Caution: Presbyterians Crossing

My Dear Princess & Dear Fellows,

Lemon was on excellent form today. I think she was bored. Basically, whenever Smock was away, Lemon took the opportunity to regale me with stories of her family.

She and her daughter like doing things together. They often take courses to get them out of the house. They've done pottery and were looking for something else. Lemon suggested a "make a ukelele" course but Daughter turned up her nose.

"Wheel pottery?" said Lemon. But no.

"I've signed us up for Chunky Knitting," announced Daughter with a PING. That PING was from the computer, as the financial transaction went through.

"Chunky knitting?" wailed Lemon to me. "I don't WANT to do effing Chunky Knitting!!!"

Apparently Daughter has it in mind to make a rug. I mocked this idea, but it turns out that yes, indeed, you can make Chunky Knit rugs with HUGE Chunky Knitting Needles. Did you know about this? Princess, I know you are a knitter. Just a thought. You will need to dragoon a daughter though. It sounds like a two-knitter job.

So that was Chunky Knitting. Then we got talking about the fact that Lemon was trying to enroll Son in a college. The online form, she said, confused her. 

"Did you know there are FIVE sexes now?" she asked.

It's true. There were five options. And I should add that this was for a boys-only school. But now it included Trans, one choice for girl to boy and another for boy to girl. Plus an option saying, "Undefined, more than one of the other options" or "Undefined, none of the other options".

It IS confusing. When Lemon googled, she found out that this isn't even the half of it. 

"There are THIRTY-THREE options in the Australian census!" she told me.

Please don't misunderstand. It's not like we are disapproving or wish to pigeonhole people. But THIRTY-THREE. That's a lot of options.

We went through the list, and found that perhaps it is a little bit of an exaggeration because a lot of those options sound VERY similar. There is a lot of nuance, which is lost of us boring Cis people.

"But what's this one?" asked Lemon. "Big ender?"

I just about spat out my coffee. "Bi-gender," I gently informed her.

She was a bit embarrassed about that. "Usually it's my sister who gets words mixed up," she told me. "The other week we were driving through town together and someone jaywalked right in front of us. I hit the horn but my sister stuck her head out of the window and shouted, 'Why can't you use the presbyterian crossing like everyone else!!!'"

This struck me as even more hilarious than those people who identify as "Big Ender" on surveys. It took Smock coming back to her desk for the two of us to recover.

Oh yes, and I may have done some work today too. But that is not important.

S.