Diary

Today I had my first appointment with the surgeon who will do my Adam's apple reduction. I reported at the desk of the otolaryngology department in the hospital, but -- of course -- I had to go back to the reception desk to have a punch card made. So I went back to reception desk and gave them my punch card from another hospital as an example, so that I would not have to spell out all the details.
The lady copied the F from my other card without further ado.
"Are you single?"
"No, I am married."
"In that case, would you like your husband's last name on the card as well?"
"No, thank you, just my maiden name will do."
When she looked at my insurance card, she spotted an "M".
"Do you realize you are still registered as a man with the insurance company?"
"Yes, I know, but it will change."
She didn't see any problem in this.

We went back to the otolaryngology department where I had an interesting talk with Dr. De Jong.
"So you have come for an operation on your throat?"
"Yes, I want my larynx reduced."
"So you haven't come for voice therapy?"
"No, I have heard operations on the vocal chords are very risky..."
"That is true, but we don't need to operate on the vocal chords for that, we can do it by adjusting the orientations of two little bones in your throat."
Hey, here is another thing I didn't know about! I thought practicing to use your voice in a different way was the only solution except for operating on the vocal chords. I have thought so for years and I cannot quickly decide to take another approach right now on the spot. So for the time being I just want him to help me with my larynx.
The doctor has a look at it and he has to admit it is quite large for a woman. HE also looks inside my throat and he seems satisfied with what he sees there.

So I will soon be hospitalized for a day and night because the operation will be done under general anesthetic. I didn't know about that either, I thought this was always done under local anesthetic without hospitalization.

Well, at least the first knife will now soon go into my body, or to put it differently: they will put a knife to my throat. At least it seems like there is finally some progress in my transition again!

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It looks like I am running more and more behind in writing my weblog. I often get mail from people who say "It has been a bit quiet lately, hasn't it?" No it hasn't! I work on it every week and there is always a lot of material "in the pipeline" to be published "real soon now". Real soon, yeah, but not just yet.

A week in Prague gives me a lot of wonderful material and pictures, but putting all that neatly on line took me a month. Hopefully I will manage to make up and get to current issues again; that is much more fun!

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Tonight my forty-eighth column was broadcast in Gendertalk #576.
You can find the complete program in the Gendertalk archive.
Or you can find just my column at:
http://eveliensnel.com/audio/HAIR01.mp3
A full transcript of the text is below:

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Hair

When you get a sex change operation (SRS), some of the skin that is now on the outside of your body gets transplanted to the inside. It is very important that there is no hair on that skin, because otherwise hair will be growing inside of you, where you can no longer reach it, after the operation.

In an SRS-operation they usually remove the hair on your genitals in a very simple and effective way: With a knife they scrape along the inside of your skin. This removes all the follicles forever.

For some reason they don't do that at the gender team in the VU hospital in Amsterdam. So I expected they would first do a laser treatment or an electrical depilation in the hospital.

Well, they don't! They don't lift a finger to help their patients with that.

It makes me wonder what they do with a patient who is brought in with an appendicitis. Do they send him to a hairdresser to have his belly shaved before they operate him? I know, I know, I am being sarcastic, but I was very disappointed to find out there was yet another hurdle between me and my operation.

So I set out to find myself a new skin therapist who was willing and able to help me with this rather intimate problem. The lady who did the laser hair removal on my face is now living 100 miles away from me, so that was not an option. It took me several weeks and in the end it was my spouse Julia who found me one.

Last month I have had an intake-interview with her where I have explained what I need to have done and she will do it. I think she is a very good therapist, because one of the first things she said is that depilation is not necessary, because they can easily do this for me during the operation. It looks like she is more knowledgeable than the people at the hospital.

So I am going to see her for my first treatment today. I am very glad you cannot see me right now, because I have also asked her to work on the remaining hair on my face. I haven't shaved since Wednesday. It feels terrible, I have always hated these hairs on my face.
Hopefully she can help me get rid of these as well, that would certainly improve the quality of my life. If you look at it that way, these visits with the skin therapist may well turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

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Today was the day: My first appointment for laser hair removal on my genitals. I have to admit I was quite nervous: People had told me this would be very painful.

