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LGBTQ+ Politics
LGBTQ+ Allies: I Want Your Trans Love Letters…Sent to Politicians
Your words could save our lives
My wife and I sat in the doctor’s office together, preparing emotionally for our annual checkup. We were also requesting for a renewed prescription for our HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) medications. HRT is what we each use to medically transition. Testosterone makes me look and feel more like the man that I always was. Estrogen makes my wife look and feel more like herself. We were both nervous, despite having an excellent doctor who is a trans ally. With our histories, we’ll always be nervous in doctor’s offices as trans people.
Not every trans person needs these medications to survive. Some trans people never medically transition, and they are no less trans.
I do need testosterone to survive. When I first started testosterone, I discovered what it felt like to be in my body for the first time since puberty. It had been too painful to exist in my body when I was estrogen dominant, so I escaped by disassociating most of my life away. The central metaphor from the movie The Matrix nailed how it felt for me. It was as if most of my life had been lived through virtual reality, and I suddenly knew what life was like outside of a very realistic computer game. I felt real for the very first time. I felt warm and alive.
I used to live in a state where it was essentially legal to medically discriminate against me for being trans: North Carolina. My first doctor outed me to insurance by listing my diagnosis as “gender identity disorder”, an outdated diagnosis. As a result, I soon found myself on the phone with a health insurance agent explaining to me that I had an “addiction problem” despite using my medicine exactly as prescribed. She explained that it was not ethical for the doctor to have allowed me to medically transition and that I must detransition for coverage of anything at all. I would later receive many letters explaining that my insurance company “did not discriminate” but that it would not cover asthma medication or a foot procedure because it could be related to me being trans.
For anyone who is wondering in good faith, there is a major difference between substance use disorder and needing…
