The Camera Never Lies

I bought a new phone a few weeks ago, for my business. Its main purpose will be to provide a work email terminal and a wireless hotspot, fitted as it is with a SIM carrying a generous data allowance.
It's a Chinese phone, not simply made there but from one of the well-known Chinese domestic brands, and it's a high quality piece of kit.

As you'd expect these days it's a reasonably vanilla Android, without the cumbersome overlays that dogged phones a few years ago. It has a decent enough camera, and it is this that has provided a surprise. It has a "Beauty" mode. For selfies, and it makes a few tweaks in its software. Evening out skin tones and blemishes, enlarging the eyes very slightly, placing a highlight in the hair, and reducing the chin a bit. It lies, in other words.

So I've been playing with it, and even though I know it's lying, it's a rather useful aid to someone with a nagging feeling that they still look, you know, a little bit blokey. It takes a decade or more from my age, and manages to make me look acceptably enough feminine in my presentation to warm the old cockles of the heart, or something. I know HRT has filled out my face and given me lips because I can see it when comparing with past photos, but as we all know, only we know what the bloke looked like in the mirror and we can all see him sometimes looking back at us.

We trans people have a complex relationship with our own image, and a lot of us never manage to quite come to terms with it. I've had friends who've opted for FFS when they looked fine and returned looking frightful, just to lose his shadow, but my reaction has never been that extreme. It is however nice to see something of the girl in the mirror without the aid of the phone, and then to barely see him at all in the beauty-mode-enhanced version. I am no looker and I am not fishing for compliments, this is merely to express my pleasure at reaching a milestone of the mind. If the camera is supposed to lie, then I'm happy to have found one that does.

It's a long old tunnel

    There comes a point in many blogs in this sphere when they slow down and eventually peter out. Sometimes they end abruptly when a writer decides themselves to have completed their transition, other times people just slowly move on.

    So, if you are one of the regular readers here, you'll probably have wondered about my uncharacteristic silence. I'm not the most prolific of writers here these days because I spend all my time writing for a living somewhere else, but I normally manage one or two posts a month.

    Why the gap then? I'm not leaving, no worries there. No, I had something of a shock a little while back, that has led to a surprising turn of events, and it's given me a lot of ups and downs with a bit heavier on the downs, and taken me a while to get over.

    If we rewind a couple of months or so, I wrote an official complaint about my endocrinology treatment. I've had several years of very poor service, outright neglect from my endocrinologists, and very low levels as a result. The complaint isn't the main story here, but it's relevant.

    Then, in October, I had a bombshell. My surgical referral had been declined, due to an administrative technicality over my referral not coming from a gender clinic. Worse still, they'd sat on it for five months, wasting a significant amount of time.

    I suffer from something rather annoying, atypical facial pain, or AFP. It's a chronic pain condition of the facial nerves, in my case on the left side of the face. It's an extremely intense pain, about as strong as pain gets. I'm lucky, mine responds to treatment, and it's episodic. It comes in attacks, usually triggered by a stress event, and this news triggered one of the worst attacks I've ever had. Three weeks of popping powerful nerve suppressants and painkillers like candy, before it faded away as though it had never been. I suspect if I can time an AFP attack before my GRS I won't care about any pain down there. I'm told some doctors refer to AFP as "The suicide pain" because it can be so bad it drives patients to suicide, and I can believe that. As I said, lucky mine responds to medication.

    As luck would have it I had an appointment with my counsellor about ten days after the news, at which I poured out my tale of woe. I gave her all the paperwork I had, my referrals, the refusal letter, and my written endocrinology complaint. And went into detail about the joys of AFP, which I didn't need to embellish as when an attack's underway it's pretty obvious.

    Four days later, a letter. In it were three pieces of paper. My next counsellor appointment, and two appointments with the senior gender specialist psychs. On the same day, consecutively, in December, at the time about six weeks away.

    That sounds like a reasonable result, you might say. But to anyone who knows the gender identity clinic system, it's remarkable. Such things Just Don't Happen.  Really. I had resigned myself to three six-month waits, and a huge delay. Now I have a likely referral around Christmas, and then whatever wait is needed for my surgeon. Which is another story, but one thing at a time.

    So then, what caused this? I have no idea. My nearly-8-year path through it all perhaps? The AFP? Being able to put "Journalist" under "occupation"? Or my endocrinology complaint? To be honest I have no idea, but something must have pushed the relevant button. I am aware that I am being done a significant favour even if I don't quite know why, and after four years of being messed around by other doctors I'm very grateful to this set for doing it.

