Bikini, sunglasses, cool drink, good book ...

 It's officially the first day of autumn tomorrow but, here in the Med, the hot days of the last seven weeks continue unabated. I love the heat, as I've said so often, but even I like a bit of a change to cooler weather, even for just a day or two, from time to time, just for variety (hint). Apart from the wild thunderstorm a fortnight ago, it's been unvarying. So I lie around reading books in my bikini (no, sorry, no photos!). OK, I do other stuff, even the boring washing up (!), but it's not the weather for a lot of exertion. 

My books this week include a gorgeous edition of Jane Austen classic, a horrifying science bestseller (Ultra-Processed People), and a book on LBGT love (Altricorpi) that I mentioned a review of a few weeks ago. I'll talk about the latter two in due course but today, just look at this lovely edition of Sense and Sensibility from Chiltern Publishing:

Being a trans person, as I've said before, is not just about the clothes. My home is full of things that are associated more with femininity than masculinity. That feels right to me. This book is beautifully bound in floral decorated hard covers with gold edging on the pages. It's lovely to read, resting chunkily in the hand, as a real book should. It's not cheap, but it's not expensive either. I also bought their edition of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. It's so lovely in every way that I plan to buy more books from them. And what girl doesn't love a classic romance anyway?

Hot flushes

Thanks to people who commented on my last post about nightwear for hot nights. I must check out menopause nightwear. One of the main reasons I moved from cool, rainy, cloudy Britain to the warmer Mediterranean was because I developed an odd health problem in that I am cold in the day but too hot at night. Upright = cold; horizontal = hot. I've had no end of medical checks to see what's up: could it be a disease like lupus? or a circulation defect? or a vitamin deficiency? No doctor could work it out so in the end they reverted to the centuries-old suggestion of moving to warmer climes, like Robert Louis Stevenson or Paul Gauguin who went to the Pacific in the nineteenth century for similar reasons. Where I live now on the Italian riviera the typical winter temperature is 15C and in summer it's 30C. The lowest I've ever noted is 8C and the highest 36C. That's all fantastic for me, but cooler nights in summer are becoming an issue. 

 

Cute news

The beaches are still pretty full. (And are very regimented here to fit everyone in!)

I treated myself to lunch today at one of my favourite places to eat which has a lovely view within a palm grove.

But the cute news is that leatherback turtles, which are somewhat endangered, have been laying eggs on beaches here for the first time, right among the sunbeds and beach umbrellas. They don't normally do that this far north but global warming has changed their lifestyle patterns. Local environmental agencies provide protection and the eggs are hatching now, the first clutch at Laigueglia a few days ago. It's so lovely to see all the little turtles hurrying to the water as fast as their little flippers will carry them. There's another nest just five miles up the coast and Hatching Day is expected to be on Monday. Here's one video of the recent event.

 

Mama Turtle there got 43 live young and they all made it to the sea. I have no egg-laying capacity, nor even a womb. I wish I did but nature has her inscrutable ways. I wonder if there are trans turtles? Given how many species display trans tendencies, I suspect there are. Anyway, good luck to these little ones in a hostile world. At least they've got a hard shell to protect them. 

Sue x

Nightwear for summer

 I've always loved feminine nightwear and, when I finally stopped purging and accepted that I was a trans woman, the first thing I did was buy lots of nighties. The most feminine styles were so affirming. There's nothing wrong with pyjamas, if you like them, but they're too much like the masculine item to be of interest to me. Nighties might be unfashionable nowadays, but we trans girls need our feminine boost, right? (I think it's TGirls who are single-handedly keeping the stocking industry alive, for the same reason!)

It's been a hot summer as always but, thankfully, not as hot as the previous two years and, unlike last year, we haven't experienced any forest fires. At least, it's not so hot by day, but it's been hard to sleep because, although daytime temperatures in the low 30s (85-95 F) are fine, nights ought to be cooler but they're not because of soaring sea temperatures that don't let cooling evening breezes arise. This year the water temp hit 30C, like the Caribbean, which is way hotter than it should be.

Anyway, the nights have been too hot for the usual nightwear and even the light microfibre underwear alternative I suggested last year hasn't been good. Yes, there's air conditioning but I find artificially created atmospheres are not healthy for various reasons and, in any case, I prefer not to keep it on all night. Thankfully, french knickers work well but the best solution for tropical nights, short of a bamboo wife*, are these underskirts or half slips. 

 

Totally unfashionable and hard to find these these days, I happen to have a few which I bought in the 1990s (!) that were useful for use under unlined skirts at that time but now make great summer nightwear. Still feminine yet cool. 

