Are Things Getting Better? (s02e12)

Miss Gender (audio)

Ashley went to see her parents over Independence Day weekend. Her brother Adrian, and his wife and parents-in-law were also there, so Ashley felt some reassurance that even if her parents weren’t any better with her name and pronouns, at least the support from the other visitors would able to make up for it a bit.

Sadly, Ashley’s dad breezed through misgendering Ashley without batting an eye, neatly outing her to Adrian’s parents-in-law. She was so upset she couldn’t even muster a correction to her dad’s careless pronoun use. Being around these new extended family members got awkward after that.

Worse, Ashley came to realize that her parents’ lax pronoun efforts could become a safety issue if, in public, her parents were to misgender her within earshot of someone who might be inclined to do harm to people like her. Ashley decides to write another letter to her parents to try to spell out the potential consequences of their devil-may-care approach.

She also goes over her plans for GCS (gender-confirmation surgery). She’s put in a down payment with Dr. Marci Bowers, but it may not happen until Spring of 2017.

Ashley tells Jay about the Too Faced retractable kabuki brush. She’d been needing a retractable powder brush to stash in her purse, and while she was previously wary of artificial-hair bristles, Ashley found that it picks up powder just as deftly as any of her natural-hair brushes. Then she compares two different powders and comes away with a new winner.

(Ashley’s polish in this episode is Suzy & The Seven Dusseldorfs. We aren’t being paid to say this — just thought maybe you’d like to know.)