9-piglet-9

[9-piglet-9]

building site outside

I wrote this song at the final hurdle of receiving a prescription for gender affirming hormones. I'd been through the bulk of the ridiculous assault course of nhs assessments, a process which took at least 3 years (which sounds like , and was , a long time , but by today's standards would be considered a mad stroke of luck). Some highlights of this absurd process include obtaining a diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria (being trans is not an illness lol , but here we are) and being asked extremely invasive and irrelevant questions along with a hundred other things that I have no interest in revisiting. I wrote this song after going to my gp for my first testosterone injection , only to find that they hadn't received the necessary documentation from the gender identity clinic , they told me to come back in 10 days in hopes that things would be sorted by then . This was by no means the biggest obstacle I had faced in accessing treatment , but for some reason it hit me particularly hard , so close yet so far or something like that. Its quite a literal song which describes me walking to and from from the GP surgery and how I was feeling throughout the verses , interspersed with the chorus which describes the interaction I had with the pharmacist a while later after receiving the prescription. We had always had a very nice relationship previously , I'd been in and out of the pharmacy every couple of weeks for the previous year and a half and we would always have a nice chat and a bit of a laugh. When I handed her the prescription for testosterone her attitude towards me changed completely , she no longer looked me in the eye or made small talk , instead staring straight through me as if I wasn't there . Again , this is on the very lowest end of the scale in terms of the hostility trans people face in every day life , but sometimes the small things stick with you . They're easier to address than the bigger things anyway , in my experience . I'm very lucky to be able to say that I've been on hormones a good few years now and have been able to have surgery on my chest through the nhs too , for which I am eternally grateful . I can't describe the immensely positive impact that these things have had on every day of my life since then

[9-piglet-9]

it isnt fair

i wrote this song around 5 years ago when i had been on a long , seemingly unmoving waiting list for 3 years with no clear end in sight. when i revisited this song to record and release it more recently i tried to rewrite the words to reflect some understanding of WHY i think it isnt fair ,,, i wanted to try and put forward the belief that trans liberation can never come through assimilation into the society we live in . the structures that rule our lives were built on white supremacy and capitalism , and it is these ideologies that justify our oppression in just the same ways that they are used to justify the oppression of other marginalised communities . but im really not a good enough writer to fit these into this song ,,, so i decided to leave the lyrics as they were when i wrote them in that amorphous , bending stretch of fuckery.

  once youve made it through the excruciatingly long wait to be seen you're met with more bureacracy and gate-keeping - some of the questions they asked me would be funny if they weren't so overtly harmful and dehumanizing. To get through to the process of actually attaining healthcare you need to put forward a version of yourself in which you seem to be inhabiting the mental and physical space of being the 'good trans person' , the 'passing' trans person , the binary trans person - and these lines of perception are inextricably linked to classist, racist, ableist and highly binary ideas of what a 'real' gender looks like . i have no doubt that my class, race and ability as well as my understanding that i would have to lie a LOT and present myself in an ill-fitting way in order to get the care i knew i had needed for many years has a lot to do with the fact that I am still here now, well enough to write songs about it.

when i say 'it isnt fair' in the song sometimes i feel childish , i feel like i can hear someone in the background telling me 'yeah well lifes not fair get on with it' - which is something i feel like we've all been told a lot . but i think thats a load of shite actually . i dont really care if i sound whiney or whatever else - it isnt fucking fair , people are dying on these waiting lists , and i dont think we should accept that 'life's not fair' and move on with it . we shouldnt accept the way trans people are treated by the state in the same way that we shouldnt accept evictions , deportations , incarceration , policing , landlordism ,,,, any of this and a million other things ,,,, it all comes from the same place and passively putting up with it is only going to lead to everything worsening ,,,, so yeah ,,,, it isnt fair ,,,, join your local cop watch , intervene when you see a stop and search , resist evictions by turning up and standing with your neighbours , join a union , donate to fundraisers as much as you can , take direct action , organise , take care of yourself and dont ever let anybody tell you that life's not fair , we know life isnt fair , but we also know that nothing is permanent and everything can change .

[9-piglet-9]

piglet - oan

Oan is about trying to work out where yourself and the people around you sit on various spectrums. The spectrums discussed in the song are mentally ill/healthy , addicted/just messing about , helpful/obstructive , good/bad . it is natural that these answers are dependent on perspective and that there is rarely one solid answer , but we live in a system that morally collapses if we cant point to certain people as the ‘bad’ one , the ‘ill’ one , or the ‘addicted’ one . this is the logic that distributes life chances , and the ‘good’ people get a vaguely comfortable life , and the ‘bad’ ones are subject to incarceration and institutionalised precarity. This song is about how , when you look into your own life , and the lives of people close to you , you can see that these moral lines dont really work at all , we don’t live in a ‘fair’ world where these labels can be applied meaningfully .

[9-piglet-9]

piglet - mill

The song mill is about how my understanding of my own transness/queerness has evolved and how much better I’ve felt since I realised that my gender and sexuality don’t have to be easily definable and unchanging.

I think when I first had to defend my queerness from criticism , I resorted to the explanation and understanding within myself that I was ‘born this way’ and therefore ‘its not my fault ! let me love who I want to and live how I want to’ – which sometimes worked !

However as I grew up I experienced my understanding of myself shift , I started being attracted to types of people I hadn’t been attracted to before , and I was like ‘ahhh– if I wasn’t born this way – then why am I like this ? how do i legitimise and understand myself ?’

When I first came out as trans in liiiike maybe 2014 (?) I didn’t know many other trans people really and I had only just realised that I could even BE trans (I only knew about the existence of trans women , and my understanding of their existence was limited to their ~terrible~ media representation at the time) . when I started to understand myself as a trans man I did so through the masculinity around me , societal gender norms , and through the doctors who I was trying to get to diagnose me with gender dysphoria (I knoooow lol!) so that I could access the healthcare I needed to live comfortably .

in order to gain legitimacy in the eyes of doctors , the people around me and , initially , myself – I felt I had to conform to a typical masculinity and to express that I had always been this way and that I would continue to be that way forever . basically , I was trying to understand myself and my queerness through the eyes of cis society and the people and structures who see our lives and experiences as lesser . deep down I thought that if I did transness the ‘right’ way , i’d be fully accepted by society – but honestly that’s just not true and anyway , I don’t want acceptance any more , I don’t want to measure my masculinity up against cis masculinity , I don’t want to learn to fit in and ‘be a man’ in the ‘right’ way . maybe I wasn’t born this way , maybe I was , honestly I really don’t care how it is that i ended up being me , its too confusing a question and cis ppl never seem to have to answer it so im not going to bother either !!! the important thing is that I feel really ok in myself now that I have accepted my capacity for change as a positive and exciting thing – not something to fear or be feared. massive love and thanks to the people who helped me understand and love myself , to the trans people who came before us and created the spaces that we now occupy , and to every trans person who’s just getting up and doing it every day , youre gorgeous xxx