    The last few weeks have not been the best, I have to say. Pain and depression are not fun. I dropped out of sight in quite a few other places too, not just here. But maybe there's a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, even if it's been rather a long one.

Footnote: I wrote a piece for nGendr about HRT and self-medication, if you are interested.

The Medics And Me

    It sometimes feels as though I never have the chance to sit down and write a personal blog piece, so much of my time being spent chasing tech stories and writing about them. And increasingly these days standing up in front of audiences of hardware hackers, and talking about stuff.

    I've just returned from a walk up the village on a warm Autumn day, past brambles bearing ripe blackberries, past leaves just showing a tinge of russet brown. I've caught the afternoon collection from the post box, and my single envelope should be on its recipient's desk on Monday morning.

    You see, I've just pressed the nuclear button. 

    What I sent off was a formal letter of complaint to the chief executive of the NHS trust whose endocrine clinic has provided my HRT over the past three years, detailing my 2.5 years on HRT, most of which were on a placebo-level estrogen dose, and almost a year of which was on effectively zero testosterone and estrogen levels. I'm within six months of surgery and am still only about two-thirds the level I should be, and I've sacked the clinic in question and found another provider who is competent. 

    The final straw came at the start of last month. I'd had a blood test which gave me 75 pMol/litre estrogen (it should be around 500), and the doctor tried to tell me that was an acceptable level.

    I acidly suggested that if it was so awesome, she should try it for herself.

    That and their losing a blood test meaning I had to have another completely unnecessary one was the final straw. I have been as understanding as I could have been, but after six months of having to badger them all the way for inadequate progress, I'm done. Their house needs to be put in order, and I hope the formal complaint will go some way towards that happening.

    The sad thing about all of this, and being discharged from my GIC a few years ago, is that I have completely lost trust in gender medics. I now go in expecting to have to fight, expecting to be messed around, and questioning everything. I've started with a counsellor at my new GIC, she's a psychiatrist in her own right, and I'm going to have to tell her I can't trust her entirely because my past experience has been universally of people like her taking things away. When I wake up eventually from my surgery, my first thought will be "Finally, they can't take this away from me!", which it shouldn't be. 

    Thanks medics, this is what seven years in the system has done for me. One thing's for certain, when the dust has settled I'm going to write about it. 

An Unexpected Transition Milestone In The Dutch Sunshine

    It's the height of summer, and in the circles I move in, that means it's hacker camp season. I think I've mentioned hacker camps before when I talked about last summer's EMF Camp, for the uninitiated they're akin to a music festival but with the music replaced by the accumulated works of a large cross-section of the hardware hacker and maker community.
    So a couple of weeks ago I made the trip to the Dutch polders for several days in the sun with Europe's hackers for SHA Camp, the latest iteration of the four-yearly Dutch hacker camp. As always it was an amazing experience, I'm still in festival comedown, and life seems like a wasteland until next year's return of EMF Camp. It was my first trip to the Netherlands, I met my friend Stace for an afternoon coffee and pancake, and it was very good to see her looking so happy. Our last face-to-face meeting had been when we were both pre-transition, so there was a lot of water under the bridge.
    At SHA Camp, I found myself unexpectedly in demand. I should explain why, as I've never really brought my everyday life and identity together with this blog because it has its origins in the days when I most definitely inhabited a closet, but now I've been full-time for so many years and am reasonably comfortable in my existence there is little harm in lifting a little of the curtain. I'm self employed, but these days a large proportion of my income comes from journalism, in particular my role as one of the editors of an extremely popular website in the hardware hacker and maker community. If you're wondering why I write a little less here than I should, it's because all my writing-fu is consumed by writing for hackaday.com, and I lack the creative energy after pouring it into that. As the only electronic engineering graduate on the planet whose literacy has been honed by years working for the dictionary you probably have on the shelf, I was uniquely qualified for this work, and have taken to it with enthusiasm over the last couple of years. I get paid to play with tech and write about it, and I still can't quite believe it.
    So as an editor of a website with a huge reach in that community, I find myself in a very novel position indeed. Mine is a name my peers have increasingly heard of, and coupled with my being a very distinctive extremely tall British trans woman, this gives me something of a personal brand in my world. I thus found myself being welcomed into hackerspace villages, shown all the cool stuff, offered cool beer under the Dutch sun. For the first time in my life, I was in demand.
    I was never one of the popular kids at school, and in general as a rather depressive and withdrawn closet trans person I have not been the life and soul of the party over most of my lifetime. So I am unused to this kind of attention, and am at a bit of a loss. It's great to be a part of the vibrant and happening community of hardware hackers and makers, and great to be accepted as who I am. Nobody here knew the pre-transition me, so all they know me only as Jenny who writes for Hackaday.
    And that touches on something else which has vexed me slightly for years. The trans community has its fair share of journalists, but am I speaking out of turn when I say that I find some of them to be a little hard work? So many trans journalists aim to become trans celebrities in their own right, to be the sole voice of what it is to be trans. They are invariably fast-transitioners who have no obstacles in their path because either they pay to go private with all the mod-cons or the NHS doctors ease their passage because they know it'll be written about, and often their perfect transitions are then presented as "the trans experience" without ever acknowledging that for most of us it's very hard work. Their whole brand is built on their being "Trans whoever", "Whoever who transitioned", or "Whoever who used to be another name".
    I'm very pleased to have avoided that, to have become a successful journalist in my field post transition, and to have done it on the strength of my skills outside being trans. I'm not "Jenny who transitioned", "Trans Jenny", or "Jenny who used to be [old name]", I'm just "Jenny who writes about tech", and I value that immensely.
    So in a way, SHA Camp represents an unexpected transition milestone. Not in any medical sense, there's further to go there, but in a socialisation sense. After quite a few years living the life and getting on with it, I've arrived and found my place completely independently of my pre-transition life.
    And it's a good life, after all that's what it's all about, isn't it.

