Hexagons [e/em/eir]

Interestingly, I’m glad I didn’t realize I was trans earlier than I did! I was like 27, partway through grad school, had good health insurance and a supportive environment (including the best partner ever, love that guy), my parents couldn’t say shit, and I’d already spent years living as a woman, interrogating what womanhood meant to me, before deciding I didn’t want it. (Don’t want manhood either, my gender is “no thank you, I’m good”.)

Sure, I maybe could have avoided some pain and awkwardness if I’d realized I was trans sooner. On the other hand, as cool as my parents are, I don’t think they would have let me transition as a kid and that would have been a whole different level of hell I don’t think I would have dealt with very well. And given the conservative area we lived in, the bullying would have been off the charts, and I was already bullied. No thanks.

Also, I kind of like the empathy and understanding of women that living for so long as one has given me. I know from personal experience what it’s like to be a woman in a male-dominated profession, and if I’d transitioned earlier I wouldn’t have had that same experience.

I’m glad I’ve transitioned, I’m much more myself now, but I don’t mind having lived 27 or so years of my life as a woman, it was alright. A mask and a performance, yes, but an enlightening one that usually wasn’t too constricting.

Good god the medical system is awful about trans stuff, isn’t it? Absolute nightmare of a system, when it would be so easy to just give hormones to people who are like, hey, my life is better with hormones.

I didn’t actually realize that was the history of these terms, thanks for explaining. I guess “gender incongruence” is better, at least it’s not saying the person experiencing it is disordered. Still though, especially this far into transition, I don’t actually feel any “incongruence”. I’d be miserable if I had to stop taking testosterone, but having experienced that feeling, I wouldn’t describe it as gender incongruence, or, frankly, even having anything whatsoever to do with gender! My body just runs better with a testosterone-dominant endocrine system.

Ah well, the medical system is what it is, and despite the fact that the terminology used for us fucking sucks, there’s not really a better option right now.

I don’t exactly disagree with you and I certainly don’t want to say your feelings about the term are invalid, they’re very valid. I’d like to be very clear that I don’t wander around calling people transsexual.

But for me personally, at least in a medical context, I think it’s better than some other options. More precisely, last year my official diagnosis for health insurance purposes was “TRANSSEXUALISM”, all caps, I still have the letter from insurance because I find it deeply hilarious for some reason I can’t quite place, probably because “transsexual” is such an outdated term. This year they updated my diagnosis to “gender identity disorder” and I gotta say, I hate that. I don’t think my gender is disordered, I’m just not cis, that’s all. I’d much rather be labeled a “transsexual” than told I have “gender identity disorder”.

It’s part of the whole medicalizing trans identities fucking sucks, but those of us who need hormones do need to interact with a healthcare system that assumes all healthcare exists because we’re unhealthy in some way. I wish my diagnosis could just be, like, “needs testosterone”.

This got long, sorry. Basically, I, personally, only speaking for myself here, would much rather be diagnosed with “TRANSSEXUALISM” than “gender identity disorder”.