Transitioning

I’ve been thinking about the steps that I need to go through to transition and how difficult they are. They are normally set out as a consecutive list of; psychiatric assessment, hormone therapy, real life experience and then finally if you are really lucky gender re-assignment surgery(GRS). It’s as though each stage is a further step on the ladder, each harder that the one before, and that if you really prove yourself to be truly female you are given the ultimate goal of having surgery.

This however is upside down, whilst the final act of having surgery is perhaps the most severe in terms of biology it has perhaps the least impact on your life and how you live it. By the time you have reached that point you have already made immense changes to your life that are completely irreversible and simply changing your anatomy between you legs is a completely personal and private step that is hidden from everyday life. Surely the most significant steps are at the beginning?

From the point you first discuss it with your GP and he makes his notes you are forever identified by the state as either being transgender or potentially being mentally ill. This will never be removed from your records and will affect every part of your life. Every time you apply for a loan, mortgage, or job this will be referred to, every application for travel or health insurance will be questioned.

There is also the matter of telling friends and family, you can never “un tell” them! Once you have sat them down and told them that you are really a woman inside and that you want to life the rest of your life that way there is no going back. Even if they don’t reject you completely or disown you, they will never allow things to go back to the way they were.

The reason that GRS is held back to the very end is put forward as being “in case you change your mind”. It is the idea that if you don’t have your testicles removed you can somehow go back to living as a man, this is preposterous! By this stage of your transition your life has been irreversibly changed and there is simply no way to go back whether you have had surgery or not.

I can’t help thinking that this is simply because if you talk to a man about having his bits removed he crosses his legs and winces, and on that grounds that most doctors and surgeons are male they find this completely intolerable. The thing they don’t seem to accept is that the patient asking them for their help is not a man asking to have his bits cut off but a woman who is desperate to have a birth defect corrected.

I just hope when my time comes I will be able to find compassionate and understanding doctors in a world that is less judgmental.