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.

I'm not really sure what the difference is between the Rikseillonnat and the Rikcoevhalat. They're two distinct countries, as evidenced by the bloody war they're fighting, but Reilane and Belkerwin can pass for Rikcoevhalat with nothing more complicated than a forged ident, so there can't be any obvious physical or linguistic differences. I suppose there are plenty of examples from the real world of bloody wars fought over tiny differences, so maybe I shouldn't sweat that part too much.

The big problem is Rikazbak. This used to be another country until, at some point before the bloody war began, Rikcoevhal conquered it. The Rikazbakat have a few distinctive features (dark skin and angular features), although some natives have enough of a Rikazbakat look about them to suggest that at least some interbreeding has taken place.

The conquered Rikazbakat are supposed to be Rikcoevhalat citizens - in fact, it's technically a crime to suggest that Rikazbak exists as a country - but they're excluded from at least some forms of military service, not to mention the casual comments. It's almost a given among Rikcoevhalat that Rikazbakat drink human blood in their Snakeday fast rituals. Characters keep saying it, and the only Rikcoevhalat character who objects seems to be thinking more about harmony among his staff than about the inherent wrongness of throwing slurs like that around.

There's a kind of argument that I find myself using again and again in my essays. "If you believe A, it's perfectly natural to suggest that B, or even C. However, A is contradicted by D, making B and C completely unreasonable."

Nice, huh? In principle, yes. In practice, it means writing things like this.

If pregnancy is just something that happens to a woman, having to continue an unwanted pregnancy isn't hardship enough to justify destroying a maybe-alive fetus. It may be annoying or inconvenient to be pregnant, but all a woman needs to do is grit her teeth and endure it for nine months and she can put the baby up for adoption at the end of it.

I feel the urge to plaster that with a dozen disclaimers, just in case anyone might think I actually believe that, and then jump in the shower and scrub myself with a wire brush.

I can't remember whether I posted about my cooker, but it's been getting on my nerves for months now. When I moved into the flat, there was a brand-new fitted kitchen, with a 60-cm gap corresponding to the cooker point. At least, the bottom was 60cm, but the cupboard to the left was so far from the vertical that it was obvious even with the naked eye, making the top of the gap about 58.5cm. Since the cooker was just under 60cm wide, it wouldn't fit in the gap.

I called the council, called them again, called them to ask them what they were playing at and more or less lived with having a cooker in the middle of the floor. Finally, with encouragement from my dad and social services, I wrote a letter informing them that this state of affairs was likely to prove extremely hazardous when Andrea became mobile (she's bottom-shuffling now, so it won't be long at all). The letter worked like a charm: within the week, someone showed up to inspect the problem. Half the council's repair department paraded through my kitchen (if I'd had advance warning, I might have washed up first) and finally I got an appointment for a joiner to come and fix it.

I was seeing my counsellor this morning, with my mum at the flat looking after Andrea. When I got back, I went into the kitchen and started to get Andrea's dinner ready without immediately noticing that I'd just walked through the space my cooker formerly occupied. It was now resting against the wall, in a new, improved 60cm gap. As an added extra, my airing cupboard is plastered so that, with a coat of paint and a couple of shelves, I would be happy to use it for normal airing cupboard activities like fermenting wine, germinating seeds and possibly, if there's room, storing towels and bedding.

As if that wasn't enough progress for one day, I've had something of a Revenge breakthrough. ( Plot evolution details behind a cut, because not everyone is interested )

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.

I can't work out whether this is legislation or just proposed legislation. It's one way to tackle AIDS, I suppose.

Males over 14 face fines if caught in public without a condom.

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 story so far: I wrote a post at Alas about what seemed to me to be an uncontroversial fact: that a woman can be raped by someone she's looking forward to having sex with. The bulk of the post described an incident where that almost happened to me, because I thought telling my story might make the abstract idea clearer to anyone who wasn't already convinced.

The fact must have been uncontroversial, since it was mostly lost in the noise. The first wave of comments respectfully pointed out that I'd taken a risk they considered stupid, and the discussion switched to the subject of whether it's appropriate to make women responsible for avoiding rape. Subsequent comments set up a free-for-all about my moral character, my fitness to be a parent, my sanity and even whether I was making up the story out of whole cloth.

