I quote T.S. Eliot a lot, especially when thinking about the contents of my heart and mind. Here are some of the bits that speak to me, or rattle around my head, or have the right sort of memorability to be little modernist earworms.

First, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", a poem so bound up in its protagonist's inability to communicate his emotions it can't help but have resonated with a trans girl who stuffed most of herself in a box for a quarter century and time and again found herself flailing around ineptly with the bleeding severed tendrils of an emotional existence.

"Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea."

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;"

"Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?"

" And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.” "

"Do I dare to eat a peach?"

"Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

There are more, bits that I kind of remember but out of context or as familiar friends I'm forever meeting again for the first time... You can read the whole poem at poetryfoundation.org/poetrymag…

Thinking about the exceedingly low regret rates for gender affirming surgeries compared to basically everything else. I wonder whether it’s because the only people who can get them are those of us so utterly persistent and determined in fighting all the bullshit to actually get what we need.

Other problems aren’t like this. You have a problem with your heart they figure out what it is and book you in to get it fixed. Sure there’s a waiting list and counselling about the effects and side effects, but ultimately the doctor proposes a solution, you assess it and agree, and stuff happens.

You break a leg: they shove it in a plaster. Why the hell doesn’t the analogous conversation go “well yes I see the problem. You’re a woman but you’re suffering from bollocks. Soon have those off”?

(I know the answer of course. To much of the rest of the cis world transition is something incomprehensibly bad, to be avoided at all costs, including the patient’s own well-being, or indeed their life.)

Sure, regret rates would probably go up. Greater accessibility of any surgery probably means more people will be unhappy about some aspect of it. But the sheer amount of pain and harm that would be relieved… it makes me wonder.

Whisper it softly, but are gender affirming surgery regret rates… too low?