TransActual
What I have learnt through my experiences as a disabled trans person is to work out what I need to say before going to medical appointments. I try to plan and write down things in advance, this helps my anxiety and means that I do not forget what I needed to say, and important things are not missed.
The first barrier I faced being trans was over my use of contraceptives to suppress my periods. I had been doing this for years, but during a regular check-up a nurse decided that, due to my health issues, I was too high risk to take the oestrogen-based pill. I was upset and tried to explain that I couldn’t deal with having periods and being on a less reliable birth control pill, but she did not seem to understand.
I think no one teaches you how to be a patient, or how to advocate for yourself. It’s important to know yourself and your body and even do a bit of research before you go to an appointment.
While being treated with legitimacy and validity is rare in a medical field and legal system that doesn’t recognise us, there are those who will listen. And it couldn’t be more liberating.
I have friends beside me who know me mostly just by my name, and a loving partner who sees me beyond such labels and celebrates me for who I am. And when I am pushed towards the feeling that my lack of pronoun favouritism renders me somehow invalid or incomplete, these social supports are enough for me.
I sit here with so much more knowledge about my culture and my religion. Hinduism has a wide and varied history and mythology full of queer figures. This is a religion of genderflipping deities and queer heroes. It is a religion which recognises that people aren’t always male or female; there is a ‘tritiya prakriti’, a third nature. Which then begs the question, where did all that pressure to conform to normative society come from? What caused my self-hatred and denial and hurt for all those years? Why did I have this idea that I couldn’t be Hindu and queer?