A note on cycling

It took a while to get off last night, but not as bad as the night before. I think that I am starting to settle in, and the call with my husband is helping to ease my anxiety in that regard (I am still anxious, but less so). I slept well enough to miss the first alarm call!

I put my usual cycling shorts on, the Lycra ones with the padded seat. I was aware they weren’t that comfortable, and when I thought about it I realised that they weren’t as comfortable as of old – the seat all wrinkled up under my scrotal void: they had been created with space for balls! Without them, they kind of bunch up and rub unpleasantly on my more sensitive skin.

I need to buy some female-shaped padded shorts!

---

Gender expression

So my gender identity is a non-binary masculine-side of gender-neutral, however I find that I am expressing it in different ways. The clothes I wear are still predominantly blue and boyish; I am wearing more pink now. I never used to wear pink – the (as I thought) girly shade undermined my fragile masculinity. I am also decorating my flat with pink fluffy throws and cushions – another nod to my feminine side.

The funny thing is, that soft, fluffy furnishings were an expression of wealth in earlier times, rather than gender.

And the colour pink? I learnt in an old episode of QI (Stephen Fry was the host) that originally, in the United Kingdom, that pink was thought of as a masculine colour due to its “higher energy” and blue was the more feminine because it was “calmer”. However, at a royal birth where a boy was expected (as they always were), the room was decorated in energetic pink … when a girl arrived the tradition flipped: pink for girls!

So what’s that telling me? That maybe gender expression is a social construct! And I am picking things more freely because I am not feeling bound by social norms or maybe that I do and that I am flagging my gender using socially mandated messaging. Isn’t gender fun?

---

Little outings

An old colleague of mine posted an update on Facebook; since I’d not heard from him in years and I’d always liked him I sent a message and we chatted for a while. He had also been through a bit of a midlife-crisis, but was coming through the other side.

I shared that things had somewhat come apart for me in the last few years, culminating in me coming out as non-binary and having some identity affirming surgery. Nothing too specific, but he might have worked out a little of what “work” I’d had done when I said that the menopause sucked. He was lovely and said that I could talk to him at any time.