James
"If I had waited, what sort of situation would I be in? Would I not be able to bare living like that? Would I be dead?"
Transitioning
I first came out by telling my then boyfriend. He did not take it very well. He pretended I did not exist for three days. We lived together. That was pretty hard for me to go through. After that, he became sexually and emotionally abusive as well. There was that to escape from. I was still living with him for six months after that, because I had nowhere to go.
I came out to my aunt afterwards and she did not take it very well either. She is Irish Catholic, like my nana. She was just like “Well, I don’t understand why you can’t be a lesbian for a while”, as if being a lesbian was a choice that I could just make. It seems ridiculous to me because she’s a psychologist, just to make it worse! I told her “I’m gay! I can't do that, it’s not who I am” and she just reacted with horror. “Why are you doing this to yourself when you could just be a straight female?” She then made me come out to my Nana, who wasn’t ready to hear it and I wasn’t ready to tell her but she (aunt) just stood at dinner table and went “James has something to tell you!” and Nana was very quite about the whole thing. I haven’t spoken to them both in 6 years after that evening. Just like how my dad doesn’t even speak to me anymore. I’m not very close to my family to be honest. My mum is sad that she lost a daughter. She did lose a daughter but she gained a son. She has still got a kid. It’s just that she hasn’t adjusted very well. I was 17 when I transitioned, and they told me “You should probably slow down now and think about not doing this while you’re so young. You could just do this later!” I would get so frustrated because I knew I needed to do this and I’m happier now. So, clearly I was right and they were wrong. If I had waited, what sort of situation would I be in? Would I not be able to bare living like that? Would I be dead?
In Oct 2012 I came to Edinburgh, it was pretty soon after I started transitioning. I started self medicating, which isn’t the best idea because my mental health did take a tank. If your hormone levels are imbalanced, it’s just going to fuck with you. It’s not good for you at all. I was self medicating for eight months before I went to Sandy-ford over at Glasgow. It took another four months before they gave me testosterone through them. So I was self medicating for almost a year. But now I’m on Nebido and my hormone levels are fine and I’m a lot less loopy than I was before. The changes also happened quicker.
Should NHS pay for me?
A lot of my struggles come from within the transgender community. I believe that to be trans, you should have gender dysphoria, which is a diagnosable condition. It’s the distress with your body or with your birth sex. In some manner, you’ve to experience some distress. I don’t believe anyone should do this if they don’t feel distressed by their birth gender because it’s horrible. Being trans is not fucking easy. People push back against people who have this state of mind. They think being trans is a state of mind. You can choose to be trans. I do not agree with that. If that’s right, it’s damaging people who have perfectly normal relationship with their bodies, they’re choosing to give themselves dysphoria by transitioning. If being trans is not a medical condition, the NHS is not required to pay for my treatment and this is something I require to be paid for. I can’t afford to pay it.
Nebido shot base price is £90 - 120. Each shot. Then you’ve got to consider doctor visits, blood tests, things like that to make my hormones in order. If it’s not considered medically necessary, it won’t be paid for. Top surgeries are £5000. Sometimes upto £10,000. If you go for genital reconstruction surgery, that’s like, a £100,000. It’s a lot of fucking money and the NHS pays for it. Doctors know that this is medically necessary and I think lot of the push back from is because people don’t realise these people genuinely need to transition in order to keep on living. There are people who proudly say that it’s not a medical condition and they want to demedicalize it. They think it’s a state of mind, state of being and all this fluffy hippie shit. I don’t agree with that. There’s something in the wiring of my brain that expresses itself in gender dysphoria which is where the majority of the people who do transition experience dysphoria when they start puberty and not when they are children.
