TransActual
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?
I’ve known some online forms to literally only give 2 options for gender. It’s paralysing. Hovering over those two alien concepts. It’s almost worse when they add a third, ‘prefer not to say’ choice. As though anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into one of the binary options should be embarrassed about it; as if it’s something we must want to hide. No, I DON’T ‘prefer not to say’; I prefer to have my enbyness recognised.