Lochlan Cadigan Pederson Weinhold

That's the name of the squirmy worm growing inside me.

We just had the anatomy scan ultrasound, and now we know the sex of the baby. We're not keeping it a secret. The baby has male genitals. Now we can refer to the baby as a he instead of an it. Mostly I want to get used to calling him Lochlan. Loch for short.

I've felt hesitant about how to share this news on social media. I don't think it should be a big deal. I don't get those reveal parties, where someone close to the parents knows and there's a party where the sex is revealed and the parents' reactions immortalized by pics and vids.

I don't think the baby's genitalia can tell us much about the person he will be. Human behavior, and what of it is biologically or societally determined, is complicated. These are not questions with easy answers.

I do know that I hate how gender divided our society is. I inwardly cringe whenever someone says to me, "You know how it is, you're a woman" or "They just don't get it, they're men" or anything along those lines.

Sure, women and men will in general have some different experiences throughout life because of their sex. But two things.

One, any individual will have their own unique set of experiences that may or may not fall in line with the majority of others of their sex.

Two, sex is not gender and gender is a spectrum. People just don't always fall in line with binaries or societal expectations.

And another thing (there are always more things, why did I assign it a number?): When people say stuff like "You don't get it, you're a ____" it is almost always a discussion ender. And I think that's usually because discussing complicated things is hard and people don't like hard things. Or sometimes it's just lazy shorthand, a thing people assume most others agree with. Either way, I don't think it's helpful and I do think it's dismissive. Let's try to do better.

So, his name is Lochlan. He has male genitalia and is healthy and is still squirming up a storm. Here's his spine:

Some interesting further reading:

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/science-gender-feminism-biology-essentialism-research

http://www.sheknows.com/parenting/articles/1077087/you-may-know-your-babys-sex-but-you-wont-know-their-gender-for-years

Well

Lotsa lotsa thoughtsa.

I'm thinking, lately, it'd be better to just have this up and going, whether my posts are well-structured, well-thought-out, well-written, or wells. It might be interesting if they were wells. Hell, that would definitely be interesting. How can a blog post be a well? A literal well, that is. Metaphorical wells are easy.

I am incubating life. That's new since last time.

I am often overwhelmed by life. Last year I started to feel like life was a freight train that is chugging away slowly in front of me. I am jogging behind it, trying to catch up and hop on. The best thing would be if I could hop on it, clamber my way to the captain's seat (the engine car? Are those in front?) and hop in and set the pace for the train.

All the things I want to accomplish are sitting in the cars of the train. Or maybe the car they're in is rusting and falling apart, so some things are falling off the train. If I stopped and and tried to catch them, the train would just get further away from me. I dunno. It's not a perfect metaphor, but it's the best image I've been able to come up with for how I feel.

Anywho. Here's a start to something.