It's been over a month since I changed my name, and things are still very slowly getting changed over. Alliance&Leicester wanted me to prove I was really me, which I did by sending a copy of a letter from the tax credits, which surely no identity thief could have got their hands on. With that in hand, they changed everything over and sent me a new cheque book. My debit card is in the name of "N C Kiddle", so they don't actually have to send a new one, but they might.

Nationwide, despite the worrying bit on the form, changed everything over without complaint. GM win a prize for changing my name but still calling me Miss, but it's OK because they changed it when I phoned up and complained.

The Student Loans Company agreed to change everything based on a phone call, as did Anglian Water and eon. BT and onetel, on the other hand, despite taking my word for my name when I opened the accounts, wanted me to send them a copy of my "marriage certificate", because apparently people change their forenames and leave their surnames alone when they get married now.

The big three that I haven't notified yet are the taxman, the DWP and the DVLA. I was hoping to get a doctor's letter saying that I'm having treatment for gender dysphoria, in order to change the gender marker along with the name, but my GP doesn't feel she can write one until after I've seen the psychiatrist. I find the whole business extremely frustrating, not least because it shouldn't need a medical specialist to explain that someone who changes his name to a boy's name has gender dysphoria.

I have to notify them of my new name, though. Theoretically, I shouldn't need a doctor's note to get a title that matches my name, but I don't trust government departments to be that simple. The change of gender marker doesn't do a lot, since I'll be female for social security purposes until I can change my birth certificate - which makes it all the more baffling that I need a doctor's note. I'm planning to write a letter informing them that I've changed my name, glossing over the doctor's note aspect and hoping they will at least change name and title without too much unnecessary drama.

If you are trans and change your name so it better reflects your gender identity, remember that everyone you currently have business dealings with knows your old name. If the new name is extremely similar to the old name, it will be immediately obvious that you are changing your name because you're trans. If you choose a rather different new name, you get to say that you simply like the new name better, something that doesn't sound convincing when the difference is just two letters.

Of all the people you speak to, someone is certain to ask.

I've been musing for a few days now over the thoughts of a couple of very wise men. Drakyn talks about getting used to his body:
So anyone, be they HBS or Christian or feminist or have letters after their name, wants to tell me that learning to cope with a vag' makes me less of a man...well they can go fuck themselves with rusty railroad spikes.
Ryan talks about being frightened:
The worst thing is I feel like I can’t admit weakness, admit fear, without making myself vulnerable to attack. I’m sick of pretending there’s no fear, just so that it isn’t confused for doubt.

Between them, they've set me thinking about what you might call the kinder, gentler transphobia. The transphobia for people who have moved beyond calling trans people delusional, beyond slotting us firmly into the sex we were assigned as birth, into accepting that sometimes people are born with bodies that don't match their brain sex. But not into letting go of all the baggage they have when they come to think about trans people.

Like: trans people all despise their birth-sexed bodies. Trans people all want surgery more than anything else in the world. Trans people are all painfully dysphoric right up to the moment they begin transition, whereupon all their problems melt away like snow.

And then when a trans person steps outside those lines, it doesn't compute. It's possible for a man to have a vagina, but he's not allowed to enjoy using it for sex. It's possible for a man to have a uterus, but if he can cope with pregnancy, he's not really a man. If he's really trans, he should just be getting by in the body he's got until he can get it turned into something more manly.

There are trans people who feel that way about their bodies. There are trans people who need surgery to feel whole, and I would hate for anyone to get the idea that there those people don't exist. But there are also trans people who need hormones to feel whole but don't care one way or another about surgery, and I'm sick of people having the idea that we don't exist.

See, trans people don't come in a simple one-size-fits-all format. We all got thrown the same curveball, but we had to find our own individual ways of dealing with it. We don't necessarily have anything in common besides the body/brain mismatch, so of course we're going to end up with a whole range of different solutions.

I have more to say on this, but I can't put it into words just at the moment.

My doctor referred me to a gym programme around the turn of the year, and I finally got round to acting on the referral today. Turns out the secret was putting it on the weekly goal list - I can't motivate myself for my own sake, but when it affects Scunthorpe as well, you bet I'll get myself in gear.

