The missing transmen of TV.

Tatiana Maslany, I love you. You are wonderful and gifted, a charming and charismatic actress and the star of one of my favourite television shows. You're the heart of Orphan Black, which is consistently such a fantastic and intelligent shows... and yet, I have a complaint. Not about you, per se, but about the clones in your television show.

I have a complaint about Tony Sawicki.

Tony is a fantastic character. He's got a criminal record and seems far less trustworthy than our morally ambiguous heroine, Sarah Manning. He's feisty and flirtatious, and wields his crooked smile like a weapon. And he's trans, bucking the trend of his family of clones by not being mirror images of the others. The girls can freak out over their identical faces whenever they meet each other, but not Tony. Strong and stoic, he's already different from them, and he wears his difference with pride.

My problem is not with Tony: it is with the absence of him. For Tony only appears in one episode in Season 2 of Orphan Black, Variable and Full of Perturbation. That's the lowest appearance count of any clone who isn't currently deceased, and so one of the only transmen on television is cut out of the show entirely except for one token appearance, which could cynically been seen as existing just to highlight how inclusive and progressive Orphan Black is. Tony appears in a whirlwind, shares a brief kiss with Felix, then disappears from the narrative and is promptly forgotten about.

I won't even make my usual gripes about a cisgender actor portraying a transgender character, as Tony's status as a clone means it makes sense for him to share an actor with the others. That's how much I appreciate Tony. He's an example of positive representation of a transperson who actually has a character that revolves around something other than his gender: he's not a patient saint whose presence makes others better people, nor a walking ball of angst. He's Tony, transient and flighty, and we're just getting to know him when he leaves.

Tony's absence from the show is symptomatic of the missing transman characters in the rest of television, and pop culture at large. Our representations of trans* people are Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, and Caitlyn Jenner. In the UK we have Rebecca Root, Bethany Black and Paris Lees too, beautiful women who don't or can't speak for whole swathes of the community.

Non-binary or genderqueer representation in the media isn't much better: I can think of Jack Monroe, Laurie Penny, Miley Cyrus and Ruby Rose, all AFAB people with fabulous stories but whose stories and struggles are still not the same as the AMAB people who don't connect with their gender. The only one I can think of is Andreja Pejic, who first appeared in fashion magazines presenting as a male model in the women's fashion industry, though obviously this is a false recollection as she is actually a transwoman.

So what I want from Orphan Black is for Tony to come back, to be more than just an interlude in the tightly woven plot. And from the media in general, I want more transboys, and kids who are neither male nor female. Give me a Project Castor clone who wears dresses and identifies as they; give me men cross-dressing as women with no shame or transmisogynistic jokes; and please, for the love of all that is holy, give me a transman portrayed by a transgender man actor.

Gender trouble.

(Oh look, a "sneaky" allusion to the famous Judith Butler book of the same name! How many people would have got this reference without me pointing it out? It's too late now, your time to shine is over, yes my blog post is using the name of a book published four years before I was born. Think of it as inter-textuality. So post-modern!)

Gender sucks. This is an opinion but also kind of a fact. As my non-binary squeeze asked me a few days ago, "what is gender?" And I kind of floundered and offered a few responses - it's a set of social behaviours, it's to do with human conditioning, it's innate, it's learned, it's a spectrum, it's all performative actions - but none of them seemed to really work in the face of their gaze, their cool almond-shaped eyes looking up at me, ringed with delicate eyelashes and deep thought.

I have to have some notion of gender, right? It's something we all have, but not something that gets critically considered unless you or someone you know isn't cisgender - that is, having your gender identity and your physical sex match up. I am not cisgender. I am a demi-girl, which is one of those "tumblr genders" that people seem to think doesn't exist. But also being pansexual, I'm used to erasure.

Being a demi-girl, to me, means I have some level of detachment from being feminine or female. As much as I am female, I am also not-female. This element of not-female isn't male, either: it's just not really anything, maybe agender or genderqueer (i.e. having no gender, or being somewhere in the middle of the indiscrete mass of gender identities) but not specific. Being a demi-girl, for me, means some kind of disconnect between my XX-chromosone, supposedly 'female' body and the expectations placed upon me for being a girl.

