mar 28, 2015
Saturday Mar 28, 2015
"Seriously, there's an outrageous amount of running involved." George has had a really sh*tty day. Literally. Thankfully, between having the right hormones and the benefit of being culturally expected to behave as he is naturally inclined to do, he is able to manage things fairly well.
Saturday Mar 21, 2015
Saturday Mar 21, 2015
Genitals are a touchy subject in most of western culture, and no less so for most of the transgender community. We follow up previous discussions of George's "junk", and jump into Jess' "junk" also. Figuratively, of course. Frank discussion of lower dysphoria, sex, and genderqueer identity follow as we let the conversation follow our thoughts.
Saturday Mar 14, 2015
Saturday Mar 14, 2015
We love hearing from you, our listener friends. We do our best to respond to questions and feedback as quickly as possible, and while that may take us a few days sometimes, we are always glad to see what you think and to satisfy your curiosity. After we respond personally, we sometimes realize that your question is one that may be shared by other listeners, or we feel that it starts a worthwhile discussion, and so we compile them into an episode.
Saturday Mar 07, 2015
Saturday Mar 07, 2015
Child#2 is by far our most special and most needy of our special needs children. So when the school decides that he may not qualify for all of his special education services, we might have a problem on our hands. We try to find the bright side, or at least the bright spots, when we can, and it makes the problem closer to manageable. For now.