All I had to do was get myself to the leisure centre (which I pass every time I walk to Tescos), hand over a letter and fill in a form. Oh yes, a form.

Me: This says "Name". Does it need my legal name, or the name I go by?
Receptionist: It needs to be your real name.
Me: *Sighs and prepares to write in legal name*
Receptionist: It needs to be the name the doctor's put on here.
Me: Oh, well that's my preferred name.

The rest of the form was simple enough. Except:
Receptionist: You haven't put your title. What's your title?
Me: *Wonders just how she would respond if I said Mr* Errr...
Receptionist: Is it Mrs or Miss?
Me: *Wonders how to ask for no title at all. Realises this is the one occasion above all others where a PhD would have been damn useful - I could have had one by now if I'd made a few different choices* Ummm...
Receptionist: Well, are you married?
Me: No...
Receptionist: It's Miss, then.
Forms, how I hate them. My own cowardice, ditto.

Anyway, once that was finished it was fairly straightforward. One of the gym guys took me through a health form in which the only difficult question was "Are you on any prescription medication and if so what is it?". My answer was "Yes, it's a tricyclic antidepressant called Lofepramine", which was apparently more information than he needed. Everything else was a negative.

Now all I need to do is scrounge some trainers from somewhere and get out of bed before ten on Monday morning, and I can be inducted and given a training plan. I'm actually quite looking forward to it.

Purely because I quite like the idea of becoming a better ftm.

The spam subject line asks: Have you ever dreamed to have a very hard penis during all process?

Actually, no. But I have frequently dreamed of having a soft penis I could pee through. Literally dreamed during my sleeping hours, that is. I dream that I wake up, go out into the garden and pee on the ground through my small but very functional penis. Then I wake up for real and feel stupid for not realising it was another dream.

I finally got round to seeing my new doctor today. My appointment card said I should see the nurse, but after she'd dealt with the preliminaries (I've put on 10 kilos since I had Andrea, but all my other vital signs appear to be OK) she told me to sit in the waiting room as the doctor would also want to see me.

When the doctor called me (my name was called as Nick Kiddle, which I found a nice touch), she asked me to explain in my own words what issues I had. We talked for a while about my ongoing mental health issues, she took down the names of the various people I've been dealing with, and she wants me to come back in a week having filled a questionnaire in about depression.

Then, because I thought it needed to be out in the open, I brought up the subject of gender dysphoria. She nodded, entered it on her computer and told me she knows a bit about it. That was a relief - I don't enjoy having to educate doctors before they can help me - but the next thing she said blew my mind. She has other patients with gender dysphoria.

There are people living locally who have gender dysphoria.

It might be stupid and arrogant of me, but I thought I was the only trans person in the district. In a way, it's a reasonable thing to believe, because in a fairly conservative small town where no-one has a clue about anything much, the other trans people are probably in deep stealth, so even if their paths have crossed mine I wouldn't know about it.

Anyway, she knows enough about gender to call me Nick, and she didn't immediately have to quiz me about how I could possibly cope with breastfeeding. Nor, interestingly, did she want to know if I was likely to need hormones or anything else any time soon. I don't know whether her other patients are all no-ho, whether she figures I would bring it up if I needed to, or what the story is there. She said she can accept me, and she didn't do anything to call that into question, so I'm marking that down as Very Good News.

And I'm not the only tranny in the district. It still blows my mind.

I know "ego-Googling" is a word, but what's it called when you search with Technorati? "Ego-Technoratiing" sounds a little awkward. Perhaps it's still called ego-Googling, in much the same way that I can "hoover" my floors with my Dyson.

Anyway, whatever it's called, I did it, and I found this. I'm choking up (no joke) and I don't know what to say.

Perhaps I should start believing in my own writing ability.

There's a very prevalent myth in our society that what everyone really needs is to be part of a pair-bond. Advertising, literature, films, magazines, all portray the search for one's "soulmate" as a desirable ambition - sometimes even the ultimate ambition. People who consider themselves a little more hip suggest that the best way to find a soulmate is to be oneself and wait for the soulmate to arrive, but you have to go a long way to find anyone willing to challenge the basic assumption that pair-bonding is healthy.

