So today I popped into my doctor's surgery to get my latest Nebido shot. I get these every 10-12 weeks, and the results so far have been incredible. In just one year, I have gone from looking and sounding completely female, to looking and sounding completely male (as long as I keep my underwear on, of course. Ah well.)
Anyway, so I went to the Receptionist and gave her my name to check in for my appointment. Now, my name is fairly long so it requires quite a bit of typing, so she made the sensible decision to search for me by just typing in the first few letters of my surname.
She then looked perturbed, and sat staring at her monitor for a while trying to work out what was wrong.
She then said to me: "I don't know what's going on here, but the computer says that you're a lady!".
Shit. Shitshitshitshitshit.
So I started frantically thinking: is there something wrong with my records? Is there a box I forgot to tick? When I officially changed my gender I went back from my married surname to my 'maiden' surname, but is there any way she could associate my surname with my previous (female) name? Surely I've completed all the paperwork and the computer should clearly list me as male?
So she asked me to spell out my surname, which I did... and it turned out she'd simply misspelled the first few letters and had come up with a completely different patient's records. My records are absolutely fine and there's nothing there to associate me with ever having been female... unless, of course, you were to trawl back through my history and notice that I have, y'know, actually given birth and stuff.
This particular Receptionist is actually very lovely and bubbly, so I joked around with her, raising the pitch of my voice and saying "Well, I could change my name to that other patient's name if that helps!" and so on... but bloody hell, of all the patients to make that kind of mistake with, it had to be a transgender guy who in actual fact was previously listed on their computers as a 'lady', didn't it?
But there was a delightful aspect to this story; one which I'll definitely want to share with my gender therapist when next I see her. Apart from that initial internal monologue of trying to think whether there could be anything on my records linking me to being female, I didn't actually find it upsetting. Now, a year ago this kind of misgendering would've been enormously upsetting and invalidating for me; I would've been traumatised. But I've had the privilege of passing as male for about 8 months now, and I've become so accustomed to it that I now hardly ever experience that awful social dysphoria that used to plague my daily life. And I didn't truly experience it today either. I've come to expect being read as male at all times, and have become confident that I am completely justified in expecting this, so whenever a little blip like this occurs I no longer feel invalidated; I just wonder whether I've forgotten to tick some box somewhere. This is a major improvement in my life.
As a bit of added fun, when I got to work I had a chat with a heavily pregnant colleague of mine who told me that she's been off work with a cold for the past couple of days, and it's been a bit of a pain because she's unable to take anything. I had to bite my tongue to not say "Oh, yes - I know exactly what you mean" because of course I do know exactly what she means. I've been pregnant twice, and have been ill during those pregnancies (and unable to take any medication) - but she has no way of knowing that, and I'd rather she didn't find out. ;)
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