Learning to be body-conscious

    As you get on with your life years after transition, you reach a comfortable point of socialisation that has little to do with medical matters, you are just Getting On With Things. A point at which you are left with the impression that there are few more surprises, you've got it pretty much down.
    So, boobies. It's not been something at which I've expounded on at length here, but yes, as you might expect for someone several years down the line, I have a bust. Not the world's largest, but not the most insignificant either, and even now it is showing signs that it has not yet achieved its full potential. I've been through the need a lot of padding to the need a little padding and the don't need any padding stages, and even the maybe you need a bigger bra stage. I like having them, I like the way they look, I like the way they feel, and I still find wearing a bra to be one of those experiences that just makes things feel right.
    For all that, they haven't really figured much in my interactions with the world. Never been ogled, never been shown off, never been paraded. I didn't wander around without a top on before transition, and not a lot has changed.
    It's been a little odd, one of those surprises, then, in the last month to find myself twice unexpectedly being made aware of them. The first time was for my doctor, who needed to give them a routine examination. No worries, I said, and pulled my top off. To which she reacted with horror, it seems this is something to be done on the examination table with loads of curtains around. Heaven knows why, given that we're in a private consulting room without an audience, but that's the way it is.
    And then a couple of weeks later, I went with a few friends to a small tech/activist camping weekend on an organic farm on the edge of Wales. Very basic camping, inadequate shower, earth loo you have to chuck sawdust into. Back to nature stuff, not too far away from my ethos, so not bad. There I am then, thinking I need a shower but can't face the facilities. The campsite water supply is a cattle trough, it's just after dark on a summer evening, I have the place completely to myself because everyone else is knocking back the cider, and it's sufficiently rural that I can't see any lights. Sod it, I think, I'll just wash myself at the water trough. Which I proceeded to do, a surprisingly pleasant experience. Standing there baring my meagre assets to the darkness, had it been lighter the sheep would have had an eyeful. I should be all ashamed of all this or something, shouldn't I, I thought, but the need not to be all sticky trumped the need for modesty in the face of a rural night.
    I was left pondering the whole thing, where the boundary lies between not attracting untoward attention, and being ashamed of our bodies. Of course I don't want to flash my boobs at people who will give them untoward attention, but the thought of my doctor looking at them or even their briefly seeing the cool air of a summer night in a Welsh field does not perturb me at all.
    What does perturb me is that I am expected to be ashamed of them in such harmless situations. Is it just me who stands back for a minute, and remarks "That's just not healthy!".

You don't know what you got 'till you ain't got it

It's something well-known, that before any major surgery we trans women must come off our HRT for a period of a few weeks. There's a risk of blood clots, and the effect of coming off is said to be rather difficult as you go from the hormone balance of a young person to that of a 90-year-old in a matter of days.

