Candied Bacon Sandwich á la Dave

I made some candied bacon.

For those unfamiliar with this particular cause of massive heart attacks, this is what candied bacon is supposed to look like.

This is, of course, candied bacon as prepared by someone who

• Has prepared candied bacon before
• Is willing to do their research into how best to cook candied bacon
• Is probably quite a good cook, or in fact has done anything with their oven other than reheat things during the past six months

As such, it's complete bullshit. Bollocks to that, said I, and went out to buy some sketchy bread with which to make a monster.

To make candied bacon sandwich á la Dave, you will require

• Bread. Go to the corner shop and get some. Don't fanny about with artisan bread, it's half past ten at night and it's BACON TIME. The bread is just there to stop you burning your fingers.
• Bacon. Again, any bacon will do. I used Cornershop Best unsmoked back bacon that probably came from a cylindrical pig in some godforsaken shed somewhere.
• Maple syrup. This is where you want the good stuff. The wonderful Ali brought back a litre of it from Canada for me recently, but Sainsburys' own brand is great too. A bit expensive but it's pure, which is important because you're going to be skirting around burning the crap out of it a bit later.
• Butter. If you forgot to buy butter when you went to the shop, use a tub of Utterly Butterly that has been in your fridge for a good few months now. 'Letting it mature' works for cheese, and cheese is almost exactly the same as butter. If you use vegetable oil, you are a gigantic fanny and are hereby required to go and eat some carrot sticks or something instead.

As you will see, it's a highly complex dish to prepare.

1. Stop smoking about fifteen minutes beforehand. You're going to need your nose.
2. Turn on the extractor fan, because otherwise your fire alarm is going to go nuts.
3. Turn on the heat on the hob.
4. Take a lump of butter and put it in the frying pan. Heat enough to melt.
5. Pour exactly one metric slurp of maple syrup into the butter goo. Just eyeball it, bearing in mind that since you WILL burn it a bit later because you fuck up, too much is as bad as too little.
6. Get it sizzling a bit and pop in your bacon. A bit of overlap is fine but don't stack it.
7. Cook bacon until it looks like it's turning a 'cooked' colour. Push down on the bacon with a spatula thing to make it sizzle. This doesn't help, but it sounds awesome.
8. Flip the bacon over. At this point the side that's been cooking will look like someone has Ronsealed it. That's okay.
9. Cook until the smell changes. At this point, your maple syrup has stopped caramelising and started burning. That's bad. Get the bacon out of there and pop it on a plate.
10. Place bacon in sandwich, place sandwich in face via mouth.
11. Rejoice.

Afterward, you may want to go for a run to work off the calories. I suggest running to your nearest A&E, which you should arrive at just in time to collapse clutching your chest.

Later: Dave decides to try candying every meat they have around, including chicken breast chunks and sausages.

Let's learn about non-binary identity

I am non-binary, and use the singular 'they' as my personal pronoun.

You probably have questions. I'm still a little uncomfortable discussing it all outside queer circles, so let me give you a primer, and you can ask me about anything I don't address.

Non-what?

Non-binary. The gender binary - that is, male and female - is increasingly seen as outdated and restrictive for no good reason. Non-binary people have been around for all of human history, but it's only fairly recently that we're starting to be formally defined in terms of sociological theory.

Being non-binary or otherwise genderqueer is more complicated than 'somewhere between male and female'. Gender is distinct from sex, and refers to a fairly nebulous psychological, cultural, and sociological identity. As a society, we normalise gender closely tracking sex, but it's not that simple and never has been.

In fact, to us, gender isn't a simple line between male and female. There are other axes to it, ones which don't have convenient names yet. Our gender identity shifts around in this multidimensional space, where gender is a strange, variable, often inscrutable haze.

We use the identifier because we rarely, if ever, feel fully anything in that space. Our perception of gender moves around so much that we don't see any meaningful value in tracking it for the benefit of others, which would be practically infeasible anyway. Instead, we provide the best long-term definition we can, and write pieces like this to try to explain.

For brevity, people like me often use the contraction 'enby' (singular) or 'enbies' (plural) to refer to ourselves - the spoken form of "NB" for "Non Binary".

I thought you were cis?

So did I. For a very long time.

First, a definition - cisgender, or 'cis', people have an assigned gender at birth matching their actual gender. It's the opposite of transgender.

Regarding my personal experience, for a very long time, I fully believed that I was cisgender. A couple of years ago, a trans developer posted something on Twitter which made me stop and think.

When you feel a thing so regularly, you just assume that it's part of the normal human experience. Frequently having times you wish you could interact with the world being seen as feminine, envying people who get feminine presentation for free? Turns out those are things which cis people don't experience.

It was particularly confusing because - and this is why I never pursued it - it wasn't the case all the time. I've always felt 'somewhere in the middle' and pursued androgyny. While I had the occasional wish to present femme, I rarely (if ever) had the wish to present more masculine. I put this down to being able to inherently pass as male - masc presentation required no effort.

So are non-binary people transgender?

I do consider myself transgender, but with hesitation and awareness of privilege.

That depends who you ask. Some feel the label to be appropriate, some don't. In terms of dictionary definitions, yes - the gender we were assigned at birth does not match our actual gender, and never has. There's a complication to it, which is that the construction of the word 'transgender' implies alternation from one binary to another, and so some people aren't comfortable with it.

There's also the factor with which I have trouble, which is that it feels like appropriating someone else's struggle. Non-binary people do experience dysphoria and have trouble passing, but it's different from someone who is binary transgender. If you're crossing the entire length of the male-female axis, while your dysphoria and passing problems are restricted to that single axis, they can be as severe as is possible on that axis.

But there are only two genders, male and female.

I think it's very likely that you're conflating sex and gender here. Sex is determined by your genes, and relates to the biological differentiation of your body. Gender is distinct, and refers to a fairly nebulous psychological, cultural, and sociological identity. As a society, we normalise gender closely tracking sex, but it's not that simple and has never been that simple.

But sex isn't binary either. Most of us are aware of sexual differentiation resolving somewhere other than the extremes of 'male' and 'female', referred to as being intersex or (to use an outdated, inappropriate, now-offensive term) hermaphroditic, and the perception we have is that it's rare.

Studies suggest that while sex differentiation exists on a single axis, it's actually quite common for a person to be somewhere between the extremes.

'They' is plural, not singular!

You're not the first person to have that response, and you are objectively wrong. Consider the following sentences, which while admittedly somewhat contrived, scan naturally -

When I tell somebody a joke, they laugh.

When I greet a friend, I hug them.

When somebody does not get a haircut, their hair grows long.

If my mobile phone runs out of power, a friend lets me borrow theirs.

Each child dresses themself.

The fact is that you use the singular they every day. You just don't think about it, and that's why it feels artificial.

I have more questions.

First, let me link a few resources - they might answer your question.

The Language of Gender

Understanding Gender

What Is Non-Binary Gender? (Teen Vogue has been particularly amazing at tackling gender identity)

So Your Child Is Non-Binary

What Does It Mean to Be Non-Binary?

Wikipedia: Non-binary gender

If you can't find answers from this piece or any of the above, that's okay! Ask me. I'd prefer you drop me an email - my email address is over on the left. Expect a delay in my reply.

Maybe it's just me...

...but one of the things that I find really weird looking at my old LJ entries (I imported over 2,000 of them as private entries using the Dreamwidth importer, just for archival's sake) is the URLs.

They all use plaintext HTTP.

We never really noticed the entire web switching to HTTPS (due to Let's Encrypt making what was previously a paid service totally free). It was a genuine silent revolution.