But fortunately I had Emla cream to sedate my skin with. You have to apply the cream one hour in advance and then you have to cover the skin with a special patch. The patches were delivered together with the cream, but they were utterly useless! They only covered about one square inch... I had read somewhere someone had used aluminum foil instead, so that is what I tried. With several lengths of adhesive patches to keep it all in place. What a mess!

It turned out it didn't really hurt; the Emla cream works very well. And my skin therapist handles the situation very professionally. It it quite an intimate treatment, but she stays calm and does her work accurately and quickly.

I wonder how I would have reacted to this treatment myself a few years ago. Many men would probably get aroused if a beautiful woman would work with them in this way for half an hour. Fortunately the hormones work very well on me: Even in such extreme circumstances I don't get any unpleasant, male urges.

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http://www.tellertest.com [Translated from Dutch]: "Was there any way webstats4U (formerly Nedstat Basic) could sink any deeper after setting up popups on the websites of the people who use the free version of their visitor counter? YES THERE WAS, by spreading pornographic popups to a children's site about rabbits and spyware that can be installed without warning. More information about the Errorsafe spyware that may infect your visitors if you have a Webstats4U counter on your site, can be found at Jeroen.com.

I repeat my advice: take that Webstats4u counter off of you site as soon as possible if you haven't done that yet. You may feel sorry about the years of statistical data you lose this way, but this counter causes too many inconveniences and maybe even damage to your visitors.

Taking the counter off is simple: just remove the code you added to you pages when you installed the counter. There is no need to end your account at Webstats4U."

I clearly had to take action here, so I have removed all webstats4u from my site. If you spot one I missed, please tell me and I will kill it off with a sledge-hammer

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Today the Evoluon was open to the public just for one day. There was a time when the Evoluon used to be a wonderful museum of science and technology, a place where young people could experience that science is fun, long before our governments started a campaign to persuade young people to choose scientific subjects in school.
The management was dissatisfied with the return on investment of the museum (less funding came in than was necessary for maintaining and updating the collection), so it was decided to turn it into a far-too-expensive conference center. Of course this little plan didn't work out either, so now the future of the building is uncertain.

My thoughts went back to August 29th 1970. As a reward for attaining my swimming diploma, I was allowed to visit the Evoluon for a day. It is a memory I still treasure and it was certainly had a large impact on the rest of my life.

At the time the Philips company still had a long-term vision. They thought such a museum of technology would interest young people to seek a career in science and technology. And it worked: Twenty four years later I started working for Philips and I think my contribution to the company turnover was well worth the investment of 24 years ago.

Nowadays short term vision prevails at Philips. Every quarter good results have to be presented, so they keep on selling of branches of the company to keep the shareholders happy. The shareholders are busy eating the Philips company like a swarm of locusts. Once they have gorged themselves there will be nothing left and the swarm will move on to destroy another company.
You might think: "That is the frustrated point of view of an discarded former employee", but maybe you will change your mind if you read what Frits Philips Senior has said on this matter (quoted by his son, Frits Philips Junior, in the preface of the book "Evoluon, 40 jaar boegbeeld van een ambitieuze regio"): "Not working with a long term view was something I could not afford as an entrepreneur!"
The book was launched today and if you bought one, you could have it signed by the author, Steef Hendriks. Of course I bought one. Steef told me he had seen many people in tears about what has happened to the Evoluon already. I was very touched as well. I managed to keep the tears out of my eyes, but my voice was out of control.

If you look at the third picture, you might think there were tears in my eyes, but it is just that I didn't hold the camera still as I took the picture. And the subject I was taking a picture of, was moving as well! You may guess what it is...

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This weekend I got an email from someone who was worried my site might have been infected by a pop-up virus. Every time she opens one of my pages she gets annoying windows with commercial messages on her screen. I am afraid you have all experienced this problem.

Those nasty pop-ups on my site are caused by "webstats4u", that is the provider that calculates the statistics for my website. It gets me very angry, but I have not yet found a way to get rid of these commercials. I can imagine you dislike them, I am sorry. I think I'll have to find myself a provider who gives me statistics without those stupid commercials.