I can say with complete confidence that this prospect holds little fear for me, because I have been there. For quite a few months I've had next-to-no estrogen or testosterone, and it's something I only got to the bottom of a few weeks ago.

About two years ago, I started my HRT. I was already a couple of years full-time, but had delayed HRT for fertility treatment. I received my hormone patches, and eagerly applied them. In due course after about a year, I received anti-androgen injections, and awaited the changes they would bring.

People say that the switch from T to E in this way can be a rough ride, but it didn't quite work that way for me. I didn't get the hot flushes some people report, instead I got spots, lethargy, intense dysphoria again, and unexpectedly a return of some of the male aspects down there that I thought were long gone. Oh well, I thought, this is the rough ride, it'll pass.

But it didn't, in fact it got worse. And then I had a blood test. Followed by an URGENT letter from my endocrinologist, then an URGENT appointment. About a week after the last of my two trips, so about a month ago. I had precious little of either hormone, and it needed fixing urgently.

What had happened was this: they start you on a very low dose and increase it gradually. In my case, they never increased it, and I remained on the low dose. So I never had the extra E to replace my missing T, and turned into hormonally a very old lady. A state which persisted from the end of last summer until now. I've been prescribed two different upward steps of estrogen patches and have been promised more, and I've also been given industrial strength calcium and vitamin D supplements in case my bones have lost any calcium.

This was very clearly a lapse in the standards of my care, and I told them so. I've been to the NHS's complaints service, but it's worth considering what I am hoping for. I see little point in asking for a head on a plate, as this was obviously an administrative cockup.

Instead, I've asked for three things. First, an accelerated return to proper hormone levels for me. Then, a couple of things for the rest of their trans patients, now and in the future. A commitment to keeping our HRT under constant review, to make sure nobody falls through the cracks as I did. And then for each trans person to receive a clear timetable, on date X we will look at increasing your dose to achieve Y  estrogen level in your blood, and so on.

In myself, I'm feeling a lot better for finally getting the right HRT. I have several steps to go, but it's on its way. Fortunately I don't think I had any other problems for my intensive stay without HRT, it probably wasn't long enough for that.

I can however add this episode to the long list of my being messed around by medical services related to my transition. When I started all this I was a software developer, now I'm a full-time paid journalist. You can be sure I'll write about all this one day somewhere it'll matter.

Taking Back Control, transition edition

    I've been a little quiet here of late, but with good reason. When your transition is stalled for several years by circumstances beyond your control it can sometimes take a very long time indeed to get back on the treadmill. In my case I found a shortcut, and took it.
    It would normally make me a bit uneasy, taking a brief sojourn into the private sector to get something that could take me two or three more years in the NHS, but since the NHS GIC took a huge dump on me that has already cost me two or three years I feel I've served my time. So in the middle of last month I went to see a couple of private doctors to get my GRS referral letters. They are both people I've never seen before, but since they both have NHS practices I have plenty of friends who've seen them at their GICs.
    This was my first experience of private gender medicine, and all I can say is that it's a very different place from the NHS. Not necessarily better, just different. I only needed two appointments, so the cost was fairly modest in the scheme of private medicine. Enough for a significant belt-tightening for a couple of months, not enough to bankrupt me.
    What makes it different is the access. I had arranged both appointments two and three weeks in advance, by email on my mobile phone, over the course of a half hour walk in the countryside with my friend R. A quick online payment for each, and I was good to go.
    Going to each necessitated a train to London, and since I was there for a day I arranged to meet friends both times. A visit to Tim Hunkin's arcade in Holborn with the first set of friends, then a week later a rather nice cafe with friend 2. She felt she had to warn me it was very discreetly a kink cafe, but as I pointed out: "I Googled it".
    The two clinics were slightly different, one was at the private equivalent of a GP's surgery, the other at a very flashy clinic whose main business was plastic surgery. And immediately upon sitting down in the waiting room it became obvious the main difference between the private and the NHS sector. It may seem an obvious thing to say, but for the first time in my life I was sitting among those transitioners for whom transition is something that can be bought rather than something that is a drawn-out process. I'm used to the GIC waiting room crowd, a mixture of fresh-out-of-the-closet first timers and people who've been in the system for years. The emphasis there is on Real Life Experience, living in role, and due to the delays in the system the patients haven't got much else to do but get on with it. So while the first time MtFs in an NHS GIC waiting room are a little overdone on the presentation front, most of them are in jeans and trainers, lived-in everyday clothes from whatever they are doing with their lives.
    By contrast the private waiting rooms, especially the latter one, were full of high-speed transitioners anxious to get to their goal in as little time as possible. I hesitate to go into detail because it's not really appropriate, but if I say the tone was probably more Sparkle than Trans Pride Brighton you may get my meaning. I have little doubt that within very little time all of those people I saw will have had their visit to the surgeon and consider themselves fully transitioned, but will they really have socialised in the same way as the girl who's been full-time going through the process at an NHS GIC for three or four years and is only just receiving her first surgical referral? I worry that maybe they won't have.
    Both doctors were professional and straightforward, and since I had all the paperwork necessary to prove both my HRT and my time living in role I received an assent from each of them. A few weeks for the paperwork to be processed, and there they are. Back into the system. No idea when my time will come, and when it does I'll probably be rather circumspect about it online because blow-by-blow GRS accounts can be triggery as hell, but at least now I know my day will come. One day.

