LGBTAIitp Part 60: Still Going Strong

[Kesnit]

Boys don't cry.

I am going back to this comment because I noticed something weird when I started hormones. Before, I could cry easily. After a while (can't remember how much time) on T, I couldn't. There would be times when I would WANT to cry, but could not force the tears to come.

For example, saying "it's a girl" creates the cultural assumption of pronouns and eventual romantic entanglement with boys. It was difficult for me to understand my own gender with the experience of "but... I don't really want to be romantically involved with boys, I want to be romantically involved with women" because at the time I was discovering that side of myself, it was the mid-90s and that was still culturally far outside of the expected gender role for a woman.

I also came out in the mid-90s - and was engaged to a man when I did!

I had an interesting conversation with a lesbian in her mid-20s recently. She never had a coming out because she always knew she's gay. In contrast, at some point when growing up in the 80s, I realized gay people exist. But there were none in my very tiny hometown* and I didn't meet a gay person until I went to college. (I played on my college women's rugby team, which I was told is a anomaly because the team was "mostly straight.") It never crossed my mind that I could be a lesbian**, even though in hindsight, I could see the signs.


* In the decades since I graduated and moved away, I know of 2 other people near my age who have come out. But none of us were out in high school!

** I came out as a lesbian at age 20 and a transman at 30.

Question. What does gender therapy actually entail? Google is giving me a bunch of "how to find a gender therapist" and posts about the generalized benefits that gender therapy can provide, while I'm curious what the therapy does to help prepare you for life after you come our and/or medically transition.

The reason I was curious, though, was because I saw some virulently transphobic claptrap and started pushing back against it, only to realize that it'd be handy if I actually knew what I was talking about. I figured that there's talk therapy before anything medical happens, and was curious where I could find out more about that. Well before the medical interventions that transphobes keep fixating on.

Edit:


This, largely. Again, my curiosity comes from a place of wanting to be informed when I tell transphobes just how wrong they are.

Largely. Also what sorts of things a competent therapist would want a person to know before medically transitioning, and possibly before social transition/large scale coming out.

Basically if someone came in whose primary sources of information were transphobic fearmongering about how transgenderism expected small children and confused young adults to jump right to medical transition (generally using much coarser language), I was curious what the actual process entailed for the purpose of calling out said fearmongering.

I don't know what therapists do today since I started my transition 16 years ago. I had been seeing my therapist for other issues for a while, so adding on gender dysphoria was just another topic. She didn't have specific experience with gender issues so couldn't give me any help in that specific area. But she was able to work my gender issues in with the rest of the reasons I was seeing her.

At the time, I was living in a location that had a clinic that specialized in medical issues for the queer community. The clinic did require a therapist letter before they would let people start HRT. (Obviously, I had a letter from my long-time therapist.) They were also gatekeeping a little harder than normal at the time because a character on The L Word had recently started transition and a lot more AFAB were coming in saying they wanted to be like Max. (I never watched The L Word, and when asked if my transition had anything to do with Max, I gave the nurse practitioner a weird look.)

About 3 years after I started T, I moved to another state in order to go to law school. The school had a psychologist on-site to work with students (because law school is mentally tough). I went to her and asked if she knew any endocrinologists who take trans patients because I needed to find a doctor to prescribe my hormones. She wasn't able to point me towards one, even though I found out several years later that the local university had an active queer group and there were doctors in the area who did work with trans patients.