Tara's Thoughts

This book was totally different from what I expected, just going off the blurb. I went in fully anticipating a road-trip novel: Act One setting up Maria, Act Two kicking off the trip and introducing James, and Act Three giving us the emotional payoff — James figuring their shit out and Maria finding some closure. That… is very much not what happens. Part One being as long as it is felt wildly unnecessary at first. To be honest, I actually put the book down for a bit before I came back to it to finally finish it, yesterday. But once I got into Part Two, I realised just how much all that setup and all those establishing shots in Part One mattered. Interestingly, I found myself relating way more to the people around Maria than to Maria herself — mostly to Piranha, actually.   She’s the stalwart, friendly face of the NYC trans community. Kind of where I sit in Southampton — the one who seems to have their shit together, who everyone comes to for help… while secretly very much ...

The childhood I experienced was one where I was taught to love my country.  I was a member of the Scout Association for nearly all of my childhood and teen years, only leaving the youth section of the organisation when I was 16 in order to pursue a Naval career.  When I got to University, I was an assistant leader for a local Scout Section for about 18 months during my undergraduate years, and I look back on that with a lot of fondness.  Combine the drummed-in words of “Do my duty to God and the Queen” of the last line of the Scouting Promise with my military background, and you have someone who could well have found themselves on the fast-track to the Conservative Party.  My upbringing was of a system that had experienced consistent investment through the Blair-Brown Labour years, and I had never seriously wanted for anything growing up.  I never experienced hardship that less fortunate individuals would have. In 2022, when I came out as a trans woman having ...

  Hi, welcome to another one of my essay-ramblings about my life, reflecting on bits and bobs.   What I want to talk about today is two concepts that I have felt a lot, and when I’ve mentioned it to friends, they’ve expressed great solidarity with my words. As a trans person, there are moments that leave me at a loss for words. Moments so specific and so visceral they deserve to be named.   However, the vocabulary we use is quite difficult to change.   Sure, we’ve had recent additions to the common lexicon – brainrot, transmisogyny, and compersion are the examples that spring to mind, but for the most part it takes a while for these to filter through. Lacking a proper name for a lot of these feelings, I’ve decided that where a word doesn’t exist, you can just invent them – a kind of linguistic liberalism. --- Comphoria The first of these concepts is a kind of joy I’ve felt many times: when I witness someone, especially another trans person, finally start to be...