In September, the pope will be making the first official visit to the UK since pope John Paul II’s visit in 1982. Coming at a time when the pope has been astoundingly intolerant of women, homosexual people and trans people as well as when secularists have been increasingly disturbed by the Catholic church’s efforts to force their beliefs on non-Catholic citizens of countries the world over, this visit is meeting a lot of opposition.
However, added to that, the costs of this visit are quite astounding. Latest figures talk of £10-£12m ($15-$18m) excluding security! When the security is included, the cost to the country is calculated to be as high as an eye-watering £100m ($150m)! I think that it’s quite right that people of all walks of life are upset by this visit!
Today, though, Tory minister, Christ Patten dared to suggest that protesters should show tolerance to the pope!
The pope has called trans and gay people ‘contrary to natural law’. He has worked to continue the church’s opposition to the use of condoms, helping the spread of HIV across the world and helping to keep poor women in the preferred position of pregnant subservience. Further, he has proven to be completely against the rights of women with his opposition to women in positions of authority within the church. He has been implicated in keeping priests who have abused children out of the hands of the law.
Whilst I would honestly hate to see ugly scenes during this visit (that helps nobody), you ask us to be tolerant, Mr. Patten? I suggest you ask the pope to show that very same tolerance to the millions his church is subjugating and hurting.
For more balanced commentary (sorry, I can’t be balanced about this), please read here:
Pink News – Anti-Pope protesters urged to show tolerance
Reuters UK – Britain seeks show of restraint during pope visit
For funnier commentary, please read here:
The Spoof – Number 10: “Pope won’t escape axe”
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Tags: Catholic church, pope, UK
Well, it looks like my days in Hamburg are numbered! I moved here last Spring, mumbling ‘I’m so not going to move again in the near future’ as I carried my boxes down the driveway to my house. Well, with the announcement that all management functions in my company are being centralised in Geneva, it seems that I am going to move again in the near future.
So, within the next few months, I’ll either be moving down to that corner of Switzerland with my current position or, if the conditions for my move aren’t good enough (Geneva is a lot more expensive than Hamburg), I’ll be taking a redundancy package and probably heading off to the UK to be with my girlfriend. Either way, I don’t think that Hamburg will be home this time next year.
Geneva is a city I know well, and I have some very close friends there (including my best friend: my ex-wife), so moving there isn’t exactly a hardship, especially if the package is right! However, I have moved a lot in my life and I’m tired with carting boxes all over so I do hope that this is the last move for the time being! To be honest, I’ll miss Hamburg, too, since I’m just starting to get rather comfortable here!
Oh well… I’d better start planning my packing!
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The process of developing in ones transition is huge. The years running up to my decision to transition were bad, with depression, anger, frustration and fear colouring them. Transitioning, however, was a real rollercoaster. I’ve been through fabulous times, I’ve been through terrible times, I’ve been scared witless and I’ve had moments of sheer, unadulterated joy.
In a process such as that, people are fragile. I don’t think I would have made it were it not for the support of my ex-wife, my lovely girlfriend and some lovely friends. I needed them so much in those moments when I thought I’d never be able to live a normal life as a woman and when the fear and mental pressure were simply too much. I owe a lot to these people.
However, thinking back, I remember one situation which hurt me deeply and I want to make sure I don’t end up doing the same to someone else. I had developed a deep friendship with a trans woman from Northern France. Even though she lived hours away, for quite some time, we helped each other a great deal. She gave me a lot of strength and I helped her through some black moments where she felt she’d never be able to transition.
Luckily for her, she got the support of a fabulous psychiatrist who worked her way through the French system to get my friend her operation a couple of years ago. It’s the luck of the draw all so often in medical systems: The right doctor can make a lot of things happen quickly. Whilst I have to admit that I was sad not to have the same level of support, I was happy for her and we remained in contact during that period of her life.
Unfortunately, some time after her operation, I hit a very low time in my life and turned to her for the help which we’d given each other so much in the past. I was shocked and saddened to feel a complete lack of comprehension from her. There I was going through the same things we’d both gone through together months before, but she’d reached a point in her transition where she just couldn’t relate to the problems she’d actually gone through herself.
I was thinking about this recently due to the post a friend of mine made on her blog. She talked of the down moments and the fear and I realised that I had neatly partitioned that part of my life away. Four months post-op and I’m already forgetting chunks of my transsexual past!
It’s a natural part of the way the mind works. We forget the bad times and move on. If we didn’t, just imagine how tough it would be to lead a normal life! However, this very mechanism that helps us survive is the thing which means that a ‘transsexual community’ will always be more difficult to create than the equivalent gay/lesbian communities. We move through our transitions and emerge at the other end ‘fixed’ so it is so easy to march one with ones life and completely forget the pain one had felt just a few months before.
