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Behold, my 1000th comment!
So finally, a decade after cracking my egg and 5 years of HRT, I’m going to legally change my name and sex. But oh boy is this giving me a headache. Just so much bureaucratic bullshit I have to wade through and navigate.
And on top of that [CW: institutional transphobia]:
This week there was a new court ruling here in Austria that could potentially make this whole process illegal. It was specifically about enbies but in the ruling they included a paragraph about your “biological sex” being the deciding factor. That means that in the worst case it could affect all trans people, including me. So amazing timing for me… like it just had to happen at the exact same day that I started the whole process -.-
My nerves are completely done because of this and fucking RIP my sleeping schedule
But when this Herculean task is over, I’m going to enjoy some nice teas that I ordered recently: A really fancy sheng pu-erh from 2007, some tea that is supposedly from the 80s and another one from the 70s, so over 50 years old.
I also got myself a nice light-blue celadon teacup that I can use together with my pink gaiwan and my white gong dao bei on top of my ebony tea tray. Perfect set-up to celebrate this special occasion.
Hell yes, another human into gongfu cha. Enjoy that sheng puerh. Tea that is half a century old is potent stuff.
Not always. It depends if the tea is still able to further ferment. I’ve had some oolongs and hei chas that were also decades old, but they became weaker over time. They still developed a nice, antique aroma but lost other ones on the way there.
That’s also why I didn’t really have a lot hope when I bought it because I thought that 50 years were too much and that it would just taste stale. But damn was I wrong on that. The baozhong is definitely not as strong as the pu-erh, not even close, but for a tea that has been green-killed and is just lightly oxidized, the potency of just the smell really stunned me.
I still don’t understand how aging non-fermenting teas works and why this one is so much stronger than the oolongs I’ve had but I take it!
Sounds like a smart move to get it done as soon as possible before the ruling can take effect.
I’ve changed name already, but also put of changing my legal sex because of the bureaucracy issues (It involves sending physical letters in the mail multiple times for some reason and temporarily losing access to your bank account 
), but definitely planning on doing it as soon as I can in case reactionaries try to fuck with it.
Why does every country without self-id laws have such ridiculous processes? I mean obviously because it’s supposed to be as a difficult as possible for us but honestly, some things are just bizarre.
Because I have to change my legal sex first and then my name afterwards I will get 2 new health insurance cards and birth certificates back-to-back. One with my new sex and my old name, and then the one with the new name. Almost as stupid as your bank account lock-out.
I got some great news. Just got a call from the official for an appointment next week. All my documents seem okay now and hopefully nothing should stand in my way of being officially female soon. My nerves can finally rest a bit now.
Also, my tea just arrived (a bit sooner than I expected) and holy damn, that 50 year old stuff is dank as fuck! It smells really old, so I think the age is probably right, and it has this really dark, herbal aroma, which isn’t what you’d expect from a usual baozhong with it’s floral aroma.
I’m going to force my mom to taste it with me when I visit her next week. We’re gonna have some fun together.
Conflicted on whether I want a legal record of changing my sex in terf island or not
Yeah, your system is really strange with the whole un/enrolled deed poll and GRC. In my case it’s pretty obvious what the right answer is because I can’t change my name without changing my legal sex first.
I don’t really understand the name change part. Are people not normally allowed to change their names? In the US you can just go do that whenever, for whatever reason. As long as it’s not something ridiculous, and you pass a background check, it’s just a bit of paperwork and a small fee.
In Austria names are bound to your sex. I could change it to a unisex but not a female one, at least yet. And if I did that, I would also have to pay around 500€, so not a small fee.
But when I change my legal sex to female, I can then say that my old name doesn’t fit my sex and thus have a proper reason to change it and with that I have to only pay a minimal fee.
All of this stuff is not based on any laws but court rulings, which is why this process is so convoluted.
Some countries have laws regarding the gender of names, so you can’t change your name from a ‘male’ name to a ‘female’ name or vice versa. Some names are seen as unisex though so you can freely use those regardless of your gender.