For all my behaviours - my empathy, my need to please but also challenge authority figures, my rebellious streak, my wanderlust, the Maths papers I bailed on - I worry whether they were truly my choices or made by the environment I grew up in, which necessarily includes the patriarchy. I am good at remembering names, but is that because of the burden of femaleness impacting my thought processes and others' expectations of me since I was a kid to the extent that it's become part of my personality?

I have too many unanswered questions about this, so identifying as not-a-cis-girl helps me with it. Being demi- helps me feel more secure in my skin, helps me challenge notions, helps remind me that acting typically feminine does not make me a stereotype, that girly is not synonymous with weak, that internalised misogyny is not my fault but that of the system I was born into. (It's like one of my agender friends commenting how accepting her gender identity as agender helped her be more comfortable wearing dresses and skirts: to paraphrase, once she accepted she had no gender and thus nothing to lose from not being 'feminine enough', the act wearing feminine clothing didn't carry the same problems and was liberating.) I have no problems with the undeniable womanly curves of my body, as a binder would probably damage me too much without doing anything to sort out my hip-to-waist ratio that proves I endured female puberty - but being unhappy in your body is not a prerequisite of any gender identity whatsoever. Dysphoria is not essential to the trans or non-binary experience.

You may feel this exact way and yet still identify as cisgender, but guess what? That's your prerogative. Like not every person who is attracted to people of more than one gender has to identify as anything other than how they feel, nobody's going to try and make you have a gender that's not what you identify as. (Shout-out to all the straight guys in the back I've slept with! Guess what? You've fucked a non-binary person! If that makes you feel uncomfortable then that's your problem.) At the same time, there are options.

Gender isn't a fixed construct. We get to make up our minds ourselves. There are more words than there used to be, but there's also much more awareness and discussion of feeling like this. Feeling confused over my gender isn't a new phenomenon for humanity, and not for me - I've been a conflicted tomboy all my life, stealing my brother's girls but pretending not to like pink to keep my brand consistent - but I have the language now to express it. Technically I am trans, in that I am not-cis, but I don't see myself in that umbrella. Rather I am in the non-binary camp, of people whose gender is not either girl or boy, yes or no, pink or blue. How is increased language and awareness a bad thing?

And because of all this, and because of understanding gender as a spectrum before I even worked out where I was on it, I define as pansexual. I am attracted to people, and their gender is irrelevant. Call me bisexual and prepare for a long discussion about this.

I still don't know what gender is. For my enbie beauty (whose non-binary label they wear as a hesitant badge of pride), it's freedom to dress as they feel on any given day without giving a fuck. It's not worrying about not being served in Betty's for wearing a skirt and not having their identity questioned on the days they wear combats. It's something that makes them happy in a world full of insecurity and uncertainty: the knowledge that they are not boy or girl, and that it's okay and really most people don't care other than to compliment them on their banging Hello Kitty dress.

Dating my enbie (non-binary person) brings its own string of challenges: it's made me aware of how I use language so much more, the arbitrariness of gendered clothing, the constant weighing up of whether to confront catcallers or not, and the total shittiness of men in women's clothing being a "joke", like femininity is funny and shameful.

Wearing female clothing brings you into a female space regardless of biology, and on the streets that can mean harassment and danger as others feel entitled to look at you and make comments. My enbie happens to be 6'2" and wear stubble with their flowing red and brown locks, which raises even more confusion from passers-by. There's not been much actual street harassment, but there's so much whispering and confusion, comments to friends, wolf-whistling. I ignore it, burning to confront harassers and educate them about gender; I can't imagine how it makes my other half feel.