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Tonight my forty-seventh column was broadcast in Gendertalk #574.
You can find the complete program in the Gendertalk archive.
Or you can find just my column at:
http://eveliensnel.com/audio/PRAGUE01.mp3
A full transcript of the text is below:

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Prague

Last week we had a short vacation in Prague in the Czech republic. As you know I was a bit apprehensive about this trip; afraid to have to use my passport with a male name in it, afraid to run into trouble at the security check and most of all worried about the acceptance towards transsexual women in Prague.

The first hurdle to take was the passport check at the Dutch airport. The lady who had to check it looked very carefully at me and at my picture in the passport and she came to the only possible conclusion: This was indeed my passport. And that is all she needs to know. If I look similar enough to the picture in my passport it doesn't matter if I die my hair green or purple or grow breasts. So she smiled at me, handed back my passport and told me I was free to go ahead.

The second hurdle is the security check. But since I passed the metal detector without a bleep, people hardly looked at me there. Julia had a lot more trouble passing that stage. She hadn't taken off all her bracelets, so the detector bleeped and she was searched as if she were a terrorist. Ridiculous to think we would want to blow up the aircraft on our way to a great vacation! If we want to do that, we will do it on our way back home!

So far so good. We arrived safely in Prague and we didn't have any problem getting into the country there.

We soon noticed many people were staring at me in Prague. I may feel quite passable in the Netherlands, but apparently that has to do with the acceptance of the Dutch people as well as with my looks. In Prague people looked at me as if I were a creature from a different planet! They certainly aren't used to seeing gender queer people there.

But there were no real problems. One evening, when I was a bit more dressed-up than usual, because we wanted to go out, we almost had some trouble in the subway. A couple of guys on the platform were looking at me in a rather aggressive way. We made sure we got into a different compartment of the subway than they did and we didn't see them any more.

Before we went there I had already done some Goog'ling to find out about the acceptance of queer people over there and I wasn't disappointed. I had found several gay-friendly bars and restaurants in Prague, so I had decided to look at some of those to give you a report about them.

Café-Café on 10 Rytí­řská is listed as a gay bar in our travel guide, but most of the guests are heterosexuals. It is a beautiful place with large windows and lots of mirrors, a place to look at people and to be seen yourself. Being close to Václavské Náměstí it is often visited by tourists and all the staff speaks some English.

Another nice place we visited was Street-Cafe Maler on 28 Blanická, listed as a lesbo club in my travel guide. Unfortunately it was not very busy when we were there, but their pages on the Internet show that it is not always so quiet. We found a very pleasant atmosphere and nice modern music there. The bar personnel didn't speak any English, but some of the guests did.

I haven't told you about the sheer beauty of Prague. This can be found in any travel guide and on the Internet. All I wanted to tell you is that it is also a safe place to go for us genderqueers. Recommended!

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We were hardly back in Holland when we had another project on our hands:: T&T-evening in Eindhoven with Julia at the cash register and Fenna and me behind the bar. Fortunately they have new furniture in the community center, so I will never have to carry those heavy tables any more. But still it is hard work, such an evening behind the bar.

Someone had the idea of putting up a sign with the names of the bartenders and that sounded like a very good plan to me. It is so much more pleasant to be addressed by your name than by "Hey" or "Hello". There were slates available, but where would I find a piece of chalk? I had to look through all of the community center before I found one:

Behind the bar: Fenna & Evelien

It was very busy again and Ice Tea is still the most popular drink. Fortunately Fenna knew where to find a secret stock of extra glasses that were suitable for serving Ice Tea in. We have to keep all the cans of the beverages we poor, so that they can be counted for checking the balance, but it just wasn't feasible. So halfway trough the evening I threw out 50 empty cans and I made a note on our list about it. They will just have to take my word for it.

Previous T&T-evenings: August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January, December, November, October, September, July 2005, June 2005, May 2005, April 2005, March 2005, February 2005, January 2005, December 2004, November 2004, October 2004, September 2004, August 2004, July 2004, June 2004, May 2004 and April 2004.

Labels: TandT

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