The funny thing is, when I joined Twitter about six years ago I never intended for my gender to be ambiguous. However, as a public servant, I did feel that I needed to be anonymous. I already had a name – Lee Tennant. It was an androgynous name I used online and that I planned to use as a pen name when I finally tossed it all in to be a writer.
What I did need, however, was an avatar and after many mis-starts and an unusually long time as an egg, I finally decided on Holly from Red Dwarf. Why? I no longer remember. But the senile computer just seemed appropriate for some reason.
When I first started my Twitter account, I didn’t have anything in particular I wanted to tweet about. The first few tweets I read were celebrity nonsense and I was wondering what the appeal was. Do I really care that Alyssa Milano got coffee up her nose?
No. No I do not.
It was about this time that I went home to visit my parents in south-east Queensland. We were watching the local veggie news I couldn’t wean them off (despite 20 years of trying) and a short piece came on about climate change.
“It’s all rubbish, you know,” said my father dismissively.
To which I responded, ‘What the fuck?”
If a flying pig had soared into our living room and taken a dump on the carpet I wouldn’t have been as gobsmacked.
The problem of course is that I had isolated myself from popular culture narratives for so long that I hadn’t realised this nonsense was being perpetuated. I read my news online from international sources, read science journals and science news. Climate change had been established science for decades. Where the hell had this come from?
I tentatively waded into the mainstream and nearly drowned in the bullshit. At the time, I had no idea that the multinational energy industry had funded an organised campaign of denial. Nor did I realise (although I should have) that the local powerful mining industry had taken advantage of their grip on our commodity economy to choke the science out of it.
Then Rudd toppled and I realised just how bad things had gotten. This is what oligarchies look like and our economy was looking a little Putinesque. Of course, Rudd was an arrogant, micromanaging tosspot so his toppling wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. But he was, of course, replaced with Gillard and she could neither be bought nor influenced nor manipulated by ego. So she had to go too. And that was when things got really nasty.
But that of course is the subject of a different blog post.
I wanted a place I could go to counter misinformation. After fiddling around with blogs, I finally realised I had the perfect place – Twitter – and so began tweeting about climate change. By 2012, climate change and politics were my two main topics (with the odd small foray into science fiction television and martinis). Once my tweets focused on a specific topic, my number of followers began to grow.
After being male Holly for a while I thought I’d try on the female counterpart. There was no plan to this. Holly has two forms so I used both. By the time I made the switch back I had several hundred more Twitter followers than before and that was when I noticed the change.
People talk a lot about how women are treated online. But how do people treat you when they’re not sure if you’re a woman or man? That is even more revealing. After tweeting like this for 6 years I can tell you that here is a definite correlation between climate change denial, religiosity, age, sex and an inability to cope with my apparent lack of gender. Old male conservatives are more likely to reject science, embrace theism and freak the fuck out if they think they’re talking to a woman and she suddenly turns into a dude. Or vice versa.
After several years, being androgynous had become part of my brand. When the Sir/Dame trend swept through Twitter on Abbott’s election, I changed to Dame Holly and found I liked it. I also found a lot of followers were confused. They had genuinely believed me to be a man. This further added to the ambiguity and further embedded that ambiguity into my brand.
Gender seems to be the topic de jour lately and I have an unique perspective. At least online.
Offline, however, things are a bit different. And for me, my very defined sex and gender in the real world has finally asserted itself too much to be ignored.
I love tweeting and writing about gender politics when people don’t know if I’m male or female. The misogynists steer clear for a start and aside from a few sexist or patronising broadsides, I’ve had little abuse. If I’m being attacked as a woman I simply change avatars and watch them have a virtual breakdown. I admit, it’s kind of awesome.
Also, I have a very strong motivation for my anonymity. Public servants are supposed to be apolitical and, in my agency, this apolitical requirement is taken very seriously. Public servants have been fired for making political comments. And complete anonymity was the only way I could tweet about politics without having to self censor.
Except, of course, I did anyway, preferring to steer clear of matters relating to my own agency – at least until those issues became so stark it seemed odd not to.
Dame Holly’s changing gender or, as I think of it, lack of gender, is part of who Dame Holly is. Writing this post is therefore not an easy thing to do and I have repeatedly put it off for several weeks now.