Neither of us are out to our parents, and there's something depressing about that. If we can't be who we really are round our families for fear of them not understanding - or worse, laughing about it, or reacting badly, or cutting us off - then living authentically gets that much harder,

Maybe we all have gender trouble. But if you learn anything from this, it's that your cheap laugh at the expense of a muscled dude in a red dress in the Fallout 4 E3 previews is a bullet shot to the hearts and souls of gender non-conformers around the world. Laughing at a man wearing a dress says you think women's clothing is embarrassing, and any feminist worth their salt can see why that's problematic. So, I will fight tooth and nail to keep my non-binary friends and kin safe, even if that sometimes means the best way to fight is through stony glares and silence as we walk on in our swishy blue skirts.

Be happy, go think about your ex.

In continuation of my perfectly contradictory way of being, the happier my relationship is, the more I think about my exes. For possibly the first time ever, everything is functional. There's no communication issues, no co-dependence, no unequal states of affection or distance that tests commitment. What this proves to me is that my sadness over past loves is unrelated to my current relationship. It's not that I am "not over" my exes: it's that I will always be sad about the way things ended.

I think part of the reason we can become so bitter to our exes is that, for a time, they were so important to us. The gap remains between what they were and what they are now. Once, they were close to us. They slept next to us, spoke to us over every little thing, held our hands and occupied our heads. But after you break up, they can become strangers.

While I've never had a shouting-till-dawn break-up, there's been a mix. The ones where you stop responding, the ones where you promise to stay friends, the ones that distance tempers into being not quite so harsh. My exes are all on my Facebook, but I wonder if they remember. When we pass by without making contact, do we both think back to the days we said we were happy? Were we really?

None of this can be verified against another's experience and we are all different. Even though it happened more than two years ago, I can still get sad about being broken up with over dessert after going to London aquarium together. I feel guilty for dumping a long-distance girlfriend over text when I was 16, and it makes me sad we don't talk any more. Clinging to the past is toxic, but there's a melancholy in realising these people that were so close once are now nothing.

Losing touch scares me, How easily we can be forgotten, If we are nothing but the sum of the relationships we make, what does it say when they can be forged and broken so quickly? We are all fragile. And I guess that goes for friends, too: the people I know who are graduating used to be so close to me, and are now gone. Yes, when we became friends they were sweet, and perhaps they became less so the better we knew each other, but that doesn't stop them from being close.

We forget too many people. Getting left behind is awful. This is all stuff we know, but don't want to consider. Maybe that's why I think so much about the people I had so much almost-happiness with. Things aren't meant to last: all things end. But it's not really so bad to think about the relationships that did. They had meaning too, and their status as passed doesn't negate the value they had at the time. That is not to say I react healthily: I bottled up my angst at someone who hurt me which ended in wanting to punch them. How are you meant to respond to that, when you also know their own ex had physically abused them? I compete with others on arbitrary scales to measure happiness, and I am aware of my bizarre jealousy over who moves on first and how easily exes seem to get over things. My best friend is technically my ex: he has moved on, and I think I'm losing him now to a girl the year below me. That hurts more than anything, as our friendship survived my multitude of inadvisable relationships and torrid flings: it's upsetting that one person can decide to curtail things and they just end.

Whatever. I think and write about this well-trodden ground far too much. Go stroke a puppy or something.

Wearing my loves.

I have a soft spot for stolen clothes from my loves. That's lovers in all senses - familial and romantic and friends. They can give me things all they like, but I am terrible at returning loaned things. Possession is temporary: nothing is really ours after all, is it? So I keep things, magpie-like, pieces of people I don't want to forget and reminders of things I need to remember. I used to steal my brother's pyjamas when we were kids; now, I borrow my father's tailcoat to go to a ball. It's wearing pieces of history, bringing the past into the present, taking on old

Sometimes in my head I get an image of me wearing the things I've received from the people who mattered most to me at the time, all at once. I'm barefoot, because my feet are too small to steal socks or shoes; I am in boxers I stole from the dancer I had a mostly-physical relationship with and wearing the oversized t-shirt of a boy I loved, but was not in love with. There's a long necklace from the first girl I ever dated, which hangs low and bronze almost to my navel. And I am wearing the hoodie of the one I am in love with, while circumstances are getting in the way.

