This was originally written as various responses to messages.
But I have burnt within thee as a pure flame without oil. In the midnight I was brighter than the moon; in the daytime I exceeded utterly the sun; in the byways of thy being I flamed, and dispelled the illusion. –Liber LXV V:9
Do what thou whilt shall bet the whole of the law.
Anyone who’s to the point where they’re about to get the surgery have already had to deal with so much gatekeeping and hoops to jump though. Generally the only people who regret it are the ones where it’s botched and there’s certain surgeons we’re warned to avoid because they’re known to do that and also not listen to the patient.
Wanna get on HRT? Go to a therapist first and get them to send us a letter. Want to get SRS? Go to two different mental health professionals and get letters plus your PCP. Then good luck actually affording it. Oh you got the letters? Ok well now you have to get perminent hair removal for the entire genital region. Oh the places near you refuse to help trans customers? Oh well, figure it out. Oh great you have your hair removal done? Ok now you have to loose 50 lbs because reasons. Oh it’s hard to lose weight because of the side effects of the testosterone blocker? Tough. I don’t care you have to figure it out anyway. Oh you want facial feminization surgery and a tracheal shave? Well your insurance doesn’t cover it so you’ll have to pay out of pocket. Good luck affording it since trans people make way less than cis people doing the same job and we’re often locked out of promotions and the like just because of our gender, and often the person making the decisions doesn’t even realize they’re doing it because it’s just so normalized that it happens on a subconscious level. If I had the power and the ability, I’d make every cis person have to live a week as trans so they can appreciate just how privileged they are to be cis.
Kids who are trans know it even if they don’t know how to express it. I knew at 6 years old. For kids, they don’t do anything. For themselves they put them on puberty blockers which simply delay the effects of puberty until they turn 18 and can make the decision to go further with care. I wish that had been an option when I was in school. Instead I had to deal with years and years of testosterone poisoning which made my second puberty not as effective as it could have been if my first was delayed long enough to start the second as the first and only. But honestly that’s not good enough. Being the weirdo on puberty blockers is gonna cause social isolation. If it were up to me, you’d be able to start the transition care therapy during the time when you’re supposed to start puberty so the child can grow in pace with their peers and not to suffer as much dysphoria. Again, I knew at 6 years old. I also knew that talking with it with my parents was not safe because of how they’d treated me up until that point. When they’d tuck me in for bed I’d pretend to fall asleep until they left the room and were out of earshot I’d get back up and pray desperately to be made into a girl. The thing about transition people like to forget is that it’s a medical issue; it’s called gender Identity disorder. The symptoms are primarily the presence of gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is a feeling as real and physical as pain or orgasm. It centers on anything about their body that conflicts with their true gender. Untreated, GID has an extremely high mortality rate. The longer the patient experiences that dysphoria, the worse it gets until you can’t ignore it or otherwise make it go away so you get desperate and in far too many cases the only available answer to how to make it go away is suicide. They’ve tried to treat GID with every thing you can think of and many things you didn’t and the only treatment that has any degree of meaningful success is transition and the earlier the better. So remember that before you think of anything related to trans healthcare. Gender dysphoria is a ticking time bomb. There’s a reason we don’t have a trans pride celebration but rather trans day of remembrance where we morn or many dead from the past year. Ourb bodies are actively trying to kill us and society only seems concerned with making it worse.
I can’t help but be incredibly jealous of cis women. They were just born with everything I should have had and they just take it for granted. I have to go through this really obnoxious process to get even halfway there and with technology where it’s at, that’s the best I can do. So many stupid-ass hoops to jump through. First you gotta find a sympathetic therapist and get them to give you a letter. Then you then have to find a doctor willing to prescribed them and give them the letter. Then you have to live full time for a year or two on the hormones before they’ll give you a referral to a surgeon. Then you need 2 more letters from medical professionals. Then you gotta meet this arbitrary set of criteria. For me the thing that’s in my way is I haven’t finished hair removal and my weight I have to loose down to 190 before they’ll do my vagoplasty. Then I also have to do voice surgery which means I won’t be able to talk for several months. Then there’s other surgeries insurance won’t even cover; tracheal shave and facial feminization surgery. And even then after all that there’s people who will discriminate against you for being trans. There’s people who would kill you for it given the opportunity. (and it happens all the time) Dating is a nightmare because people have all kinds of fucked up biases about it. Plus tons of friends and family will cut you off when you finally come out. There’s nothing fun about being trans. Most trans people are suicidal. There’s no silver lining. It’s living life on hard mode until you die and hopefully reincarnate into someone cis. Hopefully, though, that time bomb won’t go off for me in the meantime. I hope that for all trans people out there. We all deserve better. May we all see days when the timer can be stopped and the bomb dismantled so it can hurt us like it has for far too many
Love is the law, love under will.
In a spirit of freedom,
Vanessa