27 May 2026

I mentioned my next appointment at the gender clinic a few weeks ago to Matilda & her response was: “How do you think it’s going to go? Poof, you’re a girl now?”

I didn’t say anything. I don’t think she meant it the way it landed, I genuinely don’t. But it landed somewhere tender and it’s still sitting there now, a weel later, while the house is quiet and Lyra is asleep.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it.

A year ago, maybe two, something like that would have sent me somewhere. Out of the room, out of the conversation, maybe out of the house for a walk I didn’t need. The flight response was reliable. It wasn’t helpful, but it was there, ready, whenever something got too close.

It’s largely gone now. Lyra took it with her when she arrived, or maybe she just replaced it with something heavier and more useful: the necessity of staying. You can’t flight-response your way out of responsibilit, and you can’t dissolve when there’s a small person who needs you present and warm and here.

So I stayed in the the house and quietly absorbed the comment. I buried it in that particular way I’ve apparently learned to bury things, and I carried on with the evening.

I’m not sure if that’s growth or just a different kind of avoidance. Maybe both. The flight response and the burial are probably cousins. One takes you out of the room, the other takes the difficult thing and presses it down somewhere you don’t have to look at it for a while.

What I know is this: Matilda didn’t mean to hurt me. She was probably being flippant, probably not thinking through the weight of the words before they came out. That is not a character flaw. It is just a thing that happens in long relationships, where you sometimes forget to be careful with the other person because you’ve forgotten they’re still capable of being hurt. I am certain I have done the same before now.

But I am still capable of being hurt. The gender clinic appointment matters to me. It matters in a way that is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t carried the same thing, and I don’t always find the words to explain it even to the people closest to me. I haven’t discussed any of what I going through at length with anyone/

I suppose what I needed, in that moment, was for it to be taken seriously. Not analysed, not solved, not questioned. Just taken seriously.

I’ll go to the appointment. Whatever comes next is whatever comes next.