When I am sad I wear other people's clothes. It makes me feel connected, reminds me that others exist even when I am alone and lonely. Today I am in my mother's cardigan and my friend's big, blue coat. They are keeping me warm in the cold, keeping the rain away from my face and holding me together when I feel like falling apart.

I know I should give these things back, but things are only things. Material possessions matter less than memories to me. Moment and experiences are transient and can give you the warmth or sadness that clothes cannot. I have always been a physical person, and the proximity and affection of touch is what I seem to perpetually crave. It is getting hard for me to sleep alone. The quiet of my room is no match for the tumult of my brain. And I have always been fine by myself, but that doesn't mean I am not lonely.

My mother's feet are smaller than mine and she still wears my old trainers that I have grown out of. I wonder if she feels fond of me when she wears them. I would. Or does she just see them as trainers, utilitarian things to keep her feet dry?

I don't know what is going on with my life, but I will give back this cerulean blue hoodie if my love asks me to. It's the colour of a clear sky, the highlights in my hair, my eyes in a storm. (His eyes are more green.) If love is putting someone else first then my selfish heart can do that, even if it means martyring myself. I will give back the hoodie that after two months still smells of him. But if he does not, then I will keep it. It reminds me of affection, of being held, warm hands on my cold arms. I am holding myself together as best I can, in other's clothes, to keep me whole when I want to unravel.

I suppose I have always been one to wear my heart on my sleeve.

Summer is ending.

Some days, when I think about how vast and hopeless the world is, I get stuck. Stuck in my own brain, as I consider the huge expanse of people trembling in fear and madness. Stuck in the horrors that permeate people's psyches, lurking just below the surface in day to day life. Stuck considering the multitude of ways life conspires to fuck people over based on no sound reasoning whatsoever.

It's been a long summer, where an early spike of heat has faded away into rain and grey cloud and cool breezes on days when it's already a little cold.

It's been a summer full of death. At the individual level, celebrities seem to be dying like never before (possibly a side-effect of our aging global population and the ability of the internet to extend stars' lifespans beyond their decade of fame; funny how we only remember people when they die). We've seen James Foley executed in front of the whole world, who watched his beheading through their fingers on computer screens and smartphones. He was trying to elucidate us about the dark corners of the world; the darkness got to him.

On a larger level, we've learned so much more about the hundreds of violations going on around the world. The Gaza strip has seen fighting that's killed 2000 civilians - and over what? Two groups of people, locked up safe in boardrooms, disputing who owns some land without sparing any thoughts for the people who live there and call it their home.

We've seen spates of cops abusing the black community in the USA, from Ferguson to New York and even further. I get so angry about it - but I am white, I am privileged, I am English. I am not on the streets holding candlelit vigils for Michael Brown, and being tear-gassed for my efforts. But I wasn't there either in London, when Mark Duggan was shot in 2011. Then, the country turned on itself as anger flared up all over the nation, and we rioted across the country. In Ferguson, there are no riots. There are peaceful protests, misreported by the white media wrongly representing something calm as violent - due to the cops' reaction, which wasn't even precipitated by anything.

One and a half thousand children were sexually abused in Rotheram in an industrial, organised fashion over the course of decades, and the authorities did nothing. Too concerned with protecting themselves than the children they were supposed to be caring for.

This is the state of the world, right now. Ebola ravages Africa but we only care when a British citizen is infected. There's so much bleakness and suffering that we have to depersonalise, only view a few select groups as people and the rest as merely faceless masses - because, if we really truly considered every person who was hurting, and empathised that fiercely with every sore soul, I think our hearts would burst.

I get stuck thinking about all this - and I feel bad, because I'm happy. There's nothing I can do to help, and my impotent thoughts of action wither and die into indolence and satisfaction with my own personal status quo.

My job pays me £117 each week for three days of my time, where I mainly dick around and waste time by writing cloying, overwrought blog posts like this. My friends see me most days, a dancer cooks me dinner on a semi-regular basis, and I've managed to avoid dumping a bucket of water over my head. I've gained weight but the media's insistence that I should now experience crushing body dysmorphia hasn't materialised. My body is still my body. I'm happy.