At first, I wanted to set everyone straight, to point out that social services have no problem with my fucking the entire Airborne Division should I so desire, to ask what was so bizarre about the idea of wanting to get laid during pregnancy, to explain that I'm not interested in a "culture of monogamy" that has so far done nothing but hurt me. But the sheer weight of comments, and the sick suspicion that no-one would listen to my responses, dragged me down. I started to feel physically ill.

"That's what you get," I was told, "when you bare your soul online."

I think there's a parallel with the way rape victims are told they shouldn't have gone to that bar or been alone with that man. Rapists cannot respect a woman's consent and internet trolls cannot discuss the substance of an argument without resorting to vitriolic personal remarks, so anyone who doesn't want to become a victim must modify their behaviour to protect themselves. Don't be too sexual - you might get raped. Don't be too outspoken - you might get shamed.

I'm not going to stop being outspoken. (Not because I'm brave; just because I suspect I have more chance of turning myself right-handed.) I'm not shutting up here, and while I'll take legitimate criticism of my ideas, I don't believe "This woman is a whore" or "I'm glad she's not my mom" constitute legitimate criticism.

But what can I do? This sort of crap would die away drastically if it was socially unacceptable, just as rape would be vastly reduced if society stopped tacitly condoning it. But I can't bring about social change on my own. Sometimes I can convince myself that I'm adding a drip or two to the stream that will eventually wear away the stone, but the stone is fighting back. When I talk about how the world ought to be, I'm being impractically idealistic, or worse, whining that the world isn't the way I want it to be.

Words don't do a lot, not directly, but words are all I have here. I can't saw people's skulls open and physically rearrange their brains until they agree with the way I think the world should be. I can tell my stories and make my points as clearly as my writing skills allow; the rest is up to the reader.

And some days, I get so frustrated.

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."

Email from Planned Parenthood:

On behalf of the Planned Parenthood community and the patients we serve in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, thank you for your support and generosity. Your thoughtful decision to support Planned Parenthood today is helping those in need during this emergency situation.

Awww, stop, you're embarrassing me. To begin with, I only donated ten lousy bucks, which is unlikely to make a great deal of difference in the face of the devastation. And then, I only donated that because the save-the-sperm factions were annoying me and it was the best thing I could think of to piss them off.

Here's a post I made over at Alas about why I wanted to donate. I'm reposting it here because I think it deserves as wide an audience as possible. Go give them money if you can. They will accept donations from Brits and presumably others as long as you have a credit card.

Save-the-sperm nutcase Dawn Eden is outraged that Planned Parenthood are offering their services in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Let's pretend they don't employ anyone with any transferrable medical skills whatsoever. Let's pretend that they don't offer a wide range of women's health services that might be useful to some of the victims. Let's pretend the only thing Planned Parenthood have to offer these people is abortion and contraception.

Being outraged that they make the offer is still the wrong response.

"These people need food and water; they don't need contraceptives." Non-sequitur. Needing food and water doesn't take away any need you might have for contraceptives, and unless Planned Parenthood are telling the Red Cross, "Hey, no need to bother feeding these people, we're giving them contraceptives!" the need for food and water is irrelevant to the question of whether Planned Parenthood are doing the right thing.

Planned Parenthood don't have experience in providing food and water, but they do have experience in providing contraception, and some people do need contraception. The young girl in the shelter who's just been raped needs emergency contraception so she doesn't have the fear of pregnancy added to everything else she has to suffer. The couple who've lost everything except for each other need contraception so they can have the basic comfort of a good fuck and start feeling like human beings again. The woman who's reached safety but lost her birth control pills along with the rest of her possessions needs replacements so she can begin putting her life in order. If you sincerely believe that these people's needs are so wrong that attempting to meet them is worthy of outrage, I have doubts about your humanity.

Amanda Marcotte, outraged at a particularly inhuman response, vented her feelings:

Just to spite your sorry ass, I will worship the Disco Ball, say "goddammit" loud and often, commit a dozen or so acts of sodomy, consume way too many alcoholic beverages and if I was pregnant, I would get an abortion just to spite you.

I would make the same pledge out of solidarity, but I've put too much effort into growing my baby to consider having an abortion for anyone's sake. Instead, I've done the next best thing by donating what little I can to Planned Parenthood's relief efforts. Anyone who's outraged at the save-the-sperm outrage, I urge you to do the same. I found it extremely therapeutic.