The romantic myth encourages people - mostly women - to persist in abusive relationships long beyond the point where they should cut their losses and leave. "But I love him," the story goes. "I know he loves me. If I only try a little harder, I know I can change him." Romantic novels all too often show a woman investing all her emotional energy in a man whose behaviour would be described as abusive in the real world - and for the women who emulate this model, there is no Happy Ever After. It would be naive to say that the only reason women stay in abusive relationships is because they read too many Mills&Boons, but the romantic myth must surely be part of the reason why so many women are told to try harder at a relationship that shows every sign of abuse except for actual physical violence.

Nor is life a bed of roses for people who aren't in a relationship. Bridget Jones's fear that she would die alone and be eaten by dogs voices the fear of all too many single people: that in a society that so heavily favours pair-bonds, those who lack a pair-bond will be at best disadvantaged and at worst left on the scrapheap. When every magazine on the rack is happy to tell you how you should amend your behaviour to be certain of finding the perfect mate, when family give pride of place to your pair-bonded siblings and leave you to fend for yourself, when you see yet another advert for a dating service that promises true love within six months or six months free, it's hard to imagine otherwise.

Not everyone who buys into the myth suffers, of course, just as not everyone who drinks alcohol becomes an alcoholic. But while an alcoholic who wants to dry out can avoid places where others are drinking, it's virtually impossible to live in our society and avoid the romantic myth. Even the refugee from an abusive relationship - already badly hurt by the romantic myth - isn't advised to break that link in her mind. "Give it time," runs the usual advice. "Don't give up on all men just because you got one bad apple." Being capable of diving once more into the search for a soulmate is considered the truest test of healing, rather than proof that healing is still far from complete.

Even I can't reject the myth. I tell myself and the world that this obsession with pair-bonding has done me little good and much harm, but when loneliness hits in the middle of the night, when I'm overwhelmed by the demands of single parenthood, or even when I just long for readily accessible sex, I wonder whether I made the right choice. A pair-bond is useful, there's no denying it, but how much of that was constructed by our society? If we lived by an extended-family model, my daughter could have any number of carers with parental responsibility and I wouldn't need to worry that the buck always stopped with me. I've tried to break the conditioning that says sex leads to lifetime commitment, but society still believes it and wants to shame me for acting differently.

The obession with pair-bonds is harmful precisely because it's an obsession. If individual people were free to choose any model of family life that suited them, those who were suited to pair-bonding could be happy in their pair-bonds and those who were happy in some other kind of relationship could be happy too. But as things stand, we are not free. Any choice other than pair-bonding is a constant uphill struggle against the media, government institutions, friends and family and a thousand little things that add up to being second-class because of our choice.

piny, former holder of the Best Commenter without a Blog title, fisks a revolting example of transphobia from a gay man. He does an admirable job, and I have to commend him for his restraint. I think I would have got about as far as "a transgender pretending to be a man" before my monitor exploded.

In the comments, Thomas asks:

Which brings up an interesting issue: someone who is transitioning, and who can present as their birth sex. (For Alas readers, I’m thinking of Nick, but I don’t really want to start a forum on Nick’s sex life).

I'm not sure if you'd call what I'm doing transitioning, and the idea that anyone might call it that gives me an attack of guilt. What if someone comes to think of me as a typical transman because I'm the first one he meets? What will happen to the second transman he meets if he has the idea fixed in his mind that transmen have days where they just want to wear tight tops and pick up straight men? I shudder at the thought.

But leaving that to one side, Thomas is right to call it an interesting issue. So interesting that someone less tempted than me to make excuses for my behaviour ought to tackle it, but since I don't see any queue of volunteers, I'll just do my best.

( You know the drill. Sex stuff behind the cut )

I may have mentioned that I love CSI to little tiny bits, not least because there's usually an episode for me to relax to once Andrea's settled. But last night's (which looked like a repeat of a very early episode - don't ask me what LivingTV were playing at) really pissed me off.

The offending strand featured a woman who had accused Catherine's ex-husband of rape. Catherine's ex denied it, and although there was abundant forensic evidence to prove he'd fucked her, swore up and down it was consensual.