Just like other people having it worse doesn't invalidate your own sadness - and other people having it better doesn't invalidate your own happiness - the suffering of the world doesn't seem to have much impact on my own feelings. Not today.

Summer is ending. The pain is still everywhere I look, except in my own personal bubble. Maybe this is the only way we can combat the blackness though. Maybe happiness is the most subversive thing we can project. The world is made up of awful moments of anguish and crying when nobody can hear you, but it's also beautiful. Life is harsh, but it's sharpest when in relief. Among the brutality are shining shards of joy: laughing until you collapse, cycling through hayfevery fields, hot showers and Netflix marathons and singing karaoke with strangers. Hold them close.

One day, I'll be struggling with my own demons, be they personal or systematically oppressive. I'll be holding onto past days of happiness then: in a world where death is random and impersonal, it'll come for me eventually. Be joyous. Dare to be happy. We have to find some frivolous way to beat the severity of real life.

The transience of photographs.

I haven't written for a while and I already fear that my brain is not what it used to be. This post was not light and whimsical to write: it was mucilaginous, viscous, the words forced from my fingers rather than flowing. It's also piecemeal and bitty, strung together from patchwork thoughts I've had over the week rather than a narrative stream-of-consciousness which I am using to hash out my ideas.

I want to talk about photographs. I don't even know what I want to say about them. I just want to say something.

The problem with photographs is that they take something as fleeting, as transient as a moment, and attempt to immortalise it forever. In the past, you had to live in the second: you reminisced with your mental faculties, not your Facebook app, and everything happened once and only once.

But cameras appeared in the world, and photographs had to be staged, stock-still, for hours on end in order to create an image to last forever. Victorian women decked up in finery clutched their babies in chokeholds, staring sternly at modern technology, and the resulting sepia prints were monuments to their patience and wealth.

Those days have passed too, and now I take Snapchats of my laptop to let friends know I'm at work (and hardly working). Stay gold, pony boy, even though nothing gold can stay.

In Physics, it is an accepted fact that by observing something you change it. The Observer Effect, as it is appropriately called, says that the very act of measuring something will alter it. This is true of photographs. Taking a photograph of something changes it, because it no longer exists in its unobserved state. By viewing it - by giving it the audience of a lens - it is changed. You are not taking photos of things as you see them; you are taking photos of things as your camera sees them. Do the subject of photos even really exist outside of your aperture?

I digress.

Transience. I am a big fan of transience.

I have a tattoo on my hip of cherry blossom, which is traditionally associated with transience in Japanese culture, and the need not to fight time - instead, you let it pass, flow over you like a river you cannot change the course of. (I think of photos as leaves, floating on this river: they are buoyed along, in the same inexorable forward motion, separate from the water but carried by it.) There is a permanent reminder on my skin that nothing is permanent. I am a big fan of this irony, too.

Nothing can last forever, and few things last beyond their own moment. Photographs take that moment, distill it, capture it in proverbial amber and preserve it. A moment, cut forever from its contexts of movement and chronology: a moment, caught forever with less-than-flattering lighting and slightly wonky framing.

But photographs create another situation whereby, divorced from their context, they become irrelevant to their time. I know people who still fancy Heath Ledger, despite the fact he is dead. He is dead, and buried, and rotting - and yet we have photographs and films that depict him as young and attractive and as the hero in teen films, so fancying him doesn't seem weird. This also explains why we are still struck by photos of beauty from our previous millennium. It is not because beauty is timeless. The people in photographs, who were beauties at 21 in 1955, are probably no longer beautiful now. It is because we can make that moment timeless. Photographs turn us into time travellers, showing us things as we could never experience them because the world simply is not like that. They're lying to us. They are self-demonstrative proof that the world used to be like that, and yet the only proof is that image itself. Photographs are duplicitous.

(This is true of any static rendering of a sense, I suppose - so sound recordings are privy to this too; but I think there's something so much more intense about photographs. An image gnaws at my nerves far more viscerally than a sound.)