(*If you're wondering about bamboo wives, they're a wicker structure still found in some homes in South East Asia that you embrace in bed on hot nights and so as to allow air to flow around your body, making a night in bed less torrid. This is the best illustrated article: Good Night's Rest; and the Wikipedia article. My grandfather spent a lot of time in Hong Kong and mentioned them to me as a child.)

(c) CosyOne

 

The good stuff

I was delighted to hear of the election of another trans person to public office. In this case, Kim Coco Iwamoto in Hawaii. Pink News article.

One day this sort of thing won't make the news because of the trans aspect, but until being trans is accepted as normal we'll celebrate these achievements of our community.

Do enjoy the rest of summer.

Sue x

All you can do is relax ... usually

 The middle two weeks of August are the very height of the holiday season in the Med and, a bit like at Christmas, nothing works properly so you may as well have a break anyway. I need an electrician but I'll just have to wait till everyone's back at work in September! Also, it's been hot, and that doesn't exactly make you want to jump about much, even in just a bikini (oh yes! I love my bikinis). So I've mainly been swimming, enjoying the sunshine (I have a lovely tan!) and working through a stack of books that I've been wanting to get into for months. There are lots of local events, from concerts of all genres to food festivals and craft fairs. 

Antiques fair, Sanremo, Italy

OK, it's not all been relaxation. I've been hosting builders from downstairs who have been installing a complex air conditioning system in the flat below that has to run its pipework through a communal shaft behind my boiler. Why the folks below did this work during the hot weather rather than in the spring in anticipation of it, I'll never know. I do feel sorry for the actual workmen slaving on the roof in 35C (95F) heat with sweat pouring off them. Not exactly what's meant by a hot summer body!

The one scary moment was on August 15th itself, which is the main public holiday of the year. I heard a rumble of thunder in the morning, the first sign of trouble after weeks of hot, dry weather, and thought I'd best get up a little earlier and take the washing in. It's just as well I went to do that as suddenly a terrific thunderstorm descended and my garden furniture was lifted up before my eyes. I managed to grab my sunbeds before they were hurled over the parapet to oblivion but even so all the other furniture - steel framed chairs, the metal barbecue and anything loose - was thrown everywhere. I got soaked in a torrent of cold rain. Just look at this mess!

 

The worst of the lightning, torrential rain and ferocious winds was over in 30 minutes and after a couple of hours it was done, but it wasn't a great start to the main holiday date of the year with all the beach facilities having to close. I think Arnold the Olive (aged 4) will survive the mistreatment - he's sprouting olives for the first time.

What a contrast to the previous evening when I enjoyed the fireworks over Sanremo harbour from my eyrie on the mountain.

 

I've been enjoying visits from lots of big fat geckos. I've never actually seen them so big and fat before. There must be lots of tasty bugs about. Also a millipede. I honestly don't think I've ever seen one outside a botanic garden before. I'll keep this image small as I know that some readers hate creepy-crawlies and might jump on a chair and scream.

 

The night sky has been beautiful - the Summer Triangle is almost overhead at these latitudes, and the Perseid meteor shower gave me one or two shooting stars to make a wish on.

It's not so hot this evening and I've actually got a bustier and shorts on with gossamer-thin (5 denier) natural tan tights to make my legs look smoother.

I do love the late summer. Everything seems so alive. Yet so relaxed!

Northern Hemisphere readers: if you are still on holiday, do enjoy every moment. If holidays are coming to an end, I hope you have wonderful memories of your break.

Sue x

13

 I started my blog 13 years ago today and I dare say if it was a real teenager it would be on puberty blockers. Or wouldn't if you live in the wrong part of the world.

I guess that's the big difference between 2011 and now. We were progressing well towards better transgender rights and now we're going backwards. I now live in a different country from where I lived then, and heightened transphobia and general xenophobia in the UK were a major reason for moving. What's not changed, though, is my gender identity. I remain trans, despite all the well-meaning advice from the transphobes that I needn't be if only I tried a little harder.

I continue to write this blog. The first three years were descriptions of my trips out as a woman. Then I got a disfiguring illness, couldn't wear makeup and limped along for the next three years. I was able to enjoy a bit of a comeback in 2018 but then went abroad, supposedly temporarily but ended up remaining. My blog is now more into finding positives in a world that is much less agreeable than when I started blogging. 

 

Let me show you nice things

On a practical level, I have been labelling posts over the last four years to make finding topics easier. I'm going back over older posts to do the same for those but it's a slow process.

Thanks for reading, and for all your comments. 