Complaining: it works sometimes.

   A few weeks ago I made a complaint to the BBC, after a regrettable Radio 4 report about a trans woman prisoner in which she was repeatedly misgendered. I received a reply, which I missed at the time because it went into my spam folder.

Many thanks for contacting us about PM, as broadcast on 21 March 2017.

Thanks for raising with us the pronoun we used during the item on a transgender prisoner being moved to a women's prison - we took this to the editor and those involved in the story.

You're right about the pronoun use during the item. We always seek to use the correct wording, but unfortunately that didn't happen here.

It was an oversight, for which we apologise.

We value the time you've taken to point this out and do seek to use the correct wording.

   So there we are, a straight apology. Most likely not just because of me, but because Trans Media Watch got on their case about it. But without a load of people complaining, we wouldn't be there.

   So keep complaining when you see or hear this kind of rubbish. Sometimes, it works.

Detouring the slow train

    If you are stuck in an interminable waiting list - no, if you are stuck in a holding pattern simply to be on the waiting list, what would you do if someone offered you a shortcut?
    Readers of this blog will know that I'm on the slow train when it comes to transition, nearly 4 years full time and 7 years in the system, but discharged from the GIC because after 18 months fighting awful treatment by my then employer I wasn't ready to go forward for surgery. Having sought re-admission to a GIC I've subsequently found out that it's likely to be 18 months before I see anyone and then another year before I have my referral letters, so getting on for 3 more years to surgery. Naturally I'm about as pissed off and dejected as it's possible to get. Knowing that with 4 years behind you you've made a far better job of a social transition than many of those who overtook you in their race for surgery doesn't help when you're left in the wilderness.
    So back to the question, if someone offered you a shortcut, would you take it? And if that someone was your doctor, your GP, especially would you take it? Hell yeah!
    I'm not going to go into the gory details, but there is something I can do that will save me a lot of waiting, which my GP tells me will let me back into the system by a different route. It's not some magic fix for those at the start of the process who are desperate to go faster so don't bother asking, instead it's for the rare and unusual cases like me who are stuck, but stuck very near the end of the medical road.
    It does however involve a short detour into the private sector, seeing a different set of doctors, and forking out a moderate amount of cash. Not new car levels of cash, or even slightly new car levels of cash, but let's say decent quality older car levels of cash. Cash I can afford, but would prefer not to waste.
    It's risky, in that it depends on my GP's say-so. If he decides to forget the path he laid out for me, then it's wasted money. Wait the 3 years, or fork out new car levels of cash for private surgery. Which I could raise if I perform financial back-flips, but would prefer not to.
    In Hollywood films there seems often to be a mysterious plot twist in which a choice is offered to the protagonist through which they can continue their boring life or enter a course of excitement and danger. Looks as though that just happened to me.
   

Another day, another BBC complaint

     Another day, another BBC complaint. This time a story on Radio 4 about a convicted rapist who transitioned in jail. An unpleasant person, but a regrettable slip in broadcasting standards.

Yesterday the PM programme carried a piece about a rapist who has transitioned from male to female while in jail. She has completed entirely the medical process and obtained a gender recognition certificate, so she is both physically and legally female. Yet your report persistently referred to her as "He" and as "Him", and did not acknowledge at all that she is now a woman.