All this thinking was prompted by something a while ago. A friend of mine sent me a photograph of himself as a teenager, in order to prove he had once had hair. The photo was a candid shot, of a Welsh 16-year-old holding a cat, looking slightly surprised by the proceedings. His hair was blond, and as New Romantic as any Spandau Ballet tribute act. I have only ever known my friend as an adult: he is, to my young eyes, old and wise and sensible (and almost certainly reading this). To think he was once my age - that he was younger - is inconceivable. He was 26 when I was born, and I'm closer his age in this photo from 1984 than I am to him now.

But in that photo, there isn't much to mark it as being defiantly 80's fare. The clothes are rather generic. It could have been taken in 2011, when I was 16 and had rainbow hair. The boy in the photo could have gone to the same Cardiff Uni open day as me, passed me on a crowded train, smiled at my chronic clumsiness.

What a shame he stopped existing the moment after the shutter clicked.

Bullshit Bell 5: Timekeeping.

I had a plan for a blog post today. I was going to write a beautiful, gentle, whimsical thing about photographs and how they distort our sense of history, making the past forever present through a frozen image which refuses to change no matter how the world around it does. I was mulling it over in my head last night. It was going to be achingly well-written. A musing on transience and time.

But no.

Instead, I am calling bullshit on the corporate world in one more small, petty way that has proved I cannot deal with offices where everyone wears pencil skirts: timekeeping is bullshit.

I say this as an admittedly unpunctual person. I turn up on time to events when you're expected to be late. I'll get to lectures either five minutes early or five minutes late, and rarely in the sweet spot in between. I've been trained by my mother to turn up to doctors' appointments ten minutes early, when in reality I don't think my GP's ever been less than twenty minutes behind schedule.

In my mind, punctuality is pretty flexible. Being assigned to work 37 hours a week means I will work 37 hours a week. If I am 5 minutes late turning up to work, I'll religiously work an extra 5 minutes. I may be 5 minutes late to work fairly often, but sometimes I'm early to work. Because that's how humans work. We have days when we wake up early and days when we can't get out of bed and sometimes we have days where traffic is slow or the lights won't turn on or we have to spend ten minutes looking at ourselves in the mirror to psyche ourselves up to face the day.

And yes sometimes I am late to work. What of it?

Has anything interesting and vital ever happened in those 5 minutes between when my contract starts and when I arrive?

My manager is apparently the only person who cares about this, because he is the one who chews me out. He's not even my boss. Because my boss is in Turkey for four weeks, and working from home. He has also threatened me with termination of my contract if I am late again.

How does that work, exactly?

If 5 minutes past 9 counts as so truly horribly heinously late that the very existence of space-time warps and number start turning backwards, then yes I will accept that I was late and this was a mistake that could have been avoided.

What about 1 minute past 9? Couldn't that just be down to our watches not being synchronised?

Or thirty seconds past 9? Or 1 second past 9?

If I am 1 second late on Monday, am I going to get fired?

Personally I'm still a little bitter about the extra 3 hours I worked to finish some important copy, only to be told that I hadn't cleared the hours in advance so they didn't count. In my head, I'm stilled owed 3 hours, which I can chip away at by being 5 minutes late every day for 36 days, and still have worked 37 hours a week.

In a fast-paced working environment, yes, I can possibly see the relevance. In journalism, where new stories can break at literally any time, I suppose it's important to be at your desk at exactly 9am, because heaven knows how you could receive communication on your smartphone while commuting. In an office where the most productive thing I've done with week is write 400 words of newsletter copy and be told the photos I selected for it were wrong, it's pretty hard to care.

So, there we go. Timekeeping is bullshit. Punctuality is bullshit. I can keep track of my own hours. I know that when they deign to give me work to do, I do it on time and well. So why should it matter if I want to have breakfast in the morning rather than arrive, starving, at 8.55?

I don't even have anything funny and witty to say. I'm just angry. And if someone wants to give me a job where the quality of my work counts for more than my timekeeping, that'd be great. I would walk out now were it not for the money. Truly, I have sold myself to The Man.