Legalize Gay

Recently, I went to D.C. to visit the wonderful Samantha Dahl.  I could tell you about the trip, but then I'd have to kill you.  Seriously.  But that isn't the subject of this post.  While I was there, Brittany, John, and I visited the Human Rights Campaign store.  It was pretty awesome.  For those of you not familiar with HRC, they are a LGBT rights organization.  The yellow equal sign inside a blue square is their symbol.  They had flags, shirts, bags, watches, bracelets, pins and pens, all sorts of stuff.  While I was there, I bought this awesome bag:

I am completely obsessed with it.  Since I got back from D.C. I have been carrying it around with my purse and a library book or two in it.

Those of you who know me well already know where I stand on the issue of gay rights but here it is for the rest of you.  I think that this movement is the civil rights movement of our generation.  I want to practice civil rights law when I graduate, ideally for Lambda Legal, the ACLU or South Carolina Equality.  But even if I don't get hired by any of those organizations, this is what I want to do with my life.  This struggle for equality, for love, is my calling.  I feel strange using the phrase "my calling" because of its religious connotations but no other words express how strongly I feel about this.  I think it is what I am meant to do and I won't be fulfilled doing anything else.  I simply can't sit and watch this battle, I have to be involved.

Now back to the bag...  Since I have been carrying my Legalize Gay bag, I have left it at home more than once because I didn't want to have to deal with people's reactions to it.  Thursday I went to dinner with my mom.  My parents are very very conservative evangelical christians.  They barely know me at this point in my life because it's just easier to not tell them things than to get the "You're going to hell" lecture.  I haven't told them what kind of law I want to practice because I know they would be disappointed but that won't change my mind.  If I tell them now I'll have to deal with their disappointment and their efforts to change my mind/save my immortal soul for the next few years.  Now once I am actually a lawyer I'll absolutely tell them but for now it's just easier to omit it.  That has been my general theory with my parents on a lot of things in my life (sex, drinking, the whole not going to church thing) and it has worked fine thus far.  On Friday, I took the bag to the Strom (USC's student gym).  While I was walking around the track between lunge sets, I kept looking over to where I had left it.  I wasn't terribly worried about it being stolen, I was more worried that someone would vandalize it or something.  Yesterday I babysat for my cousin's two little ones.  I traded my stuff over into a Tridelta tote before I went to get them because I didn't want to have to talk to my aunt and uncle about it.  I went to Skyline (a line dancing club in West Columbia) last night and left it behind.  Usually, I would just bring a small purse to Skyline but it was raining when we left so I wanted to bring an umbrella too.  I saw the bag on my bed and almost grabbed it so I could carry both things together but I stopped myself.  I was worried that someone would see it and try to bother me or mess with it.

So I have left my bag behind three times and one other time I have been concerned about its well being.  I've owned it for less than a week.  This whole thing has made me very conscious of the privilege of being straight in our hetero-normative society.  While I consider my dedication to the LGBT rights movement as a very important part of who I am, it is not nearly as basic as my sexuality.  I go out with my boyfriend to bars, restaurants, the grocery store, wherever and I don't have to worry about the kind of reactions we'll get.  I get to be proud of him, to show him off.  I was always aware of this privilege somewhere in my little brain, but this one week of "Should I bring the gay bag or not?" has made that knowledge so much more real to me.  LGBT individuals don't get to leave their sexual or gender identity at home.  For them it is more a question of "Should I hide who I am?  Is it safe to be me here?" and that fucking pisses me off.  They don't always get to show off their awesome significant others or even themselves.

My experiences this week have also made me wonder if I should be more honest with my parents about who I am.  To understand the extent to which this would hurt my parents, you need to understand what they expect of me.  They want me to be a good christian girl.  There are lots of definitions out there of what makes a good christian, I don't mean to say that the one I am about to put forth is right or wrong, it is just what my parents believe.  They want me to believe in God and Jesus his son.  They want me to accept Jesus as my personal savior.  They want me to not drink, smoke or cuss at all.  Also, no drugs.  They want me to go to church at least once a week.  They want me to wait until marriage (to a good christian man) to have sex.  They want me to take a passive and submissive role in my dating and marriage relationships as the bible says is appropriate for women.  They want me to be a conservative, pro-life republican who opposes LGBT marriage and rights.  I am almost* none of those things.  So when I say "I support LGBT rights" my parents will hear "I'm an unsaved sinner who is going to hell."  My mother will be devastated and my dad will be livid.  But is it fair, to them and to me, to not tell them?  Am I essentially lying by not telling them these things?

I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do but when I do, I'll let y'all know.

*I don't smoke or do any illegal drugs but that's because those things are super bad for you.