This is highly offensive to all transgender people because when it happens so blatantly on as respected a national broadcaster as the BBC it devalues their claim to their gender. The person in question is an extremely unpleasant criminal, yet her unpleasantness does not mean that the BBC should legitimise misgendering of transgender people. The vast majority of other transgender people who are not criminals will suffer when transphobes will use the BBC's legitimising to justify misgendering them.

Your reporters let their distaste for the individual concerned cloud their judgement when it comes to your organisation's diversity commitments towards a vulnerable minority. Their report came perilously close to hate speech, she is an unpleasant person because she is a convicted rapist and not because she is transgender. This represents a regrettable dip in standards from the BBC and from Radio 4, a station that already seems to have a problem when it comes to transgender people.

She has become a woman, and her pronouns are she and her. Please do not forget that.

I doubt it'll get anywhere. But somebody has to.

Breaking down those walls of stone

    If someone had told me I'd see over forty transgender people in a room expressing something approaching agreement, I'd never have believed it. We are by our nature a very diverse grouping, you might say a broad church. You could safely expect an argument over whether the sky is blue on a clear day.
     But yesterday it was something of a surprise to see just that. Stonewall, the national LGBT campaigning charity, were holding one of a series of consultations on a document intended to lay out their trans strategy now that they are embracing the T in LGBT.
    Stonewall, you see, are an organisation with a bit of a problematic history in these matters. In the past, they have quite happily pretended to be LGBT when in fact they were more LGB, or a bit more accurately, LG. If you're being brutally honest, LG. Even LGGGGGGGGGGG, some people will tell you, such was the attitude of the coterie of middle aged gay men that once held sway at its helm. They'd take money on an LGBT ticket and even talk to politicians on that front too, but when it came to the crunch they'd throw us under the bus every time. Thus you'd see its name sometimes written as "Sonewall", because there's no T in it, or even occasionally "Sonewa", because at times there could be precious little L either. Not an organisation that had much trust from within our community
    A couple of years ago against this backdrop along came a new Stonewall director, Ruth Hunt. She immediately set about refocusing Stonewall to be genuinely LGBT, and to facilitate this she had the organisation recruit a trans steering committee. This committee put together the draft document, and yesterday's event was one of a series in which they placed it before the trans community.
    It was a document into which a lot of effort had been put, and it shows how much they have changed. In front of us we had a well-thought-out enunciation of trans rights and experiences, both as they are and as they should be. And here we come to the agreement between the attendees, while there was plenty to tweak around the edges the tone of the document was as far as I could see universally approved.
    Since I was there wearing my trade union hat I made a few suggestions on workplace rights. I always feel as though I've said too much or even made a fool of myself at these occasions, let's hope I made a valid contribution. We'll see the completed document in the coming weeks, and then its contents will be the subject of Stonewall's campaigns on our behalf.

    A long day involving a sprint across London between connecting Tube stations to get back home for another engagement in the evening meant I couldn't afford to hang around and socialise. My fellow attendees were a diverse bunch among whom was my friend Paula, and there could have been a lot to chat about had I had the time.
    I'm still beset by the crushing onslaught of my recent GD relapse, which isn't ideal when you're in the icily polite loneliness of a packed British commuter train. A self-important middle aged lawyer kept trying to invade my space with his elbow, then fell asleep and toppled onto me. I proceeded to invade his space with my elbow, placing him upright and awake in no uncertain terms.
    Before my evening engagement, an online conference for one of my current part-time employers, I went to the toilet in their office building. In the mirror, despite all the annoying stuff, I saw an image I liked.
    Pictures of me are not common, so it was the first time I'd been tempted to take a selfie in many years. It shows how far I've come, even if in some ways I'm no further forward.

What a difference a few years makes

    So yesterday morning, there I was in my doctor's waiting room. I've gone back seven years, asking to be referred to a gender clinic again. Only of course it's rather a different situation, I'm asking to be referred back to the clinic. Not the same clinic, in the intervening years another one has opened up a lot closer to home.
    Into the doctor's office, and explain why I was there. Discuss where I am in the process and where I want to be, and that I need to be referred with my referral stating very clearly that I'm there only to get surgical referrals, I have served my time.
    The difference between now and seven years ago was this. Back then my GP, a different one from today, had that rabbit-in-the-headlights look. Transgender people were something of an unknown to him. Yesterday, completely different. I went in expecting to have to explain the whole process, and was pleasantly surprised to find this GP fully clued-up. We're coming out of the woodwork in huge numbers, and of course the professionals have had to learn about us. It would be difficult to explain to a cis person how positive this is, but it's evidence of an inexorable process. A decade or so ago you would never have met a transgender person in an average small British market town, now we're part of things. The dinosaurs in the media who still have a go at us on a regular basis can't fight that, when their readers all know people like us it becomes ever more difficult to demonise us.
    It'll be quite a few months before I get an appointment, and thereafter there will be more delay as I traverse the final few hurdles. But I'll get there.
    One thing's for certain though, I'll heed the advice a friend gave me quite a few years ago. Transition, she said, doesn't end with any particular medical procedure. It never ends, and there is always more to learn.
 

