Somewhere between two small towns (and a lot of more villages), my brain slowly began to realise what I had experienced that morning. It started with packing my bag, driving to the main station and from there my reality enfolded itself into a two-hour nightmare of cancelled or delayed and overcrowded trains, discussions with taxi drivers and an almost missed appointment with an incredible stoic psychologist. While I was trying to recover from an all-or-nothing sprint in the corridor of the practice, the professor called me in and my prepared arguments were gone as if at the push of a button, my inner voice sang in my head:
His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti
He’s nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready
To drop bombs, but he keeps on forgettin‘ […]
Great, was there a way to win his expert opinion for hormone replacement therapy through a one-sided rap battle? I couldn’t think of any precedent. The psychologist started with the same questions as in the first meeting: family relationships, friendships, studies and part-time jobs dragged out the time. My brain was now much more interested in the wall of shelves with thousands and thousands of books than in the person I was forced to be in… „Last time you told me that you were 99.9% sure. Does that mean you have still 0.1% of doubt? I was about to interrupt him, but he ended his part of the speech with „Or has something changed?“
This question brought me back to reality within seconds. I was supposed to explain myself again, my feelings, my thoughts, me being trans and something about that was suddenly fundamentally bothering me. Maybe it was the fact that I had been trying to get to the neighbouring town for several hours, maybe it was the discussions with the taxi drivers about whether they would take a five-minute journey or whether I could pay by debit card, maybe it was the three nervous breakdowns I had since leaving my flat, but something inside me refused to answer this question in a friendly way.
The guiding principle that my mum had tried to instil in me to always smile and be charming had disappeared. He wanted to know if I had doubts?! Did he really want to know?! He really dared to ask me again?! Well, if that was the case, I decided, to not just tell him about my doubts, but what I thought about the whole questioning process. Simply because I wanted him to know how it made me feel… suddenly I stopped worrying about possible causalities or consequences:
„You know?”, I started slowly, „this is getting very philosophical, but when can we be sure that we really know something? Besides, you know what annoys me? As a trans person, you can’t have any doubts, you always lose. Either you cater to the media cliché of an eternally suffering trans person who hates their own body and is just waiting for treatment or you stand by your complicated perception of your reality with all the happy and all the unhappy moments in your life, about your trans being and run the risk of not getting an expert opinion because a psychologist thinks this person suffers too little, so they can’t be trans. There are certainly trans people who suffer incredibly, but I know just as many trans people who live quite happy lives, but just prefer their appearance to match their inner life. And no, of course, they have to pretend for years, especially in front of various medical staff, because happy trans people can’t exist.“
I took a deep breath, I saw him start to speak and interrupted him again, I didn’t care what he had to say, it was my turn now, he had asked for it, so now he had to listen to everything that I wanted to say.
„If I realise in a few years or decades that perhaps it wasn’t the right decision, then at least I know that I tried. At least I was allowed to choose how I want to spend my life. Until now, I never had a choice, I was simply born in a body that was given a label based on external characteristics that only I have ever questioned. The only thing I want and feel I am entitled to is autonomy over my own body and what I want to do with it regardless of the opinions of unknown third parties. You know what: I know that they are now deciding not to give me an expert opinion. Maybe you already have, simply because something about me doesn’t suit you. Because yes, my next year will depend on your decision, but then perhaps you should also know that even if you have already decided not to issue me with an expert opinion, I will continue my search. I’ve already been turned down once and I’ve been down for that very reason and I’ve got back up and I’m not going to stop looking for a way to get this hormone replacement therapy.“
I stopped; I had run out of arguments. Although there was no spaghetti in my stomach at that moment, the muesli from breakfast was there. Angry and confused that I had gone through with my little speech, I stared at him impassively. No reaction from him, absolutely nothing, not even a twitch of the corner of his mouth. Instead, he looked at me calmly over the rim of his glasses. Then he looked at his clipboard and then back at me, far too relaxed as he replied: „In the end, it really is your decision, I can’t take that away from you. I’ll issue you with the referral and let the endocrinologist decide what to do with you.
After a moment of silence, he took my still slightly constipated me back to the most desolate corridor of all corridors, nodded briefly to me and closed his office door behind him. I made my way home. I wasn’t sure whether I felt incredibly empty or whether I just felt everything at the same time and therefore couldn’t grasp anything concrete. Somewhere in the back of my head, that nasty little voice came back with: „So, now you’ve got the report, but was the drama in there really necessary? It’s not as if you’ve started a revolution…“
It was true, I hadn’t, and I was sure that my pseudo-rap solo wouldn’t change anything about his occupation, but it had been a desperate attempt to retain some dignity. Human dignity is sacrosanct and retaining dignity in a trial that categorized you as a victim of a medical condition was incredibly difficult. Luckily the healthy part of my brain hummed back to the nasty voice: I shot the sheriff, but I didn’t shoot no deputy…
The sun came out from behind the clouds, and I thought so that’s what it meant to be structurally discriminated against. It wasn’t always swearing words, misgendering, deadnaming or insults because I no longer fitted into the feminine or masculine boxes at first glance. No, it was so much more subtle.
It was the fact that strategic obstacles were placed in the way of strategic paperwork that built on each other. If you missed a deadline and an important document was missing, you had to interrupt the administrative process chain and start again from the reset point.
The circumstances were that there were only a few practices nationwide that specialised in trans people and that not only the waiting times were incredibly long, but also the distances. The longer the journey, the more likely it was that something would get in the way, especially if Deutsche Bahn (our national railway company, it is most often as bad as people say) was involved. But above all, the reason was that you had to justify yourself to everyone and everything, first to yourself and then to others for the rest of your life.
It felt like a never-ending war… although it wasn’t. It was simply going to a psychologist. Moreover, most people in the world aren’t waking up with the thought: Today I want to specifically harm trans people. Instead, the structure of harm is called a systemic issue, but even today as I write these lines, I still feel like I could never let my guard down. I felt forced to be sceptic of strangers and I didn’t like this feeling.
Funnily enough, I have never felt so stigmatized in my life before. Not when I had to rely on technology to read long texts for university due to my reading and spelling difficulties, nor when I had to sit next to my friends and watch them finish their meals due to my inability to eat with them because I am a celiac or not when I had to stay at home because my parents couldn’t afford to my for my school trip. Those were all issues, with which I found a coping mechanism. Transphobia was something else, it felt different, maybe because it was new…? But what if I was just really a confused girl who lived in a deep hole of internalized misogyny? But calling myself a confused girl although I wasn’t… wasn’t that misogynist itself?
Suddenly I felt incredibly exhausted, in the end, it seemed, that trans people were trapped between the fronts and they were prone to lose.