Catherine investigated, and found evidence that convinced her it was indeed consensual. The woman then broke down and confessed that she'd invented the rape accusation because "a girl I knew did it and the man paid a ton of money to shut her up". I guess the writers don't understand why it's harmful to perpetuate the stereotype of women making false rape accusations for jollies.

That's not what pissed me off worst, though. The evidence Catherine found? The victim had put in some kind of weird contraceptive device that has to be inserted well in advance of sex. Ergo, she was planning to have sex (which I can just about grant), ergo she wasn't raped.

At the risk of touching off yet another shit-storm, I have only one thing to say.

We live in a sexist society. Whatever the Sheila's Wheels adverts say, men are still better off on average than women. Men, as a group, have advantages that women don't - and yes, to the extent that I pass as male I also enjoy some of these advantages.

If you, as a man, protest that you didn't seek out these advantages, you didn't ask for them and it's not fair that you're being held accountable, I have some sympathy. But if you found a few thousand pounds in used notes, the morally right thing to do would be to look for the person who lost them, not slip them in your pocket and forget about it. If life gives you an unfair advantage, you should at the very least be mindful that someone is getting a compensatory disadvantage.

If you, as a man, say that you never deliberately exploited women, I'll trust your word. But I'll also ask you to trust me that you've likely exploited some women accidentally on your way through life. If a woman defers to you because society has taught her from infancy to defer to men, and you don't even recognise that this is what's happening, you're getting something at her expense. Exploitation is an ugly, loaded word, and I wish I could find a better one, but that's what it is, at the root: accidental, careless exploitation.

I have some sympathy for men who are baffled that they're being asked to take responsibility for this accidental exploitation. Society shapes men as surely as it shapes women, teaching men from infancy to take their advantage over women for granted. Overturning this training takes an enormous mental effort, and I know from personal experience that you have to move past the defensiveness and aggrieved sense of injustice at being made responsible for something no-one ever told you was wrong.

But if you, as a man, start telling women that our sexist society is good, that they have an emotional need to defer and be exploited, that they have no right to stand up and say that society is broken and they won't play by broken rules any more...

...I'd say you're getting off lightly when I call you exploitative.

Dad: Are you [Andrea] going to go to Walton Girls [secondary school where he's currently working] when you grow up?
Me: She isn't. I don't agree with single-sex education.
Dad: Oh, so you're going to go to St Hugh's [the other school on the estate]?
Me: No, she's going to go to Thomas Sumpter [a school in Scunthorpe].
Dad: Is she going to get a taxi?
Me: By the time she's secondary school age, we'll live in Scunthorpe. Or Gunness [village close to Scunthorpe]. I'm going to buy a little house in Gunness and keep chickens. And a goat. Called Frank.
Dad: You should have a girl goat, then you'd be able to milk it.
Me: I will have a girl goat. I'll just call it Frank.

I knew it was today, but what with one thing and another (OK, just one thing, and she's called Andrea) it had slipped my mind and it took Yahoo to jog my memory. Starting from today, same-sex couples are getting married in the UK. It's called "civil partnership" to appease people whose only objection to SSM is having to update their dictionaries, but it confers all the state-offered benefits of marriage.

Congratulations to everyone who finally gets to "make it legal" today.

The Times has an editorial presenting trans people as a freak show, and a socially dangerous one at that. The only remotely interesting thing about it is that, for once, it's talking about a trans man - perhaps they're finally cottoning on to our existence.

Last week, with another slash of the scalpel, we were introduced to "Britain’s first transsexual GP" as Dr Vanda Zadorozny, with womb removed, breasts lopped off, a hefty dose of testosterone and a short back-and-sides, reappeared in her surgery as Dr Richard Curtis.
Interesting that she lists the stages of transition in reverse order. Simple ignorance, or deliberate ridicule?

It is, for a start, at odds with another strand of liberal thought: that we shall not be defined by our reproductive parts. Not by bulk of penis or breast, we insist, shall we be judged.
I think there's someone round here defining people by their body parts, but I'm not sure it's us.

But for a society that trips over itself to reassure a mastectomy patient that she is no less of a woman then blithely to accept that, thanks to similar surgery, "Dr Richard" is no longer a woman at all, is absurd.
Here's the thing: a woman who has undergone a mastectomy still identifies as female. Dr Curtis doesn't, and didn't before his surgery. He identified as male and had surgery to reflect that. Who knows - he might even have had surgery because stupid people who are incapable of handling the idea that a man might have female body parts refused to accept his identity unless he went under the knife.