So what’s changed?
Well, in many ways I have. And there are some things I want to talk about lately that anonymity and gender ambiguity are standing in the way of.
Firstly, there was my mother’s severe stroke two years ago. She requires ongoing full-time care and this has put pressure on myself and on the rest of my family. I’m extremely stressed about a lot of things that are somewhat divorced from global energy restructuring.
We are hemorrhaging money and while my Dad is trying to sell assets and pull together as much money as possible, it won’t be enough and it won’t be fast enough. At the moment, Mum’s care is $9000 a month. But that’s a different blog.
Tweeting about these issues would help but I’m constantly muzzled by the need to be ‘Dame Holly’.
Secondly, and this is probably going to step on my ending… my ongoing health problems have reached a head.
If there is one thing we simply don’t talk enough about in our culture, it’s women’s health. Women’s reproductive health especially. So many women – like me – struggle on a daily basis with a variety of reproductive health issues and mostly we’re supposed to just soldier on and STFU. This is extremely unhealthy – both for us personally but for a society that is chronically under-diagnosing and under-treating these conditions.
I’m 39 years old and next week I am having a hysterectomy. Would I have needed one if doctors had taken my health complaints seriously? If we all talked openly about our reproductive issues? If workplaces allowed women to restructure their work weeks around the reality of their biology?
I was first found to have endometriosis when I was 25 years old. At that time, I had an operation to remove an ovarian cyst and the endometriosis itself. My employer was furious that I asked for a week off (a week!). Afterwards, I was put on a variety on hormone treatments in the form of contraceptive pills that variously sent me insane or made me violently ill. My employer told me I was taking too much time off work. Women, I was told, all have these problems and taking a day off just because I was vomiting was hardly productive
Women vomit. All the time, actually. And they have cramps, headaches, chest pains and mood swings. You don’t take a day off work every time you do. That’s insane.
“Oh, I vomit at work all the time,” I blithely told my future public service employer. Most of its employees were women and they thought I was clinically insane. Like, literally, insane. I remember vomiting randomly after lunch one day into my wastebasket.
“I just threw up,” I said, confused.
“You’d better go home,” one woman said.
“Oh no, I vomit at work all the time. Just give me a minute to clean my teeth.”
This is not fictional. Nor is it hyperbole. This actually happened.
The whole experience reminded me of my teenage years. Every month I would bleed through everything for two or three days in my seven day period. I would have a headache three weeks a month. I would faint from the pain at school. I had to take a change of underwear, uniform and a box of sanitary pads to school with me to try to avoid bleeding through.
“Mum I don’t feel well. Can I have a day off school?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. This happens every month. I was the same.”
The gynaecologist who removed my cyst told me that the period I was describing was wildly abnormal and I should have seen a gynaecologist in my early teens.
“Not in my family,” I said. And God knows you didn’t discuss it with anybody else. Otherwise, we might have known.
Last year, I bled through everything again right before my work Christmas party. I had to sit through an hour meeting hoping nobody would notice and then find an excuse to go home and change before meeting everybody for drinks.
“I don’t know what to do,” a friend said to me at lunch the next week. She seemed embarrassed. Her 11 year old had her period and she kept bleeding through everything. She’d had to leave work and rush emergency sanitary items and a change of clothes to the school the week before. Twice.
“It’s so heavy. I know it’s not a lunchtime topic but I know you’ve had problems so…”
“Problems? I had this problem last week. Take her to a doctor.”
“I don’t know. I mean, is it unusual or abnormal?”
“You won’t know until you take her to a doctor. Do it. Trust me. If everything’s fine, you’ll know. If it’s not ok, you’ll be glad you did. For her sake. I wish my mother had.”
Not that I blame my mother. She was just repeating her experience with her mother. After all, I’ll be the first woman in this family line to make it to my late 30s with my uterus intact. My teen experience was exactly the same as my mother’s and her sister’s and, in fact, was less stark than my Aunt who had her hysterectomy at 26. It just makes me doubly glad I decided not to have children.