Egg Update: August 2012

This egg donation process is frustrating.  As I told y'all earlier, I had to go in and have blood drawn.  A lot of blood.  I handled the needle and all a lot better than I expected I would.  When I left, the lab technician (or nurse or doctor or whatever her title was) told me to make another appointment as I left for one more test with them. I also wanted to talk to my donation coordinator because I had about a million questions for her.  At the front desk, they wouldn't make me another appointment, they said they would have to call me back to do that, and my coordinator wasn't there so she was going to have to call me too.  That was last Monday.  On Friday, I left for DC.  I decided to give them until Tuesday, when I would get home from my trip, to call me back.
On Monday, a full week after my appointment, my coordinator called.  So I had a conversation about eggs and lady bits while strolling down the street in DC.  We made an appointment for my remaining lab work and I asked some questions.  I wanted to know what was next.  Where am I in the process?  How long will all of this take?  Will I have to be re-screened each time I donate?  She told me that I am still in the screening process.  Once all of my lab work comes back I'll have to do a full physical (gross).    Once all of the results are in and they're sure it's safe for me to donate, they'll match me up.  She said the screening process can take months and really depends on how busy they are, etc.  Once I get matched, donating would take a little over a month.  She said there are some recipients interested in me so there shouldn't be too long of a waiting period between the screening and getting started with donation.
I really do want to do this.  Honestly.  But I am so tired of waiting.  I started this process in April.  4 months later, I feel like I haven't really done anything.  It's frustrating.  And I am by no means a patient woman.  I just don't understand why it takes so long to return my calls.  I'm trying to give them something that isn't exactly easy to come by and they act like keeping me informed is a burden.  I know that medical tests and all are necessary and sometimes they take a long time.  I'm not suggesting they cut corners.  But how hard could it be to pick up the phone and let me know what's going on?  Frustrating.

Eggs (the baby-making kind)

I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow.  With a fertility clinic.  Yep.  I applied to be an egg donor in March.  On April 25, the day after my 24th birthday, I went and took a personality test.  I guess to see if I'm crazy or something.  Then I didn't hear from them for months.  In late June, I got a call that the woman in charge of my case (file? whatever) was out of town and that she would call me in mid-July.  She finally called me 2 or 3 days ago (which was in August, may I point out) to make an appointment for me to come get blood work done.  So tomorrow I am going to a doctor's appointment to allow a nurse, who works for a very non-responsive doctor's office, to steal a bunch of my blood so that I can help a total stranger maybe have a baby.  I'm a little nervous about the whole process.  This is what will happen:

- First I applied
- Then the personality test
- Then some blood work
- Then I'll have to take birth control of some kind to sync my cycle with the recipient mom's cycle.  She'll be doing the same thing.  We'll do that so that when I ovulate and they take my eggs, she'll be at the most fertile part of her cycle which will maximize her chances of conception. (This part makes me think about the scene in Bridesmaids where all the roomies are laying around devouring cupcakes together)
- In the last few weeks of the process, I have to take hormones everyday.  Injected hormones.  You know, with needles.  I am terrified of needles.  Also, these hormones will make me a little crazy.  So I'll be even more of a raving lunatic/raging bitch than normal if that's even possible.
- On "the day" I'll go in, they give me some anesthesia and they'll go in and take out my eggs.  Hopefully the hormones will have caused me to release several so the recipient mom can have a good shot at getting preggers.  I'm still hazy on the details of the procedure.  I know they won't be cutting me open (they'll go in vaginally) but I don't know how anesthetized I'll be.  I'm not sure if I'll be completely out or what.  Hopefully completely out.

I'm very nervous about the needles.  But I figure, I'm 24 years old, I should probably face this fear.  And hopefully, the great Monica Ploetzke will be administering the shots which calms me.  I trust that woman with my life.
I'm slightly worried about how the hormones will affect me when I'm also dealing with the stress of school.  Everyone at school has already seen me cry in class and scream at people in the lobby so I doubt public opinion could get much worse.  But what if I can't handle it?  Law school really stresses me out in the first place and I can't imagine how I'm going to handle it while I'm juiced up.
I'm also a little nervous about the extraction proceedure.  I've never had real surgery.  I had my wisdom teeth removed in college.  The recovery was pretty smooth and it wasn't too horrible of an experience.  But I have never had real surgery or anything.  I've never been hospitalized, never been to the emergency room, nothing.  I have been so lucky to be healthy.  The idea of being unconscious and having doctors I don't know prodding up my lady bits is, at the least, disconcerting.
But more than the needles, more than the crazies, more than the procedure, I'm nervous about how I'll handle not knowing how it turns out.  There is a strict anonymity policy.  They'll know about me (health history, education, etc), and they get my picture but not my name.  I don't get to know who they are.  At all.  There is a 50/50 chance that the recipient mom will conceive through this method.  I don't get to know if she gets pregnant or not.  If she does, I won't get to know the baby's gender or birth day or name.  Nothing.  There could be a little me out there running around and I won't have a damn clue.  I'm afraid the wondering is going to make me crazy.  But I'm going to do it anyway, lord help me.  So I'm going to try to blog about the process in the hopes that it will help to ground me and remind me why the hell I decided to do this in the first place.