The making of a complete man or woman is a long process,
You don't say!

involving roles in child play, the angst of puberty, the struggles of adolescence; it is the inner and the outer and the body and the soul and the history of a person,
You know, I think a lot of trans people would agree with that more than you think. Understanding your gender, if it happens not to match your body, takes all of this and more.

it cannot be substituted by surgery or drugs
Hormones and surgery are the tools by which trans people remodel their bodies to match their identities, not a substitute for understanding those identities in the first place.

and it is insulting to those of us who served the full tour of duty to suggest that it can.
"Full tour of duty"? What - trans people are now springing into the world fully transitioned?

And while I wish the good doctor no personal ill, I am still glad that this is not my GP: anyone so capriciously destructive of the healthy body that Nature gave them would not be welcome near the one she gave me.
I suppose we'd better alert all the patients whose doctors have had liposuction or a facelift - that's also "capriciously destructive of the healthy body that Nature gave them". And everyone knows that doctors have to turn their patients into copies of themselves. Why, it's the first thing they teach in medical school!

In short: "I know virtually nothing about trans people, but I do know I wouldn't want one for a doctor. They're weird and icky and their very existence insults me."

Jay Sennett and I seem to be having a blog discussion, which is a Very Good Thing for three reasons. Firstly, I've always wanted to have one. Secondly, Jay keeps paying me squirm-inducing compliments, not least in the eloquent care with which he addresses what I say. And, most importantly, this discussion is making me examine what terms and labels mean to me and why I'm so adamant that I'm not a transman.

Jay rightly points out how dangerous it is to set up an arbitrary line and declare that no-one is a proper transman until he crosses that line. In some places, the law won't recognise a transman's identity until he's carved his body up into some semblance of a male body, which I find barbaric both in the theoretical implication - that your body defines what you are - and in the practical consequence - men are forced to take all the risks of infection and so on associated with surgery for something that might not even benefit them, depending how they see their body. Setting up hormones as the gold standard of transition seems to avoid that problem, but testosterone is dangerous to some people and unavailable to others.

So it's all very well for me to say that a transman is someone who has begun transition, but that only leads to the next question: what does it mean to transition? If it isn't surgery and it isn't hormones, what is it?

My very tentative answer is that transition means to begin living in role. Which sounds very satisfying for about three seconds, but then the next question comes up: what constitutes living in role?

What indeed? The anecdotes about butch dykes who get called "sir" more often than some transmen but still identify very firmly as female muddy the waters, but they're murky enough depths even without that. A name change is usually a clear marker for transition, but what about those who were blessed with androgynous names from birth? My legal name identifies me very clearly as female, but the name I go by in daily use, a recognised diminutive, has fooled more than a few people into calling me "sir", at least on the phone. If I changed my legal name, all the institutions I do business with would also call me "sir", but a change of name is a hassle. Is it fair to demand it of someone who passes just fine without?

The importance of a name change is mostly symbolic. It's a way of saying to the world, "That identity my parents bestowed upon me when I was born? Completely wrong; here's what I really am." Transition begins when you tell the world that, all appearances to the contrary, you are a man. A transman is a transman when he says he is.

I like that definition because it doesn't dictate to anyone else how they should experience their gender, but it leave me free to say with complete confidence that I am not a transman. And yet one tantalising question remains: could I, one day, become one?

To that one, I don't have an answer. Last week, while venting about a certain person's obsession with rigid gender categories, I described myself as not identifying as female. Recollections of a time when I tagged myself "Hetero bio female" in a desperate attempt to repudiate the suspicions I was starting to have about myself are still fresh in my mind, but now the description of myself as not-female is painlessly true. I might stay in genderfluid territory for the rest of my life, or I might realise, some day in the future, that I'm comfortable with the term "transman". I don't know, and right now I don't really need to know.