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.

The news is still depressing. Because one of the London bombers studied at a madrassa in Pakistan, the Pakistani president has announced that foreign nationals will no longer be allowed to study at madrassas. The depressing thing is that this punishes the hundreds of legitimate religious students but has very little effect on the hate-mongering clerics who, if I read the article correctly, are already operating outside existing laws.

It reminds me of nothing so much as the Dunblane gun ban. In the aftermath of a tragedy, it's political nature to pass some laws that look like they'll prevent a repeat occurrance rather than take the time to implement the kind of complicated solutions that stand a chance of really preventing another tragedy. Something must be Done, and the possible effectiveness of the Something matters less than the mere fact that it's Done.

It comforts the injured and bereaved to know that Something is being Done, and to that extent it's a good thing. But if it's allowed to be used as a substitute for the long, slow process of real change, it's doing far more harm than good. Comforting today's injured and bereaved is useless if it's part of a policy that does nothing to prevent tomorrow's victims from being injured and bereaved in their turn.

I suspect this ban is supposed to appeal to those who say moderate Muslims need to "put their house in order", "distance themselves from the extremists" and "root out the terrorists in their midst". Which makes it all the more depressing that they probably aren't even paying attention, or if they are, it's only to tar all madrassas with the same brush.

So Something is being Done and nothing is being done, and moderates who just want to study are being prevented while rabble-rousers get round the law, and the people who are demanding that Something be Done probably don't care anyway.

I'm now convinced that creating the cute li'l parasite was the most monstrously selfish choice I ever made.

My changing body has reached a stage where nothing's comfortable. My stomach feels bloated almost constantly, and the skin feels uncomfortably stretched. My breasts have decided to come out in sympathy, and I wish I could just sleep from now until November and ignore the annoying new shape I've become.

I need to either learn to separate myself from my writing or break the habit of ego-Googling. My pregnancy blogging from Alas has been picked up by folk on both sides of the abortion divide, and I've managed to piss people on each side off. True, some pro-choicers have said very nice, ego-stroking things about my essays, but that doesn't compensate for the pro-lifers that ripped my views to shreds and accused me of cognitive dissonance for good measure. This led, predictably, to a couple of hours in a darkened room saying "They're criticising my work, not me" over and over, in the hopes that it would stick.

And then there are the glib responses to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes. "If he was innocent, he shouldn't have run from the police." Except they were in plain clothes, so all he saw was a bunch of armed men running towards him. Pointing out that he "spoke English" doesn't help matters: I "speak German" but if I was out and about in Berlin and a bunch of armed men charged at me, I doubt I'd be in any position to take in the finer points of what they were saying. And even if he had some guilty reason to fear the police - news reports today suggest his visa had expired - that's not a capital offence.

"The police are far too trigger-happy." Just as glib and just as wrong. If I was an armed officer and I was following someone that intelligence suggested might be a suicide bomber, I think I'd err on the side of preventing him from detonating at all costs. Clearly intelligence screwed up in this case, but in the current climate of fear, how do we make sure it won't happen again?

"It's all the fault of the terrorists." The terrorists created this climate of fear, but we are all responsible for our own actions. No-one is going to defend them from being made scapegoats, but we harm ourselves when we deny our own responsibility. If it really is all their fault, then we have no say in the matter. They can set us against each other, make us kill each other so they don't have to: they have won.

The only way I can look at it is that the world is a crappy place where sometimes every decision is wrong. A world where innocent people are killed by terrorists and more innocent people are killed by police doing their best to protect innocent people and the only winners are the ones who don't care how many people die as long as they get their way.

It makes me think that creating the cute li'l parasite was the most monstrously selfish choice I ever made.

I ought to be walking the streets, knocking on doors, looking for that elusive employer prepared to offer a job to someone who's 23 weeks pregnant, or failing that, writing 2k a day and turning out novels I can sell for big money. What I'm actually doing, of course, is watching absurd amounts of daytime TV.

My favourite programme, even though I'm not sure what to make of it, is Mum's on strike. Mothers who have hitherto had to take care of kids and house with little help from their husbands clear off to a spa for a few days, leaving the husbands in sole charge. The fathers are carefully selected: none of them know one end of an iron from the other and most of them believe their wives' jobs are a piece of cake. These two factors make for much merriment, especially for the wives who are secretly watching every move.

