I wish every dumbass “but I want to do AWAY with gender! yer just reinforcing blahblee” would actually read this piece. Just…argh. anyway:

nine months after the lead psych attempted to blackmail me into participation.

*shudders*

So much for “first, do no harm”.

What happened to the basic human right of self-determination, patients having choice over medical procedures… gah! Where to begin with the utter betrayal, the sheer disregard for basic ethics!

Too many injustices are allowed to be perpetuated.
I’d like to help end this one.

I guess I’m lucky in having a clinic (Mazzoni Center of Philadelphia, PA) that prescribes hormones on informed consent (they just do some medical testing to make sure that you don’t have a physical condition that makes hormone use dangerous, like an f-ed up liver), having a great doctor who operates on the same basis. I’m going the independent route r.e. counseling, and my therapist has been very good. However, I’ve not tried to get the approval letter that I need for surgury, I’ll need a psychiatrist’s approval, and I have zero trust for psychiatrists (my therapist is a psycologist).

The thing that really, really scares me is Real ID, which potentially means losing my driver’s license / ID, which is bad enough. Worse, though, if the gov’t ever decides to fully enforce the gender no-match provisions, I may be permanently unemployed. (Currently, they’re sending out the no-match letters, which is bad enough as people are getting outed and endangered, but the gov’t put on hold — temporarily only — a provision that anybody who’s the subject of a gender no-match or name no-match letter be immediately *fired*, with no chance to appeal.)

Nezua: Thanks for letting me know - I’ve updated the link.

Em: Yeah, I definitely had the opposite situation going: that I continued to come in my usual jeans and t-shirt pre-hormones, when I patently wasn’t going to be able to pass, was being read as “not serious” for a long time. It felt like I was just fucked around for two years until they were like “well, she’s still here, so she must be serious after all”.

It’s much the same with genderqueer here, though: while I’m not the slightest bit genderqueer, it pisses me off to no end that it’s taken as invalidating one’s need for medical treatment. It’s not even scorned as such; they just pretend it doesn’t exist, and look at you silly if it’s even discussed in passing.

And yeah, I think you’ve probably been lucky to avoid the clinic system by geography: I’ve not heard anywhere near the volume of complaints coming out of anywhere else than Monash, and some of my friends who did it independently have had great experiences. If I’d known how bad Monash was back in my teens, I’d have gone that route too. Most of the trans folks in Canberra that I know of have been going to people in Sydney to avoid Monash altogether.

I think I’ve gotten off comparatively easily, maybe cos Perth doesn’t have a clinic?

One thing that was made very clear to me, though, was that third gender or genderqueerness was not going to be tolerated. I don’t identify that way, but was still like, hmm.

That’s interesting (and fucked, obviously) what you said about butchness, since one of the things that a friend of mine said to me before my first meeting with my shrink was “don’t wear a skirt, he’ll think you’re a cross-dresser.” So there’s issues no matter how you present, I think.

You’re spot on about how fucked up the medical establishment is.

by the way. i’ve moved my blog (sidebar link). its not where at /elmachete (i put the new one in the URL field here)

be well.