All this musing intersects somewhere with my ideas about what courage is. I see courage as doing something that's difficult, and while that's not a bad definition of courage I tend to run with it in quite the wrong direction. If I look back on a decision and see that it was the easiest of all possible options at that point, I reject the idea that it took courage all the same. The alternative to remaining true to my identity while being pregnant is to turn my back on my identity or end the pregnancy. I don't think I could live with either possibility - certainly I've no great desire to try - so I'm only doing what I have to do. No courage here, move along now.

And of course, transitioning would be an act of great courage. However I intellectualise it, there's an idea in my mind of some dragon that needs to be slain, some giant hurdle that you can't possibly fail to notice you've jumped, before you can consider yourself a man. That's why I cling to the things, like changing my legal name or cutting my hair, that stand out clearly. Everything I've done so far to advance my male identity can be undone in an instant if I decide that's what I want. I've not risked enough; I've not done anything difficult; I'm not brave.

But that's not true. I've changed myself in slow, incremental ways, by pitching my voice low so often that it now comes out husky with no effort on my part, and by playing around with my male identity for so long that it's started to feel natural. Even if I wanted to put myself back into the pink box, I wouldn't fit properly. I could tell the world that I'm a hetero bio female, and I could convince the ones who didn't look closely - as indeed I do now when I sleep with straight men - but if nothing else, I would know I wasn't being myself. It's a comforting fiction to pretend the genie can go back into the bottle whenever I like, but fiction is what it is.

And my lack of courage is probably another fiction. I proclaim on my blog that I'm male-souled. I've blogged in detail about my gender identity and blithely given the URL to family members so they can read as much of my life as they choose. I describe myself as a boy in the "real world", although few people take that seriously and I don't bother to enlighten them. It's true that I could show more courage - cutting my hair so that I pass, for instance - but it's also a fact that I could show less. I do what I have to do to be true to myself, and perhaps it's time I learned to accept the label of brave, at least.

If a tree falls in the forest where no-one can hear it, does it still make a sound? If a trans guy isn't completely out, even to himself, is he still trans?

The story so far: I saw a psychiatrist who, in an unparalleled display of empathy and support, decided that the challenges of being gender dysphoric and pregnant were greater than the challenges of avoiding my third relationship fuck-up within a year, despite the fact that the latter rather than the former had prompted me to seek psychiatric help. When I tried to explain that I didn't see parenthood as intrinsically gendered, he waved my objections away, asked whether I intended to breastfeed and took my affirmative answer as clinching proof of his thesis.

As a response to that, I wrote Lady Madonna, baby at your breast, in which I tried to make my case that breastfeeding and a diagnosis of gender dysphoria needn't be incompatible, that my gender dysphoria is far more complicated than "wanting to be a man" and that I've more or less made my peace with the girlie body parts and the things they can and can't do.

Jay Sennett was inspired and impressed by my post and felt moved to hold me up as an example of a brave pregnant transman sharing his feelings with the world. I, of course, felt moved to immediately disclaim all compliments, especially the suggestion that I was in any way courageous, because I'm still living in female role and don't even consider myself a "proper" transman.

Jay and another trans guy basically told me that a gender identity I haven't acted on is still a gender identity and that I was, too, brave. I resist the suggestion that I'm brave, but it's got me thinking, what is a transman anyway?

About a year before I started seriously questioning my gender, I watched a documentary about trans men at various stages of transition (diagnosis, hormones, top surgery and lower surgery). I was fascinated by the similarities between me and them, but the thought of appropriating a piece of their label seemed almost blasphemous. Here were men who suffered all manner of pain through being forced to live as women, and I, who voluntarily puts on a dress from time to time, dared say, "Hey, guys, I'm a bit like you."

Every time I interact with (other?) trans guys, that's been my attitude. I say that I'm questioning, exploring, that I like shaving and binding and pitching my voice low on the phone, that I prefer to be called "Nick" and squirm with delight when someone reads me as male, and then hastily add that I'm not FtM, I'm not trans, I'm just questioning and I'll shut up now so y'all can talk about the important stuff that affects "proper" transmen. When trans guys accept me without qualification as one of their own, I feel guilty, as if I'm somehow conning them and claiming a kinship I have no right to.

I discussed this more than once with my friend Sam. In his usual forthright way, he told me I was talking crap. For every trans guy who knew from birth that he was a boy and wondered why his parents insisted on turning him into a girl, there's a guy who grew up with a nagging feeling that something didn't quite fit somewhere and didn't put his finger on just what it was until he learned about the existence of transfolk. And, he informed me, every trans guy who learned late and gradually what he was has been where I am now.