By the end of the programme, the fathers have a much better understanding of how much work looking after kids can really be. Appreciating how hard their wives have been working all this time, they humbly ask them to come off strike and take this burden of work from their shoulders. The wives invariably comply, although they sometimes extract a promise of more help around the house from now on.

I'm all in favour of showing that looking after children is hard work, but I'm not entirely convinced by Mum's on strike. It sometimes seems like the mothers make their task harder by worrying about things that really don't matter. In one recent episode, one of them rolled her eyes in exasperation because her husband bought the wrong colour toilet paper, and both of them, inspecting the house on their return, were shocked to find the kids had left their toys on the bedroom floor. All the parenting guides stress that you should make your life easier by not sweating the small stuff, but these mothers all seem to have bought into the idea that they have to be perfect at all times.

Besides, how typical are these families? It's often the case that women take on the lion's share of housework and childcare, but the mothers in this programme have it much easier than some. They can afford to stay at home with the kids full-time, rather than having to do all that work on top of a job, and of course the fathers are at least on hand, even if they don't help much. I get very jealous, watching and knowing that I could never score a couple of days at a spa courtesy of the programme-makers.

I don't think I'm supposed to be thinking these things. I'm just supposed to laugh at the idiot fathers who can't even manage to bake a chocolate cake or bath their children without causing a minor household crisis. I'm supposed to listen to the parenting expert's comments ("It's important to keep an eye on your children at all times") as if they were holy writ. Most of all, I'm supposed to treat the programme as mere entertainment rather than expecting any kind of social commentary.

And, presumably, I'm supposed to make sure I buy the right colour toilet paper.

One thing I've been hungry for ever since I started accepting I was pregnant is information: what's happening to my baby right now? Are these changes in my body and my emotional state normal, or should I be discussing them with my midwife? When can I expect the various milestones of pregnancy? To help me in my quest for knowledge, the midwife presented me with not one, not two, but three books explaining what to expect.

The first one is The Pregnancy Book, produced by the NHS and billed as my "complete guide to pregnancy, childbirth and the first weeks with a new baby". As you might expect from a government publication, it has an earnest tone throughout, complete with the kind of diagram I last saw in my biology textbook in school. (One particular illustration, a cutaway diagram showing how the other organs of the lower trunk squeeze in where they can fit to accomodate the extra-large uterus, I haven't looked at since the tenth week, when it made my morning sickness noticeably worse.) It has large sections aimed at teenage mothers-to-be and those facing pregnancy alone, as well as information about bereavement and domestic violence duing pregnancy. The downside of this comprehensive approach is a format too large for easy browsing - a serious drawback to a reading-in-bed addict - and no space for any week-by-week guide to what to expect.

The other two books are a more convenient format. They're both supported by advertising, which leads to the surreal situation of a page explaining how to buy the minimum of necessary equipment on a small budget facing an advert for a super-hi-tech nappy disposal system, and I get the distinct impression that their target audience has ever so slightly more disposable income than I do.

Bounty's Your pregnancy isn't bad, considering those dawbacks. It has a sidebar for every week of pregnancy, describing typical changes in mother and baby, as well as useful information about diet, lifestyle and preparations for the birth. Single parents get a couple of lines about choosing a birth partner, and teenagers get several sections, mostly about the importance of eating enough calcium (pregnant teens are building two sets of bones at once). Everything is arranged by week, and sometimes their logic is hard to follow - pain relief during labour is discussed under Week 28, for instance. The illustrations are photographs of volunteer mums, dads and babies, and the overall tone makes it my favourite book to browse when I want to know what I'm in for in the next few weeks.

My least favourite is Emma's Diary. A few useful sections about pregnancy and caring for a new baby, somewhat marred by the cutesy cartoons, are squashed in around a week-by-week diary of what I can only assume is a typical member of their target audience. Emma, the eponymous heroine, gets on my nerves big-time. She has a job from which she can take maternity leave without any problems, supportive parents and a largely supportive partner, and she still manages to find something to whine about every week. Her bump is the wrong shape and makes her look merely fat rather than pregnant. Her belly button has popped out. She can't wear her high heels because her feet have swelled up. And so on and so forth. In between these whines, she indulges her consumer lusts by buying the kind of products that are advertised on facing pages: hi-tech and hopelessly out of my price range.