I have some lovely friends who are pre-op. I even have some who are still not sure they will ever transition. It would be terribly sad if I wasn’t there for them in the way that others have been there for me. I won’t do what my friend did to me. Whilst I have no need to carry the luggage of the bad times I went through, I do have to remember that others are still on that roller coaster and I want to be there for them.
Yes, we may not have a ‘transsexual community’, but that doesn’t mean we should forget how difficult things can be when transitioning and it certainly doesn’t mean we should not be there to support those in that time of their lives.
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Tags: depression, help, support, Trans, transition
Like most people, I was saddened to read about the injuries sustained on Lola and Isabella Koupparis when their mother reported that they had been mauled by a fox on 5th June. As a parent myself, the thought of any attacks on young children always has me feeling much empathy with the parents and the emotions they may be experiencing.
However, invariably in these situations, someone out to make a name for themselves always has to come out with a typically knee-jerk reaction. In this instance it did not take long, as come Monday 7th June, Boris Johnson (London’s Lord Mayor) was quick to state that “It’s right that boroughs should focus on their duties for pest control because as romantic and cuddly as a fox is, it is also a pest.”
And how is the fox a pest? Is it because it may dig some holes in a garden, kill some chickens, produce mating calls, defecate on the lawn? Let’s put all this in perspective. How many foxes have been driven off their land by human encroachment? How many chickens do we kill in the course of a year? Who chases foxes out of the country in a warped sense of sport? Who is so careless with rubbish that foxes are attracted in to towns? And we call foxes pests!
And the calls for culling – they are preposterous! It is understandable that there is a cry for the fox responsible to be caught and humanely put down, but for a sweeping cull based upon the actions of one? Would anyone suggest blaming the citizens of Whitehaven over the actions of a rogue one? No, of course not, so why do so with foxes? If we want further comparison, let’s consider how many children are killed, hurt or maimed by fellow humans; then try and find records of the infinitesimal attacks on humans by foxes.
John Bryant, an urban wildlife expert, claims that such attacks are extremely rare, stating that “I have only ever heard of two cases in my 40 years of dealing with foxes, one of which turned out to be a German Shepherd and the other a cat.”
Martin Hemmington, founder of the National Fox Welfare Society is reported as saying that it is not commonplace for a fox to enter someone’s house, and that the likelihood was that this particular one was perhaps injured or had concussion and was disorientated.
Saying this does not diminish my shock at what happened to poor Lola and Isabella Koupparis, and I sincerely hope that they are not scarred mentally or physically by what took place. I just hope that sense prevails and that most readers understand that this was a rare and most unfortunate occurrence, and that the fox population as a whole should not be persecuted as a result.
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Tags: Animal Cruelty, Animal rights, fox, koupparis, london
Equipped with a nice bottle of white wine, some decidedly unhealthy tacos with a ‘hot’ dip (‘hot’ being a relative term when German tastes are considered) and a nice sunny day, my lovely girlfriend and I took the opportunity to relax in the garden with my little cat. An indoor cat, she never goes outside without a lead so she does enjoy these excursions and you can see that she managed to explore the garden properly:
That’s what week-ends are for, relaxing in the sun with my little human-feline family. Just what I needed! 
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Every year, the Whiny Expat Blogger Meet Up brings together the crème de la crème of the German expat blogger community (OK, it brings together the party animals of the German expat blogger community if last year’s stories are anything to go by!) Last year it was in Munich and I unfortunately missed it due to work, but this year it’s being held in Hamburg and I’m one of the hosts!
At this point, we don’t know when it will be held, but the voting is going on for that over here. If you’re not already registered as an expat blogger, then I’d recommend doing so so you can join in the fun!
If you’re an expat blogger in Germany then I certainly hope I’ll see you there!
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Wow… That was a mad few days! Pretty much exactly two weeks ago, I wrote my last post here and headed off for my first business trip (three days in Copenhagen), followed by a birthday party in the Netherlands for my mother and then straight away two days in Paris. I clearly learned my limits after that!
Returning from Paris, I felt myself flagging already. Gosh, I’d not felt that tired in weeks and this time I couldn’t blame it on morphine! It all culminated in a gastric flu which has knocked me out for the past few days and a very stern talking to from my doctor about taking it easy.
An important lesson for those returning from this sort of surgery: Don’t overdo it… It’s major surgery and your body needs time to recover. Life’s already full enough with all those dilations, don’t add too much to it by thinking you can do what you did before surgery! I’ve learned that the hard way!
Here’s to learning my limits and doing things at the right pace for the next few months!
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Those that have read my blog for some time will know that I’m one of those scary bisexual people. I really do have a choice about the sort of people I want to have relationships with, unlike people who are more strongly homosexual or heterosexual (not that I actually have any choice about who I fall for in the end – the heavens seem to have their own plans for me there!) That means that I get to think a lot about whether I want a straight or gay relationship and how I want to be seen by society.
