Post #1859265

(Every once in a while, in conversations about starting HRT, we tell the story of how we got the first HRT prescription and then realized how wrong it felt. We decided to write it down.) I was excited. I showed up to the appointment, I presented all the paperwork certifying that what I want was deemed real and acceptable, I got a prescription for what the doctor decided to be the right doses of the right things in the right amounts. I left and made my way home. Halfway there, I felt my excitement giving way to some sort of growing unease, followed by a realization. In that doctor's office, a power dynamic was established: between me, coming there, with hope for a future that might make more sense, with grief for a past that didn't happen - and a stranger who knew nothing about any of these things. Me, living my own life, in my own body, knowing that I must change this body to have a life I actually want to keep living - them, reading a few pages of blood test results and a psychologist's intrusions into parts of my life that were too shameful to deserve dignity and support when I was growing up, yet too controversial to deserve privacy and discretion now. Me, on the day everything changes - them, on a Tuesday at work. Me, finally allowed to request the most important thing I've ever needed - them, unable to comprehend this need, but given absolute power to grant or deny my request. Me, knowing I'll need hormones for the rest of my existence - them, casually telling me to show up again in January. By the time I got back home, I had words for my discomfort. “I do not enjoy this power imbalance." I was expected to submit to it without realizing that it's there, without ever having the space to question it, without ever thinking that it's anything but “just how things are”. "I did not consent to it.” I was never offered a chance to consent. I was not meant to have a say in this. Because of who I was, because of my gender, I was originally meant to be shamed out of existence. Now that I somehow still dared to live, I was meant to be questioned, examined and scrutinized. Finally, when all else failed, I was meant to be supervised and confined to someone else's idea of what I am. “I will not be bound by it.” I was expected to spend the rest of my life repeatedly asking strangers to have my permission to live extended by another couple of months. "I will never ask to be allowed to exist again.” I was expected to spend the rest of my life pretending that a permission which needs to be repeatedly extended is any different from a permission that can be revoked at any time. “I will exist, whether anyone else likes it or not." By the end of the week, I was figuring out my own ways of making sure I have access to HRT. By the end of the month, I cancelled the next appointment. I didn't need it anymore.