Would I turn round to some guy who goes by his boy name in general conversation but his girl name in official contexts, who enjoys fucking men and doesn't see why he should give it up, who loves to be seen as male but is afraid to permanently alter his body in the interests of bringing that about, and tell him that he isn't a "proper" transman and should just shut up about gender already? If it was some other guy, I know I wouldn't, and yet I have no qualms about effectively telling myself just that.

When you're defining your gender, you start by dipping a toe very tentatively into the water. It feels OK, so you put the rest of your foot in, then the rest of your leg, and slowly you ease your whole self into the water. And even when you think you're comfortably in as far as you need to be, you sometimes hit a cold spot, or something slimy brushes against your leg and sends you scuttling for the safety of the shallows. I believed, quite sincerely, that I was comfortable with my gender identity now. And yet, I feel compelled to run away with all speed from the label of transman.

I take a step back and start to understand that my gender is still a work in progress. My comfort lately comes from accepting that it's a work in progress rather than jumping for definitive answers, from embracing the apparent contradictions rather than trying to explain them all away and fit myself into one box or another. The label bothers me because it has a connotation - which, for all I know, it doesn't have for Jay - of having reached a conclusion. Rightly or wrongly, I interpret "transman" as meaning someone who has at least begun the process of transitioning, not at all an accurate term for someone who casts envious glances at drag kings with the nerve to cut their hair.

I'm not well enough versed in US politics to understand whether Santorum is a fringe lunatic or a serious influence on policy, but he certainly manages to talk a great deal of nonsense. Here he is marshalling some of the usual incoherent arguments for why same-sex couples must not be allowed the protections of marriage.

He starts talking about the "ideal": that the best family for a child is a married heterosexual pair and that this justifies leaving all other family structures out in the cold. The first half of the sentence is hard to back up without invoking the Holy Gender Roles, but I'm more interested in the second half, since it's just another example of the garbage I've been hearing sporadically ever since my pregnancy was confirmed.

Let's accept for the moment that dubious assertion that a man married to a woman is the best possible family for a child. What happens if that's not possible? Supposing the child's mother slept with men in an attempt to "cure" herself of loving women - an attempt she now realises was futile. Shall we demand that the mother marry a man, even though everything she knows about herself proves that the marriage will never be stable? Shall we take the child away from a loving mother and allow him to languish in the depths of the care system until a suitable married couple is found to adopt him? Or shall we accept that the situation is not ideal and support this family as we would any other?

I keep hearing that since X is better than Y, we should not adopt Y. If the alternative is to adopt X, the reasoning works, but when the choice lies between Y and the status quo Z, which may not be as good as Y, it falls to the ground.

It would be better for me to have a home of my own, rather than renting from a private landlord. Unfortunately, I have no means to buy a home of my own and no building society on earth would offer me a mortgage. My choice is between renting and continuing to sleep in my dad's spare room: following the logic above I would have to remain in the spare room.

The ideal is all very well when it's practicable, whether immediately or as a distant goal. But when it ignores the facts of life and the facts of human nature, I start to worry. And when it becomes an excuse to avoid making changes that benefit those the ideal was set up to defend, it becomes positively dangerous.

Devotion to the ideal at the expense of lesser possibilities is perfectionism at its most destructive. A constructive perfectionism that seeks to improve on what exists has its place in policy, although it must always be tempered with an understanding that true perfection can never be achieved and our challenge in this world is to do the best we can with what we have. A destructive perfectionism that seeks to destroy or at least bury what is imperfect can only bring pain, because true perfection can never be achieved.

By this point, the perfectionists usually start wailing that I've mischaracterised their arguments. They don't believe that the imperfect should be destroyed, only that we should continue to pursue the perfect.

We should pursue the perfect by ignoring every possibility that falls short of the lofty ideal, even when common sense suggests that the perfect is impossibly far out of reach? We have only two options open to us: the utopian ideal or the imperfect-in-every-way status quo? Nothing else may be considered?

I keep trying to understand the logic, but all I ever get is a headache.