BBC Transgender Kids programme: the second salvo.

    After the BBC transgender kids documentary a few weeks ago I made a complaint, and received a standard cut-and-paste response that was breathtaking in its lack of saying anything other than they were blameless.
    Though it's likely to be a futile effort, I've made a response, which I've pasted below.

Your response to my earlier complaint did not even try to address the subject of the complaint, instead it was a content-free cut-and-paste form response full of meaningless platitudes and bogus half-truths.
You did not address my question as to why the programme failed completely to engage with the UK medical establishment. Perhaps it is because in the time since the broadcast the various medical bodies involved have come together and issued a statement condemning utterly the practices put forward in the programme, and you knew that they would not have supported the view you were trying to put forward.
You maintain the pretence that the programme presented a balanced argument, while in practice a simple analysis with a stopwatch reveals a huge time advantage to the views of Zucker and his supporters.
You justify the programme by saying that you had input from opponents of Zucker, and from families with transgender children. Why is it then that the activists and families involved are now saying that the producer of this programme misled them as to its content? Surely that is against whatever rules you are supposed to abide by.
Continuing to pretend that this programme was without fault is putting the BBC on the wrong side of history. Trying to ignore the objections of the transgender community will not make us go away and will not help you. We are the victims and survivors of abuse like that practiced by doctors such as the ones you featured, and we will not stand idly by and see it put onto a new generation. Transgender youth support organisations are already reporting an upsurge in hate incidents as a result of this programme, when the first young trans person has committed suicide because of it what are you going to say to the transgender community then? You can count on it, we won't let you get away with a cut-and-paste answer.

    These things are an exercise in postbag size and in capturing their resources. When they get a large number of complaints, they are forced to take notice, and the aim of our community was to make this one of the most complained about shows of the year. It is likely that my reply will be printed and filed, but will effectively go in the round file. However it's worth doing, because if enough of us follow suit it adds to that complaint volume figure and causes their complaints department to have to work extra hard. We'll see what the coming weeks and months bring on this front, the BBC can be rest assured they haven't seen the last of us.

Freight train

    I'm told that this is something that comes eventually to most of us in this sphere, the point at which your transition comes to a head and it hits you like a freight train that you need to move, and quickly. After a year or two settling down and reinventing myself following the turmoil of my first year after going full-time, it came to me. Going back seven years, losing the ability to sleep, hit again by wave after wave of dysphoria as though I was still hidden in the closet.

    Yes, it's taken a few months, but the anti-androgens have hit with a vengance. All the good stuff is accelerating, building on all the estradiol patches of the previous year or so with much nicer skin, less body hair and a pleasing resumption of breast growth. But I didn't expect to be hit in this way, and to be honest I'm rather embarrassed about it. I've always pursued a "Better slow and right than quick and wrong" approach to transition, and it has stood me in good stead. It's allowed me to build a successful life as a woman unencumbered by other considerations, and I strongly believe it's given me an advantage in that I have less baggage than some contemporaries I've observed.

    So I'd always taken a view that some time in the future when I was ready I'd go forward and talk to the medics about surgery, but there was no point in pushing it if things might go awry. I imagined it would probably be another year maybe, and I'd get on with my life. It therefore feels a little silly to be reduced to a gibbering eejit by it all, I didn't think I was like that!

    Normal service will be resumed. I've made an appointment to go back and talk about it all, then no doubt I'll see psychs and all sorts again before one day taking a trip to Brighton, or West London. It'll be a couple of years, plenty of time to regain my composure.

    I feel as though I have gone back a year or two though, I thought I'd mostly dealt with this kind of dysphoria. That's weird!

The BBC respond to the transgender kids complaint

   I've had a response to my complaint over the trans kids documentary. Well, when I say "response", I really mean "Cut and paste a pretty meaningless response which says in effect 'we did nothing wrong'.".

