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"Would you like to book in, young lady?" is about the worst way I could've been greeted by the perfectly-pleasant staff member when I got to the New Bath Hotel pool today. I'd been anxious all morning about swimming; I've just been feeling so uncomfortable in my body lately (or, my pre-existing excessive anxiety has picked my body as one of the things to latch its anxiety on to, as it often does) and ambient stress about being late and etc. had ratcheted that up into I'm not sure I actually want to swim at all once the traffic meant that our already-short timeslot would be cut in half.
I just answered the question, saying I didn't need to book, my boyfriend who was parking the car had our tickets on his phone. She was happy with that, after asking if I'd been before. My friends were calling to me from the pool around then and I think that satisfied her that I belonged there, heh.
I took the swim bag over to where their stuff was but just sat down for a minute, convinced I both couldn't and didn't want to swim. I wrote two words of a complaint about this into social media on my phone, and that seemed to be enough to get me up and into my wetsuit and into the pool. I'm glad I did it, I love swimming so much. But... there's a reason it ranks so highly on lists of things trans people have had to give up and that they miss and wish they could have back.
I only talked to three or four people who didn't know me today, and this was only the first of two of them who needlessly addressed me as a lady. Oof.
However! Today was also the first outing for my fake-dryrobe (it's not that brand and it's not windproof like they are, it's literally just an enormous hoodie). How better to celebrate than by trying to get a wet binder off after my swim and then getting a dry one on my damp skin to go under my clothes! I was so delighted it worked well enough for that. Because not being able/willing to deal with this complicated an outfit before had meant going to the pub afterwards in clothes chosen for expediency rather than appearance, which I thought I was more okay with than I have turned out to be. It might not have stopped me getting called a lady again at the pub but it made me feel better the rest of the time.
It was such a nice day for a swim, perfect blue sky. I swim on my back and it was so weird to not even have any clouds to use as markers of whether I was going in a straight line or not! I'm not used to that! It cooled down after we had dinner (outside again, at our usual location at a great pub) but was nice enough at first that I barely felt I needed my hoodie. My regular hoodie, though I did add the changing robe hoodie over it after the sun went behind some buildings, to the apparent annoyance of this person, which delights me.
I just answered the question, saying I didn't need to book, my boyfriend who was parking the car had our tickets on his phone. She was happy with that, after asking if I'd been before. My friends were calling to me from the pool around then and I think that satisfied her that I belonged there, heh.
I took the swim bag over to where their stuff was but just sat down for a minute, convinced I both couldn't and didn't want to swim. I wrote two words of a complaint about this into social media on my phone, and that seemed to be enough to get me up and into my wetsuit and into the pool. I'm glad I did it, I love swimming so much. But... there's a reason it ranks so highly on lists of things trans people have had to give up and that they miss and wish they could have back.
I only talked to three or four people who didn't know me today, and this was only the first of two of them who needlessly addressed me as a lady. Oof.
However! Today was also the first outing for my fake-dryrobe (it's not that brand and it's not windproof like they are, it's literally just an enormous hoodie). How better to celebrate than by trying to get a wet binder off after my swim and then getting a dry one on my damp skin to go under my clothes! I was so delighted it worked well enough for that. Because not being able/willing to deal with this complicated an outfit before had meant going to the pub afterwards in clothes chosen for expediency rather than appearance, which I thought I was more okay with than I have turned out to be. It might not have stopped me getting called a lady again at the pub but it made me feel better the rest of the time.
It was such a nice day for a swim, perfect blue sky. I swim on my back and it was so weird to not even have any clouds to use as markers of whether I was going in a straight line or not! I'm not used to that! It cooled down after we had dinner (outside again, at our usual location at a great pub) but was nice enough at first that I barely felt I needed my hoodie. My regular hoodie, though I did add the changing robe hoodie over it after the sun went behind some buildings, to the apparent annoyance of this person, which delights me.