Sue x

More LGBT books, art and culture for summer

 Some more cultural stuff for summer, with thanks to friends for pointing out a couple of items.

 

Book

I've got a book on my shopping list now, having just read a good review. It's Aldo Simeone's novel Isola dei femminielli, which I'd translate as Pansy Island. Femminiello is a very old Italian term, which I've mentioned here before, for a member of the MtF trans and gay community, especially in Naples. 

The book is set in the late 1930s and based on the very real weeding-out of LGBT people by Mussolini. He had a habit of exiling political and social undersirables to remote mountain villages or offshore islets. In the case of gay men or trans women, they were sent to the Tremiti Islands that lie in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of South East Italy. Stupidly for the instigators of the policy who tried to hide the fact that Italy actually had queer people in it despite the virile image fascism tried to cultivate, the islands became a sort of queer if rough holiday camp where the inmates no longer felt any need to hide their nature. Then the war came and most of them were then drafted into the armed forces, war being the best way of eradicating undesirables (just ask the Russian prison population today). 

There wasn't the distinction then that we make today between a gay man and a trans woman (a distinction which a lot of transphobes continue to refuse to make) so I think my translation using the catch-all British term pansy, which was current in the early twentieth century, seems about right. 

There's not much in the way of trans fiction and this is a general gay/trans novel, but there seems to be a leading trans character in it.

If I manage to find a copy in a bookshop, I'll report back in due course on what I thought of it.

Peter Tatchell

Peter Tatchell is perhaps the best known LGBTQ+ campaigner in Britain, having campaigned above all for gay rights. There is now a portrait of him hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London, which is quite an accolade as it mainly houses ancient pictures of kings and princesses. Well, he might say he was an old queen, so why not?

Tatchell used to annoy me as youngster with his showman antics, but then I didn't associate my femininity with gay rights and my religious upbringing required me to suppress support for such rights. In the end, Tatchell won out and I have benefited and so I'm pleased to link to the Guardian article on this fittingly flamboyant new portrait. I can't paste the picture here for copyright reasons.

Thanks to Lynn of YATGB for alerting me to this.

Visual arts

‘No one can tell the story better than ourselves,’ proclaims a quote from artist-photographer Zanele Muholi as you enter this exhibition. Maybe so, but the Tate makes a decent fist of trying in this extended showcase of a visual activist who has spent more than two decades focusing their lens on the lives of the South African Black LGBTQIA+ community through vivid portraits and self-portraiture.

Thus opens the Time Out review of Zanele Muholi at London's Tate Modern gallery.

The Tate's description of the exibition here. 

And a review in London's Evening Standard here that ends:

By turns delightful and devastating, it is one of the greatest exercises in self-portraiture of this, or any, age.

That's some praise. 

I hope to be in London in the autumn and will try to catch this.

Thanks to Stella of Stellapix for alerting me to this.

 

Heat update

It's hot all right, made worse by being quite steamy, and it's quite hard to do anything. Incredibly, and very annoyingly, there are builders crawling under and over my flat installing someone else's air conditioning system. Why they didn't do it in the spring rather than waiting till it was really hot, I do not know. Time for that annual aestivation. The outdoor pool awaits...

Sue x

Trams for trans

 Two pieces of positive trans news revolving, of all things, around trams.

Last weekend a trans friend of mine went to work as a volunteer conductor (conductress?) on the trams at the UK's national tram museum at the Crich Tramway Village in Derbyshire. It was her first day on the job and she was attracted to it both by the trams and by their LGBT-friendly policies. If you can do the job with competence and enthusiasm then they'll have you, they said. Which is how any job ought to be. 

She says it was tiring but she really enjoyed it. Obviously there's a lot to learn, even in the apparently simple task of giving out tickets, but interacting with families who were enjoying a day out was the best part. She hopes to go more regularly and eventually, if she's up to the job (of course she is!), they'll put her on a course to become a driver.

It's a pity that Britain got rid of so many of its tramways. London, for instance, lost its trams in 1952, which were replaced by buses. Then they realised that trams have merits after all so they introduced the Croydon Tramlink to South London in 2000, although that's more of a light rail system than a streetcar or trolley. New tram systems have also been reintroduced in other British cities like Manchester, Edinburgh and Nottingham, some more successfully than others. 

I have used public transport most of my life and delays in my getting out in public as a girl were partly due to my reliance on public rather than private transport. On public transport, there's nowhere to hide!