What annoys me worse than Emma's attitude is the way the book avoids any mention that not all pregnant women are like her. Neither teenagers nor prospective single parents rate so much as a mention, and parents on a tight budget get a single paragraph of "money-saving tips". Obviously a book aimed at single mothers on benefits wouldn't be too popular with the advertisers, but being ignored as if I don't even exist is a bit rough on my ego.

That's not to say that Emma's Diary is completely without merit. I was particularly impressed by the page about sex during pregnancy, which explains for the benefit of anyone who was worried that sex might hurt the baby that an orgasm is actually good for it, improving the blood flow to the uterus. It also says that many women feel sexier than ever during pregnancy. Sadly that's not been my experience - yet more proof that I'm not the target audience.

I think I've attracted my first troll. My thoughts from November 2003 about whether atheists are necessarily less moral than Christians got the following comment from someone who feels it his Christian duty to teach me the error of my ways. Comment in italics, my thoughts in plain text.

I will give you a little fact.
This is not a promising beginning. For some reason, when someone starts out by offering to give me a little fact, what follows is either propaganda or opinion masquerading as fact or a genuine fact that is completely irrelevant to my argument. Here we have a little of each.

First off yea if you murder someone yea you can always repent and you can do a lot of evil and still repent.But God knows your heart and where your heart lies.Like sure you can repent but if you do not mean it,it is useless to repent because you are not rally meaning it because you know that you are still going to do evil things and think that by repenting you will be forgiven.
I wouldn't go so far as to call this a fact, because it presupposes that God exists as defined by Christians. But it's reasonable enough given that assumption, and I have no great argument with it. My contention was that it's possible for religious belief to make someone less rather than more moral, knowing that they can square things with their god later. Perhaps my commenter's god wouldn't fall for the trick, but it doesn't stop people being drawn to the idea.

A true Christian,yea they are going to sin because everyone does it and no one is truely good,but they have the Lord's heart and they want to change for the better and live a Godly life instead of doing evil.They want to honor God and His Son,Jesus Christ,and do everything for Them and not for themselves.
I have no doubt that someone who has been deeply moved by a religious experience could want to live their life in the light of this experience. I never claimed they wouldn't. It is simply not the only source of morality. There are atheists who want to leave the world a better place than they found it, believing they will cease to exist when they die and wanting to know that a part of them will live on. There are people who have no reason to believe that any god exists but have a feeling deep within their breast that there is a right way to live and it's better to live that way.

A lot of Christians think the way you think and if they do not change their ways,which comes from repenting,then when He does come back,they will be left behind and if still they do not change, they will be going to Hell.
This is neither a fact nor a coherent argument: it's a threat. I imagine it's supposed to add something to what came before, but it has the opposite effect on me. I don't believe in this hell, so I'm not likely to be swayed by the possibility that I'll end up there. However, the fact that my commenter feels the need to mention it weakens the force of his argument, as if it wouldn't stand up without the threat.

Now about evolution,that is not even a subject anymore.There are so many ways to point out the ways it is wrong it is not even funny.Scientists are finding out facts that prove they are wrong every day and are trying to hide it but hey let them think that.
I have seen some of these "ways to point out the ways it is wrong". Most of them prove nothing but the fact that creationists are ignorant of biology, physics, the history of science and the fundamentals of logic. Evolution is a fact; the debate centres around the way it has occurred and continues to occur. Anyone who cares to look at the world can see evolution in action: why are doctors reluctant to prescribe antibiotics for the slightest infection if not for the fact that bacteria are constantly evolving in response to the changes we impose on them?

Oh and by the way the true meaning of atheism is really "not believeing in anything."Do you believe that you are here right now?If so you are NOT an atheist.
So ironic that the response to an essay about redefining terms includes yet another redefinition. "Atheism" comes from two Greek words: "a-" meaning not, and "theos" meaning god. It means, as I stated in my original essay, declining to believe in a god. However much that idea threatens your belief system, that's what it means. Attempting to redefine it to mean something unpleasant or contemptible will merely make you, the redefiner, appear foolish and ill-informed. It will not change the meaning of the word.