Thanks for contacting us regarding ‘Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?’ broadcast on the 12 January.

We understand you had concerns with the programme.

With a rise in the number of children being referred to gender clinics, this programme sensitively presented different views from experts and parents on gender dysphoria in children.
For more than thirty years Dr Kenneth Zucker ran Canada's biggest child gender clinic and was considered a recognised authority on childhood gender dysphoria until he lost his job. He believes he was fired for challenging the gender affirmative approach.

This documentary examined Zucker's methods, but it also included significant contributions from his critics and supporters of gender affirmation, including transgender activists in Canada and leading medical experts as well as parents with differing experiences of gender dysphoria and gender reassignment.

Thanks again for contacting us with your views.

Kind Regards

BBC Complaints Team

    I feel as though I'm repeating a trade union speech I gave at a Pride a couple of years ago when I say that we're the last minority they think they can legitimately have a go at. You can't take a pop at ethnic minorities any more, Jewish people are off limits, gay people can't be touched, and women are beyond reproach. But transgender people? Hey, yeah, come on and weigh in, nobody will touch you for that!

    It can't continue, we can't let it.

    Last Saturday I was lucky enough to see Helen Belcher from Trans Media Watch speak to Swindon Transgender Group. She covered several aspects of her work as both a trans campaigner and parliamentary candidate, but as you'd imagine the documentary occupied a significant proportion of the time. It's safe to say that the transgender community will not let this one rest at merely a meaningless email response, and that awkward questions will be asked and BBC executives will be held to account.

    When I say I may soon be spending an evening standing on a pavement in Central London, it's not what you think. Last time we had a demo on this theme, it got results.

Complaint to the BBC re Transgender Kids programme

    The BBC is a respected national broadcaster with a long record of balanced reporting and quality programming. If something comes up on the Beeb the chances are you can trust it, a reputation it has won over many decades of cherished independence from government through its unique trust status.

    Sadly though, even the BBC sometimes falls short of its usually impeccable standards. Yesterday they aired a programme: "Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?", which presented a very one-sided view of the treatment of transgender young people drawing largely from the input of the discredited Canadian Dr. Kenneth Zucker. I was not going to watch it because I thought it might be too triggery, but I decided this morning I had to catch it on iPlayer because sticking one's head in the sand is never the best option.

    It does not, I am afraid to say, make inspiring viewing. I saw a very one-sided portrayal of transgender medicine for young people which presented Zucker as an expert beyond reproach and failed completely to feature the professionals who work with young transgender people here in the United Kingdom. The BBC has failed, and they have done so badly.

    For what good it will do, I have submitted a complaint, which you can find below. If you saw the programme and found it objectionable I suggest you do the same, and if you haven't seen it and live in the UK I suggest you find it on iPlayer and give it a look. it's too important to ignore. Handy details about making a complaint have been collated by UK Trans Info if you wish to complain as well, perhaps we can make this one of those shows with so many complaints that the BBC have to make amends.

Here's the text of my complaint. Write your own, don't copy mine word-for-word.

This programme relied heavily on the input of Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a discredited doctor from Canada who was removed from his post due to his use of conversion therapy methods which caused untold damage to his patients. It presented him as a foremost expert in his field, which given that he has been so comprehensively discredited is hardly accurate today, and it glossed over the excesses of his clinic's work. 

It did not feature the providers of gender clinic services to trans children here in the UK such as the Tavistock Clinic, nor did it feature the work of support organisations who are active in the field such as Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence, or GIRES. The majority of the example patients featured in it were not from the UK, and the view it gave of how youngsters with gender dysphoria should be treated was in sharp contrast to either that of the professional bodies in the field, WPATH, or the NHS. 

It treated adult activists in the transgender community as dangerous meddlers in the treatment of others when in fact they are the survivors of exactly the kind of abuse that doctors like Zucker practice, and which the programme promoted. 

This programme was nothing short of an outright attack on a vulnerable and marginalised minority, and in particular on members of that minority who are too young to speak for themselves. Transgender people have a significantly higher incidence of suicide than the general population, and because of attitudes like those presented as mainstream by the programme that suicide figure is increased. People kill themselves because of the views the BBC is promoting with programmes like this one. 

The BBC should present an abject apology for this dangerous and objectionable piece of programming, and immediately take steps to rectify it by presenting the views of real experts in the field from the United Kingdom, who do not have episodes like Zucker's in their pasts.

Edit: This isn't the first time...