The difficult thing for me is that I found a lot of comfort being in relationships with men. I’ve been pretty lucky and have had some lovely boyfriends, all of whom have had qualities which gave me good reasons for falling for them. However, there’s another reason why I’ve fallen for men: Being with a man made me feel that my femininity is being validated. I’ve always worried that being with a woman is, in a way, making me less of a woman.
Now, before anyone starts writing nasty comments, I’m not making any broader statements about womanhood, the place of women in society or the different sorts of relationships (homosexual vs. heterosexual), I’m talking about me and how I react to those relationships, especially considering my transsexual past. Last year, I fell deeply in love with a wonderful woman and as we come up to our one year anniversary, I’ve been thinking about how I have changed in how I react to this.
I know that my girlfriend is 100% lesbian and is, in fact, only attracted to feminine women. So, since there’s no risk of her being attracted to any (shudder) masculine parts of who I am, why is it that I didn’t get that validation of me as a woman from how she felt about me? I think a lot of it was down to the fact that I didn’t let it because society only lets men validate femininity.
This would already be complicated enough were it not that trans women being put under a lot of pressure to be heterosexual. Unlike cis women, we have leading lights in the world of psychology who have for years maintained that a homosexual trans woman is ‘less transsexual’ (i.e. less of a woman) than a heterosexual one. There are even psychologists out there who would block homosexual trans women from access to treatment such as hormones and surgery. This tends to put a lot of fear into trans women so we have another reason on top of all the same social pressures everyone in same-sex relationships suffer with.
I think what I’ve gone through over the past year is something akin to what everyone goes through when coming out… I’ve had to learn to accept that it’s OK for me to be gay, that it doesn’t make me any less of a woman. Whilst I was always happy to be seen in public holding hands with my lovely girlfriend, it took me a little time to accept that I don’t need a man to judge my femininity. However on top of that, I’ve also had to shrug off the pressure to be this ‘perfect woman’ in the 1950′s-woman/Stepford Wives stereotype that still remains part of the psychological treatment of trans women.
It’s been quite a journey to reach this point and whilst I’ll not say that I don’t need validation of my femininity any more (I have some big holes in my self confidence, sometimes, which can make me a little bit high maintenance), I have come to the realisation that I’m allowed to be gay.
It’s definitely very OK to be gay, I have to say. How else could I be in the situation I am now, in love with a truly wonderful woman?
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Tags: acceptance, coming out, LGB, Trans
One of the annoying things of being an expat from certain countries is that after a certain amount of time, one doesn’t get to vote any more. This is the case for me where both of my mother-countries have left me without a vote and I’m not allowed to vote in Germany’s national elections, either.
I can understand why long-term expats should have less of a say in their mother countries since we have chosen to live elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have any say at all. Likewise, I can understand why Germany feels I shouldn’t have a say in its elections since I’m not German.
That said, when Britain votes in a new government, that government still has a lot of power over me since that government’s policies drive my identity and how I am allowed to live (ID cards and the threat of leaving the EU are examples). Of course, when it comes to Germany, the choice of government defines how much money I pay in taxes, how that money is spent and the day-to-day environment I live in.
Having lived so long abroad, I now find myself in a situation where I can’t vote anywhere but in European elections (important, yes, but nowhere near as important as national elections under the system we have now). I can’t have any say in how my life is managed by the British, Swedish and German governments and that galls me.
I’d love to see a system where my vote is counted proportionally. That could mean that I have a third of a vote in the UK and two thirds of a vote in Germany. That way, I get a say in both countries, proportional to the amount that they affect me. Of course, something this sensible will never happen since it would take lots of co-ordination across Europe and we’re no good at that! I shall just have to sit out the voting and hope that others feel as I do which is unlikely since I’m not a fan of any of the top parties in any of these countries.
Well back to watching the BBC election coverage and keeping my fingers crossed for the party I would have voted for!
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My lovely girlfriend just spent the week-end with me and I had to drop her off at the airport for her trip home this evening (definitely not what I wanted to do!) Having very sadly seen her head off through security, I walked back to the car and set about paying my parking bill. I was pretty much in auto pilot, thinking about our week-end, and was just about to feed my credit card into the slot when I saw how much it was asking me to pay:
Yes: It really does say €2,134!
Now, considering that the first sixty minutes should cost €3 and that I’d been there for half an hour or so, that’s quite a premium! I am so glad that I looked up since I could easily have paid that without looking… It’s so easy to insert ones card into such machines without thinking and I hate to imagine the trouble I’d have had to go through upon noticing that on my statement sometime next month!
The strangled sound I made got the people using the machine next to me to look over and their exclamation got those behind them to look, too… By the time I’d got over my shock enough to move, the machine and I had an audience of quite a few people!
Luckily, the machine next to mine was a bit more reasonable, charging me the expected €3… From now on, I definitely won’t be paying on such machines without carefully checking! That could have been a very expensive half hour of parking!
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Tags: computer error, parking