I'm writing on this topic partly to praise the trans-friendly employer above and to pay a promise to put up some of the pictures I took of the old trams in Milan that have been in continuous service since 1928. Milan has had an extensive tram network operating continuously since the nineteenth century so, unlike at Crich, they're not museum pieces - I use them to get about. But I wanted to record their presence as they can't stay in service for ever. Last month I mentioned one of these old trams decked out in Pride colours and since there are a lot of trans girls who like transport and vehicles (I guess you can't take all the boy out of the girl!) I agreed to post pictures here. 

Next time I'll try to photograph and film the interiors with their glass lamps and the wooden seating polished to a high shine. But if you want more info, here's the Wikipedia article.

The best places to see them are in Piazza Cordosio, a busy square in the city centre between the cathedral and the castle, and outside the monumental central station. There are about 150 still in service running on half a dozen routes. Route 5 runs closest to home, hence it features more here.

I'm hoping to edit the various film clips together in due course and put them up on YouTube but here's a bit of film of two trams painted with advertising departing, and a tram in standard livery arriving. You get to hear the noises of trams rattling on rails and the wooden doors opening with a hiss and slap. The guy getting on the middle door, which is for exiting passengers, shows typical local behaviour!

I took photos of the three other types of tram to be seen, dating from the late 1950s, the late 1970s and the more recent low-slung caterpillars. I could give you a close-up of the 1950s tram but I couldn't resist keeping the lady in the snazzy jumpsuit in the picture. Now that's an outfit I don't think I'd ever have the guts to wear in the street, so kudos to her.

And here's the old lady in Pride colours (I identify with her!) and the latest type outside the colossal railway station. The city's transport provider, ATM, is an equal opportunities employer and I'm pleased to report, as the second positive item here, that, as of next year, any trans person may used their preferred name and gender on their season ticket. This measure has been brought in thanks to the hard work of our wonderful trans councillor, Monica Romano, who was elected on the basis of locals having tried everyone else so why not trust a trans for once! That trans-positive campaign worked, as I mentioned in 2021. And here we are.

Enjoy your travels, girls.

Sue x

Wuthering heats

They're late this year, but the hot days have finally arrived and it's been hard to sleep. Although daytime temperatures of around 35°C (that's 95°F) are OK, it's when the temperature doesn't fall at night that it becomes a problem and I don't sleep so well. A sea breeze normally builds up in the evening but when the sea surface gets too hot (it's 28°C now, like the Caribbean) then that doesn't happen and we suffer tropical nights. Such nights just aren't good for the beauty regime!

I've been spending most of my time this week in my bikini, the same as everybody else! And no I won't be sharing a photo!

To cool down, I've been making melon sorbet again, or rather melon water-ice, which is even nicer with some cold prosecco. 

A sorbet is really a water-ice or granita that's been churned smooth, whereas my item is simply frozen as I don't have a machine (or scullery maid) to do the churning. 

It's easy enough to make: 

Squeeze juicy fruits like oranges or melons (I grate the latter as I like the pulp), or any soft fruit, and set aside. 

Measure how much juice you have. You now need as much sugar syrup as that, which you can make from simply adding granulated sugar to water in equal measures and boiling until it becomes a clear syrup.

Let it cool and then add it to the fruit juice. Sometimes a bit of lemon juice can add some fruity tang that may otherwise be lost to sweetness.

Mix it up and put it in the freezer. It'll take about 24 hours to set fully.

Yum. Just right for a hot day. A full of Vitamin C. So it's a health food!

The good stuff

Just adding more to the summer season of things that are positive in the world of gender fluidity. Such as the Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever events around the world. Celebrating not the Emily Brontë novel but the Kate Bush song. Just turn up in a long red dress and do the moves. Try this example from last weekend at Margate, England. 

 

I've always spotted a TGirl or two in the crowd at these events. And don't tell me there is any man out there who doesn't want to dress up as Kate Bush. As you can see, a beard can compliment a red dress quite nicely. Who cares that the choreography is a little unco-ordinated. This is for people to enjoy themselves.

On the subject of public dances, I have never been much of a fan of traditional English morris dances with hankies and bells. ("Try everything once, except incest and morris dancing," Sir Thomas Beecham famously said). The border morris tradition, though, is a different matter, with disguise and hidden identity being an essential part of it. Being a former resident of Devon, I support the Beltane Border Morris group who have a lively modern approach to an ancient tradition and I'm pleased to note a couple of non-binary dancers in their team. As is tradition. Their spooky and wild whirlings on Dartmoor at summer solstice or on the seashore at sunset are a unique sight. Try this recent offering from the beautiful town of Lyme Regis, Dorset.

Stay cool.

Sue x