Webcomic Update…

After way too long, and WAAAY too many completely redraws the new page is up! Enjoy page 8 of Acidgirl.

Acidgirl Page 8

For me it was when I was 4…

…then again at 7, but first time first. We lived in a huge mobile home in a field owned by my grandparents in pretty much the most isolated part of mainland Ireland. It was…okay I guess. I don’t really remember much apart from the dogs. Everybody had a dog. My grandparents had a border collie named Candy, my grand-aunt a border collie named, I don’t remember that makes me sad, I loved that dog. Anyway I had a border collie mix named Charlie, who I found out this year was put down the day we left; he went mad when I went away, and after nearly killing my uncle as they drove home from the train station my uncle was forced to drown my lovely 2-year-old dog so he wouldn’t end up crashing the car. I get it, but I hate it. It says a lot that that dog is still my 2nd clearest memory of Mayo, and that I still miss him 30 years later.

I say second strongest memory because my strongest memory is the time I told my Mom that I was a girl. I can remember standing in the tiny kitchen with her, watching her make scones, and then blurting it out. I was 4, I was already trying to read, already had had so many nightmares that they’d stopped scaring me, and I already knew something had gone horribly wrong with me. My body felt like a loaner. It felt like a stop gap while my real body was being finished. It didn’t feel like it was mine. Oh and it was already becoming sick, I started to have the bowel problems that have plagued my entire life since in those 2 short years in Mayo. But, time to focus on what’s important here; the gender.

So I’d told my Mom I was a girl. You know who liked dogs, and calves, and guns, and building random things, and hid all the time (like a soldier) with my dog in the tall grass at the edges of the field, you know, a girl…with a penis. And her response was…

…

…

…

…nothing.

No response. None at all. Now the fact that my Mom has absolutely memory of this at all makes me think that she actually didn’t hear me. Mom is a very quiet woman, but she’s a noisy baker, so it’s likely that she didn’t. But tell that to a 4-year-old who’s just told her Mom that penis and boy-play-stuff aside, she’s a girl. Yeah it all got put in a small box, locked up tight, and fucked down the deepest darkest part of my psyche. And there it stayed ’til I was 7.

7 was a big year for me. I started Primary School, I had my First Communion…ugh, got my first watch, discovered Virginia Madsen, and got molested for the first time.

The last part would be the part that’s pertinent here. You see I hadn’t had any sexual awakening at that stage. None, at, all. I was a blank sexual state, on a blank gender slate, all balanced on an already geeky as hell slate. So it probably shouldn’t be surprising to me that having my sexual nature activated in just about the worst way possible, against my will, and far too early for me would have a secondary effect. Yup my boxed up gender hit a trampoline somewhere down that deep dark hole, and then it bounced back up into the light of day, walloping me in the teeth, and adding immeasurably to my misery.

I told my Mom again, and again she doesn’t remember this. I don’t remember her response, I don’t even remember if there was a response. But whatever happened when I told her it was almost 2 decades before I would tell her again, this time making sure it stuck. In the mean time I hid who I was. I hid what was being done to me all the time. Well really I hid everything that makes me me.

This is all by way of sharing my early experience of my own gender. Why?

Because the video below shows how to (mostly, and even where she got it wrong it’s totally understandable) get it right if your child ever comes to you with something similar. But how to get it right is summed up best in these words…

Pay attention to what they say, and don’t dismiss it. They know themselves in a way you never will.

http://vimeo.com/user27600859/howtobeagirl

Waking up can be rough sometimes…

So last night I had a dream where my PTSD had vanished, I was my old self again, and the really gorgeous goth girl who gets off the bus across the street from my house most days had asked me out; AND it gets better…

I had just bought an old 2 door cinema, and was converting the two theatres into a house for myself, with these insane multi-tiered mezzanine floors, and enclose spiral staircases between them, two walk in wardrobes, a 100 square foot artists studio, a command centre of my own with a custom dual motheboard, 4 graphics card, 32 gigabyte, liquid cooled gaming rig. Oh and a 16 foot projected screen with 7.1 surround sound for my 360…AND it got better.

The following morning I was travelling to ComicCon as a panellist, because not only had Acidgirl become huge, but it had been made in to a cartoon. The dream ended with my PiC and I having a pint with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

Then I woke up…rough morning man, rough morning.

How My Eleven Year Old Son Taught Me That Having a Gay Character in ‘Train Your Dragon’ is Important

evoL =

Guest post by Mindy Forsythe.  Mindy is also the adoptive mom in the evolequals story   The Real True Story About How Parents Adopted Out Their Child When He Told Them He Was Gay

 

My eleven year old son Mason has been a big fan of DreamWork’s “How to Train Your Dragon”. In the new sequel, DreamWorks plans for Gobber the Belch to reveal his homosexuality.  Dean DeBlois, writer-director and openly gay himself, told E! News that the character’s acknowledgement will be subtle.  Subtle or not, this is exciting news for our family.  We have four beautiful children aged eleven to nineteen.  They are typical siblings…fighting one minute and best friends the next.  Two of our children, however, have a relationship that has shown me just how important and influential DreamWorks’s decision to include gay characters really is.

Mason, the baby in our family, is athletic, intelligent, tough as nails…

View original post 1,244 more words

No country for young women: Honour crimes and infanticide in Ireland

People forget that Ireland was, and often still is a nasty small-minded, parochial country. And people seem to wilfully ignore that Ireland may say “We treasure our children”, but the truth is completely different.

As an abuse survivor, I’ve had people tell me to shut up about it. That’s it’s in the past and should be left there. Never mind that it is my past, my present and something I will never escape in my future.

The people who tell you to shut up are the same ones who will turn around and use that information to destroy you given a chance.

Yes Ireland, such a beautiful country, until you scratch the surface of that lovely veneer…

Feminist Ire

When I was in first year in secondary school in 1997, a girl in the year above me was pregnant. She was 14. The only people who I ever heard say anything negative about her were a group of older girls who wore their tiny feet “pro-life” pins on their uniforms with pride. They slagged her behind her back, and said she would be a bad mother. They positioned themselves as the morally superior ones who cared for the baby, but not the unmarried mother. They are the remnants of an Ireland, a quasi-clerical fascist state, that we’d like to believe is in the past, but still lingers on.

The news broke last week of a septic tank filled with the remains of 796 children and babies in Galway. The remains were accumulated from the years 1925 to 1961 and a common cause of death was malnutrition and preventable disease…

View original post 2,094 more words