Diagnosis

I'd heard through the grapevine that getting help for gender dysphoria is a painfully drawn-out process, particularly here in the UK with the bloody NHS. Once I'd come to the conclusion that I couldn't cope with it any more and that I needed to do something about it, I did some research on Teh Interwebz and saw that, in my area at least, you could expect to wait 18 weeks to 6 months in order to start the process. According to what I read, it goes a little like this:

1. Go to your GP, telling them you feel you were born in the wrong body. If you're lucky, they might refer you on; otherwise, wait for a second or third opinion before you're referred to the next stage, which is
2. Your community mental health team. Before anyone can do anything about this condition, you need to speak to a local psychiatrist who will poke around in your head to ensure there are no underlying mental health issues which could be misattributed as gender dysphoria. If you satisfy this local psychiatrist, you then get referred on to 
3. One of the gender health clinics in the UK, of which I believe there are only 3, 2 of which are in England. They'll then start counselling you over a long period to help you deal with your dysphoria, analyse its cause, and determine the best course of treatment, which may include
4. Real-life experience (living in your preferred gender role for one or two years, depending on the counsellor)
5. Hormones
6. Name change
7. Surgery of some sort
8. Full SRS surgery, if it comes to that.

The time period between each stage is, according to our local health authority, that infamous 18 weeks to 6 months.

So I saw my GP in June and broke down in tears in her office, explaining how I'd always known for as long as I can remember (since the age of 5) that I'm not female, and how desperately uncomfortable it's always made me feel. I explained how recent events have meant that I'm no longer able to tolerate living this way, and the thought of eventually becoming a 'little old lady' (within the next 20 years, holy shit!) fills me with such abject despair that it's making me feel suicidal. And I'm not being melodramatic there: I would quite literally rather top myself than find myself stuck in an old people's home wearing a horrible flowery dress, having the nurses call me 'dear'. The very thought fills me with dread and desperation.

Luckily my GP already has a couple of transgender patients that she'd referred on to the next stage, so she knew exactly what to do. She wrote to the local mental health team on my behalf to start the ball rolling. And I went home pleased (and frightened) that I'd actually finally pulled my finger out to do something about my lifelong difficulties, and sat back to wait... you guessed it... 18 weeks to 6 months for my appointment with a local psychiatrist.

So imagine my surprise when an appointment came through for early August for me to see a member of the local mental health team to get the ball rolling! So soon!

So I went along to the appointment, which was a week before we were due to go on holiday. (To Cornwall. In a fucking caravan. Again.) The lady I spoke to - one of the Community Mental Health Nurses - basically does 'mental triage' to determine whether the patient is indeed a suitable candidate for gender counselling, or whether there are any other underlying mental health issues that need to be investigated. 

In a very gruelling hour, I told her how I've always felt very uncomfortable in my own skin for as long as I can remember, and how it always jars me when anyone uses female pronouns with me, calls me a woman/lady, or even uses my given name. It shakes me every single time, and it always has. I'd thought this would improve with age, but this is my 41st year and I haven't grown out of it yet, so I guess it's not a phase I'm going through.

I told her how I used to run around topless & barefoot as a kid (usually wearing nothing but my underwear and a pair of shorts), and how I was so happy at age 6 when my best friend's mother made me a bikini in my favourite colour (blue!) because it meant I could whip off the top as soon as my parents were distracted and swim in what effectively looked like a Speedo.

I told her how I was utterly devastated when my mother spotted (because I was running around topless, natch) that I'd started developing 'beestings' at age 7 and she told me I'd have to wear a top all the time for the rest of my life. I felt so terribly betrayed by my own body. I'd been playing along with all the other boys up to that point, but now I had to wear a shirt and be this weird 'girl' thing that everyone kept insisting I was supposed to be. And now that everyone could see I was a 'girl', the boys simply didn't want to play with me any more.  :'-(

I told her how by the age of 9 I had a fairly decent set of proto-boobs growing and my hips had started to spread. I started feeling desperately miserable and felt such intense despair every time I saw myself in the mirror and saw how my disgusting breasts & hips were distorting the shape of my clothes and making it very, very obvious to anyone who looked at me that I was 'female'.

I told her how by the time I was 12 my periods had started - another betrayal - and my sense of futility and despair of my own body was reaching critical mass. I stood up and demonstrated how I used to walk down the street at that age, clutching the bottom of the front of my T-Shirt and pulling down hard on it to flatten my chest as much as possible. I said that I noticed this only earned me even more attention from men driving past me as they were wondering what the hell I was doing, so I then came up with a slightly better coping strategy of wearing clothes that were 2 or 3 sizes too big for me so that I could hunch my shoulders forward & hide my hated features in a big, baggy top.

