The other day the National Post ran a front-page piece about how people can come out as transgender and within a few months get “The Surgery” which they frame as dangerous and reckless and some other malarky. I skimmed the article because it made me mad and quite frankly, I don’t have time to read something as slopshod as the one they published.
It’s part of a salvo that’s been in the Canadian media recently, with pieces at the CBC, CTV and the Post suggesting trans people either transition too fast, too young or just need to chill out already, even as stuff like Quebec’s Bill Two - which would put both sex and gender on ID and all but out any trans person who hasn’t had GRS - is proposed by governments.
But it’s not my intention to do a point-by-point, Fire Joe Morgan style rebuttal of the Post piece. For one, I don’t think I’m especially qualified. And two, I care about my time (and yours!) enough that I don’t feel like giving it that attention. Instead, I want to elaborate about my experiences on the road to Gender Reassignment Surgery, which was not a mere process of months, but instead took about two years.
So first things first: I started hormones on Halloween 2018. Before that, I’d spoken to my doctor about taking them back in the summer and there was a bunch of hoops to jump through, both in the form of questions about how serious I was about transitioning and in medical tests I had to take. I believe I started by taking blockers first, and then after a month or so, I started taking estradiol in pill form, 1mg a day. More blood tests meant my dosage was slowly increased until it actually started registering: eventually, I settled on taking it four times a day, sublingually under my tongue. This process was monitored at basically every step, with in-person meetings and blood work done every few months. I discussed going another route - patches and injections were both mentioned - but we decided that pills were where it’s at.
This process was frustrating at times, because it felt like it was going really slow. I have friends who went with higher doses first or started on injections or whatever, and I looked at them and the changes they went through and I was jealous. But, at the same time, I respect how slow my doctor took it: we took baby steps, making sure everything was okay, and I suffered no adverse effects.
After about a year, I started to approach the subject of surgery with my doctor. My bottom dysphoria wasn’t too bad, but it was enough that I wanted it done. And it also meant I could cycle off blockers, which would be one less thing for my liver to filter every day.
Side note: I could have gone another route and had an orchiectomy, a surgery that would also have meant I can cycle off blockers and would have been less invasive. But GRS Montreal, the clinic where almost all Canadian GRS surgeries are done, recommends against this: the skin can shrink down there which gives them less to work with, which means skin grafts are needed, making what’s already a major surgery even more invasive. With that in mind, I opted not to go this route.
After talking it over and over, my doctor got the ball rolling on GRS. This meant setting up an appointment with another medical professional and explaining to a complete stranger why I wanted to have my genitals rearranged and all the feelings and anxieties I had about that part of my body. Not exactly easy, but I did it. After talking with them, and with my doctor, forms were filled in and reports were sent off to OHIP. Several months later, I got a letter in the mail from the government: my funding was approved.
That letter was dated Aug, 2020, about ten months after I spoke to my doctor. And that was just the approval. From there, I had to send information off to GRS Montreal to get an intake appointment and those gears moving. About seven months later, I got my first phone call from them.
As I recall, it was another interview, this time focusing on stuff like what medications I was taking, my general health, that sort of thing. A flurry of emails followed with forms to be filled out, both by my and by my doctor, and more phone calls. They need to know just about everything, right down to a picture of my body. After all, it’s not reasonable for everyone to fly to Montreal just for an intake session. This process took another few months.
Finally, in May, they offered me my first date: I could be squeezed in as early as the end of the month (there was an opening, thanks to a cancellation), but if I wanted to be realistic and get myself in order, we’d best aim for July. This didn’t work for me: the summer is too busy at my day job for me to even take a week off in the summer, let alone four months. After some back and forth, we settled on September.
Then the summer came, life got busy and my life became a bit chaotic. I got stressed out and suffered Bell’s Palsy; work drove my anxiety to such a point I had a bit of a breakdown. Simply put, I was having a hard go of it. Finally, one day at work when I was dealing with an employee who was acting out, I hit a breaking point and decided I couldn’t go through with this anymore.
As I wrote in an earlier newsletter:
…even now, a good three months out, I’m very anxious about this. I have feelings that I don’t deserve this. Isn’t there some trans woman out there who gets physically sick every time she strips, someone who’s dreamed of this moment since they were 12, someone that, in so many words, deserves my spot more than I do? I’m just some asshole - what makes me better than some other, more deserving person? Should I cancel and let someone who needs this more take my spot?
And a little later, in another post:
I was hoping maybe surgery would open some psychic door, make people get it right for once… but now, I worry it’ll never happen. I feel like I’m always going to be this asshole who stands there grinning as people call them sir and dude and him, because I work retail and the customer is always correct, and besides, I don’t want to provoke a conflict, because I will lose that battle every time.
I felt this way for a bunch of reasons: work (which told me it was my fault when people misgendered me), my general anxiety, COVID, but mostly because I was scared. Surgery is a big thing, and one doesn’t go into it lightly. Articles that imply people jump into this should make time to talk a little with trans people: most of the ones I’ve spoken with thought long and hard about this, and it was never an easy choice.
By September, I had bottomed out - I had a nice little breakdown on Twitter that cost me a bunch of followers and probably a byline or two - and with the support of my girlfriend and family, was back on the mend. And one day I had a realization: work was just that, work. It wasn’t my life and I shouldn’t let it dictate what I do or don’t do. I should do things that I want to do. And so, that month I emailed GRS Montreal and asked if I could get back on the list. They said yes and offered me a date: November 1.
And so I did it. I accepted the date, filled out more forms and paperwork; filed out stuff to work and with my doctor to get the required time off. I had to buy a bunch of supplies: everything from enemas to soap to slippers. I had to stock up on canned goods, frozen food and housewares: I was going to be inside for a long time. Again: this was not something one lept into lightly. With over a month’s notice, I had a lot of time to prepare and get ready. And on October 30, I boarded a plane, flew to Montreal and… well, that’s another essay I’m still working on.
But as you can see, it takes a long time for surgery to happen. I had to talk to various medical professionals just to even get an intake appointment, let alone funding, and after that came a long wait time. At no point did I ever feel rushed; if anything, I felt like it took the proper amount of time, with enough gaps and spaces where I was able to take a step back and think rationally about the process I was going through.
So it really irks me a little to see reckless articles that suggest this whole thing can happen in a matter of months, that someone can come out as trans and have surgery before the year’s out. I’d even go as far as suggesting there’s enough checks and balances in the way that it’d be hard to find someone who has regrets, although I’m sure some people do. If that’s because their expectations were unreasonable, or if they screwed up the aftercare, or simply because they decided transitioning wasn’t worth it… I don’t know. You’d have to ask them.
But all I can really say is that in my case, everything happened at a pace where I felt in control at every moment - especially when I cancelled, and later re-applied - and where I had ample time to reflect. But, I suppose, something like that doesn’t make headlines.