Turns out I have...

I told my best friend last night. I practised beforehand.

I rehearsed 'I have something I want to talk to you about. It's probably no surprise to you... but I want you to take a deep breath and think before you respond...'

I'm thinking about getting a referral to an endocrinologist. I don't want to be a man necessarily. I want to be gender-queer. More me.

My body is changing incrementally anyway. I've lost weight, gotten hairier and musclier. Hardly ever have periods. Guess I'm getting old? But I want to be different... stronger. And I'm not dead yet. I have time for another adventure in front of me. 

I'm getting a number 2 haircut... can't wait to have a soft prickly skull (even as daughter says that I think I'm auditioning for '11'... if only...)

I'm worried cos I wonder how this will sail with the cis-tem (my favourite piece of Berlin graffiti). I'm not dysphoric... other than I'd often like to be invisible to everybody else and don't much like mirrors or photos.

I don't hate my body... and I'm not sure I need to get rid of boobs that are virtually non-existent anyway ; ) I'm not particularly unhappy... other than I've been on anti-depressants more of my life than I haven't been... and I beat myself up a lot, just quietly.

Will that be enough to pass the tests, to get access to a small amount of hormones? What hoops await? 

I figure at the very least I can get a tattoo, right? It turns out, awake with jet-lag between 3-6am is a great time to brainstorm tattoos,. I want a hand written asterisk on my left inner forearm.

​An asterisk represents a star, infinity, a multitude and a wild-card. It appeals to my post-feminist queer theorist geek self. It's a footnote for a longer story and a breaker of hegemonic machinated meaning-making.

My first draft tattoo, done with a white board marker (not even permanent pen) is misspelt of course. Kind of ironic and tempting to keep. I only realised it wasn't 'asterix' when I looked it up! 'Risk' is better than 'ricks' though (even if they sound the same), because when my sleeve is rolled down you can only see 'risk'. The appending *Aster climbs into the crook of my arm.

​This is a big risk.

If things go well I'd like to change my name to Son* rather than Sonja Vivienne. Do you think the machines/forms will be able to compute an asterisk symbol to stand in for my multiple selves? I guess I could comply with Son Asterisk Vivienne.