I don’t know when I first started to develop such serious fibroids. Was it when I presented to the doctor ten years ago with stomach problems and was tested for coeliac disease? Was it when I presented to the doctor six years ago with stomach problems and was tested for coeliac disease? Was it when I presented to the doctor two years ago with stomach problems and was tested for coeliac disease?
I had a severe bowel infection and went to a different GP.
“I’ve got your file up,” he said, “there’s something wrong with you, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, “any idea what?”
“No clue. Hey, have you ever considered that you may have coeliac’s disease?”
I went back to my usual doctor and was told it was anxiety, a common problem for ‘women my age’.
“Doc, my pill has stopped working and I’m having perpetual breakthrough bleeds.”
“You’re clearly not taking it correctly. You have to take it at the same time every day you know.”
(I’m a 37 year old woman at this point, I might add).
“Doc, I’m having continence problems.”
Whatever.
“Doc, I’m chronically anaemic.”
“I’ll give you an iron injection and put you on beta blockers for your anxiety.”
If I had anxiety, I guarantee you it was a result of being sick all the time. I did not take the beta blockers. But I did get a new GP.
By this time, I was almost in tears. I was up all night in pain, I had heart palpitations, fatigue, lethargy, extreme weight gain (oh yeah, I’m not just a woman, you guys, I’m a FAT woman), headaches and personality changes. The stress I was under after Mum’s stroke wasn’t helping.
“You’re a public servant,” she asked me after I explained in detail that I had a chronic health problem that nobody could diagnose and that it was severely impacting my life. That I had a full-time job and a severely-disabled mother and the extra stress was exacerbating the symptoms. I was clearly upset.
“Um, yes,” I responded, confused. “I am a public servant.”
“I’ve been seeing so many public servants for anxiety lately. I’ll refer you to a psychologist.”
At this stage, you think. Maybe they’re right. Maybe the abnormal test results, the chronic symptoms, the inflammatory markers and the hemoglobin levels are all psychosomatic. I’m actually just severely depressed or have some kind of anxiety disorder.
It is awfully common, after all, for women my age.
“Tell you what, doc,” I said, “you do some tests. If you don’t find something I’ll go and see the psychologist.”
One week later.
“There’s something wrong with you, you know,” she said
“Yes,” I said patiently, “I know. I told you that. Find out what it is.”
“Ok. Have you ever considered that you may have coeliac’s disease?”
Murdering a doctor is still a crime, right?
“After three colonoscopies, I’m going to say ‘yes’ and also ‘let’s put aside coeliac’s disease for the moment, shall we?’ I think you’re all looking in the wrong place. My last gynaecologist visit was four years ago and I’m supposed to have a two-yearly check up. I have a history of endometriosis and problems with my periods. But I moved and don’t have a gynaecologist in this area. Let’s just consider the problem may be gynaecological.”
To be clear – the idea that a woman with chronic anaemia, incontinence, break through bleeding, painful, irregular periods, constipation, diarrheoa, lower abdominal and chest pains may have had a gynaecological problem was something I had to work out for myself.
Despite seeing five doctors.
All my other tests – the chest xrays, the abdominal scan – all came up clear. The transvaginal ultrasound showed fibroids. Multiple. Large. Concerning.
And then I had to move again.
Dad was relocating Mum to Brisbane and, since my agency had an office in Brisbane and new flexible working arrangements, I said that I would move too and help them settle in. It was a full six months later before I got a GP and a referral to a gynaecologist. He did an exploratory laparoscopy and my diagnosis was finally in.
I had a multi-fibroid uterus and severe endometriosis. My uterus was severely enlarged. My ovaries were adhered to my pelvic wall. I had to have a hysterectomy.
I could write another blog post on my decision to go through with the surgery. But once I’d stopped the pill that wasn’t working properly anymore, my ‘old’ periods had come back. My cycle was 7-10 days. I had three days a month in bed. I had chronic headaches and iron deficiency. And I talked to no one about it.
I soldiered on. And I STFU. As you do.
Next week, a surgeon will be removing my uterus and the other fibroids and cleaning out the endometriosis. It’s a big decision. It’s major surgery. And I want to talk about it. As much as possible.
So I am officially coming out of the closet.
I’m a woman. I’m 39 years old. I’m a mid-level public servant.
I’m the most ordinary person in the world.
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