I told her how the rest of my teenage years were spent in miserable resignation that this was just the way my body was, and as long as I didn't actually have to look at myself in the mirror I could just about get through the day.

Then I told her how, at age 19, I was leafing through the latest issue of People magazine looking for yet another ridiculous story to give me a laugh ("Elvis is the father of one of my identical twins but not the other one!") when I stumbled upon a story of a Bond girl who had been born a boy.

Caroline Cossey was 'outed' by the media in the UK when she had a small walk-on role in For Your Eyes Only, and someone who knew told someone else that she used to be a man and a huge scandal erupted. The story was syndicated and People picked it up... leading to me reading it that one fateful night.

Caroline said how she'd always felt uncomfortable in her (male) body and had always felt more like a girl, but it wasn't until she was a young adult that she heard about transsexualism and decided to have a sex change. She then went on to talk about some of the injustices that affected trans people in those days, such as being unable to marry and being forced to attend prison (if arrested) with people of your birth gender. She fought hard for trans rights, and is an absolute hero... but until that fateful night when I read her story, I'd never heard of trans people and I had no idea that anything could be done about it. I remember reading this article, and by the time I was halfway through I was literally shaking. I realised that this woman was going through exactly what I was going through (although from the opposite direction) and that her experiences so clearly mirrored mine that I finally understood exactly what had been wrong with me my entire life. I knew then & there that I'm transgendered and that I would benefit from doing something about it.

However, there was a problem.

I was living in South Africa at the time, and South African society is very macho and patriarchal... and they do tend to bully mercilessly any men below a certain height. Many white South Africans have Dutch ancestry, which means that they're generally very tall, so there are a lot of tall men to pick on the smaller ones. I had a male colleague who was 5'2 - two whole inches taller than me - and he suffered so much incessant bullying in his everyday life due to his height that he bought himself a monster truck so that he would at least feel tall on the roads.

So I knew it probably wouldn't be a good idea to transition in South Africa. And anyway, my mother was suffering with cancer at the time so my life was very stressful; I resolved to just put my epiphany on the back burner until I could deal with it later.

And then later came. My mother eventually died of cancer four years after I realised I'm trans (I never told her). I struggled to deal with my grief, but I eventually worked through the worst of it & figured out what I needed to do next. I decided to adopt my then-11-year-old brother, pack my bags, and move back to England to start afresh.

I'd only been living in England for less than 3 months when I met Hubby for the first time. And he was such a nice guy, and I fell so hopelessly in love with him, that I decided to marry him, settle down & have some kids. I'd always wanted these things despite my gender dysphoria, and I found myself in a position to try them out & see how things went.

Things went OK at first but I never got rid of that constant sense that I'm in the wrong body. Actually, scratch that: it's not actually my body that's wrong, it's society's insistence that I have to be a certain gender with strict constraints on my interests and behaviour that is wrong. I could probably live this way for the rest of my life (provided I don't need to look in mirrors and I can bath really quickly) as long as society wouldn't try to insist on me using female toilets, female hospital wards, female changing rooms at the gym (including being forced to see naked or topless women in the changing rooms - yuk!),  and as long as society would stop presuming that I want everything to be pink and frilly and that I want to watch chick flicks & read chick lit. Ugh! Why can't society just back the fuck off and allow people to behave how they want to behave and be interested in what they are interested in, provided nobody is getting hurt?!

So the Community Mental Health Nurse listened respectfully and sensitively to my story, asked me some probing questions to check the validity of my statements, and then said that she'd be more than happy to refer me to the psychiatrist for a formal diagnosis. She then wished me luck on my journey.

That was less than a month ago. So imagine my further surprise when I very quickly received a follow-up appointment with the psychiatrist, which was held this Tuesday?

He went over the nurse's report from our meeting, and he asked me several in-depth questions to ensure I was really a genuine case... and then he said he'd be very happy to refer me to one of the gender clinics for proper treatment. He reckons the wait for this will be something in the region of 3 months, so there's a possibility that I might take the first little baby steps towards transitioning before the end of this year.

Oh, and he did indeed confirm the diagnosis. I have now been formally diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder, by a consultant psychiatrist. This whole thing is getting more real by the day.

And as for that People magazine article about Caroline Cossey? I still have it. It made such an impression on me that I ripped it out of the magazine and put it in a safe place, eventually bringing it over to England with me. I've held on to it for 22 years. And if/when I transition, I'm going to have it framed.