I think it’s a political vehicle to try and generate fear and sympathy for a political position against trans people it’s not based in actual fact about the process. You know we often hear, the rhetoric that’s often spouted is we have to stop 11 year olds getting, having their breasts removed or like, there’s kind of like these very hyperbolic statements that of course people are like, What the hell to, which are nonsense because no 11 year old can access that surgery. it’s hard enough as an adult to access that surgery. And so I think they’re wild, they’re wildly uninformed and I think sometimes it’s about literally not knowing, and sometimes it’s about intentional, often it’s about intentional storytelling and manipulation of the truth to win political points against trans people.

I think there’s like how to support trans people even getting into the room, and then there’s how to, how to prevent that being so traumatic they never come back again. And so on the first one I think it would be good if, I haven’t thought this through I’m kind of out, answering it out loud, but I feel like it, if I can look up GP’s and see that like this GP says they’re trans aware or trans inclusive or something, I’m gonna feel way more confident going there than what the current situation is which is that I just have no idea what I’m walking into. I think then ifso I, this is a, I think there’s a structural issue that I’m not sure how they overcome which is that they categorise you, like part of their search terms for people is male or female, and so like I had this thing last year where I went to A&E, I thought I’d, I thought I might have fractured my ankle, and the woman at reception was trying to find me in the system and couldn’t find me. And then it turned out she was searching me as male, and then that’s why she couldn’t find me basically, and which was, and then she was really embarrassed and awkward, and apologetic, and it just made the whole experience like semi-humiliating, even though it didn’t need, like it didn’t need to be, it wasn’t inherently humiliating, something about that, so I think that there’s a thing about like not, I don’t know how a GP gets around that because that, it’s not the GP, well to my knowledge it’s not the GP’s surgery that can control that specifically, that they have to designate you one or the other, but I do think that there, there could be a kind of like How to refer to you option, and a non-gendered way of, I mean I think, because it’s medicalised often it does end up being non-gendered, because they’ll talk about, they won’t talk about well not always but, they’ll talk about what’s there, rather than like who you are. But I think having some like trans sensitivity, I mean I don’t want to say training cos I don’t think training changes things necessarily, but trans sensitivity practice of using like trans affirming language, and giving agency and choice around things.

I think that the thing that has shifted that depression most significantly is having surgery and having hormones. But it never felt like ‘If I do this thing this depression will go away’. It kind of just happened, and so like, it was like again like in that thing about your body knowing, it’s like I didn’t, when I was that depressed I don’t think I would ever have said to you ‘I’m really depressed because I’m trans’. I think I might have, that would have felt like one of the things I was depressed about, but it does also feel true now looking back that like I’m a lot less depressed as a person since having surgery and hormones. And so, I can only figure that that was causing a significant amount of that depression, that didn’t necessarily feel like it was about transness.

I don’t know if that really makes sense honestly, but it definitely feels very true. And I don’t think it’s the only thing that I was depressed about, but I do think the core, that core sense of like shame and ‘I can’t be who I am’, and ‘I’m always having to hide who I am’, in a really embodied way, not in a kind of, like it wasn’t like a conscious thought pattern, but like as a real emotional experience of the world as opposed to a kind of like, ‘This is who I think I am,’ experience of the world… is really, is really at the core of a lot of that depression.

What’s been your experience of LGBT+ education growing up?

Well I mean I grew up in the time of section 28 so, [laughs] from none to terrible would be the answer.

I mean it was all of my, like relationships and sex education was about straight relationships. Straight, or cis straight sex. I should say. And relationships. I don’t remember ever, I don’t remember trans people ever being mentioned when I was at school. It, well, really in terms of the learning. I don’t remember that being like I can’t remember in history, politics through to sciences that ever being something. I think like there was may, the closest we got was maybe like hermaphrodite animals [laugh]. Exactly. And yeah like other LGB stuff, nah.

What would you like to say about the importance of LGBT+ education in schools?

I mean at the top line it can save lives. It can save lives in the immediate instance of affirming any queer or trans kids in the room. It can also save lives by providing information that protects LGBT+ people either, either like in terms of like sexual health and sexual information, or other bodily information or to give kind of like the confidence and awareness to avoid abusive relationships or be aware of abusive relationships and those sorts of things. But I think it can also normalise our experience among like in the UK in theory, I mean I know it’s not always true in practice but in theory everybody goes to school. If everybody went through that education system it would radically change the world for us potentially, if there was LGBT+ affirming sexual health and relationship information in education. And I think that it, I think that what I would caveat that with is that when we often talk about this we talk about, we talk about LGTB+ education, I know this isn’t what you’ve done but it’s often how it’s talked about in the world, as specific to sexual health. And like the medicalised side, side of being who we are, and then sometimes it’s talked about in terms of like the relationship element, or the kind of PHSE kind of classes. But I feel like there’s also the need for it to be woven through English classes or History classes or it needs to move out of like a specialised space into just part of life.

I’ve never talked about or disclosed being trans with a, with a GP. And partly that’s because I’ve accessed all of my trans healthcare outside of the system. So I’ve talked about top surgery already, but also alongside that I get my, like I self-inject T, but I just order my T and order my needles and things from friends or friends of friends, and so I’ve never, even though I’m kind of like medically trans [laughs] I’ve never interacted with a GP about that.

And that is because of some of the stuff I said before around particularly if you don’t want to kind of, be binary, it’s never been a very supportive hospitable service and I have enough trans friends and have heard enough of their stories to kind of know that is true. And I think it is improving, significantly, but it’s also a lottery, of like which GP, and how much, how good it, how good the service will be. I think, there is I think there’s two other kind of like things I want to add about that, and one is that, oh actually there’s two, there’s three. One is that I think I’ve always really struggled with GP’s anyway, and I, like to ask for what I need, and I think that like that’s about the intersection of class and race and that’s something that doesn’t get, because of the fear of private healthcare systems and like the privatisation of the NHS, which I think is absolutely right, that what happens is that we never talk about the inequity in the public healthcare system. And that with the, with it, with the absolute truth being of course it’s better than a private healthcare system, and I’m not, just to make that very clear, but that there’s this kind of myth that public health, healthcare is like equitable, and that private healthcare isn’t. And that just isn’t true, like that’s not just based on kind of like postcode lotteries and like if you live in a more affluent area you get better healthcare services etcetera, but also it’s based on a model of self-advocacy, and self-advocacy is not a neutral skill. It is something you learn through having access to resources, and so and I think like the NHS, what the NHS is exceptional at is urgent care. Like if you’re if you’re, if you want to kind of use A&E, if you are if you have a life threatening condition, if you have a life threatening accident that’s when the NHS comes into its own. If you have more chronic ongoing unknown things it, it really depends on advocacy to get those things investigated, because every test costs money.

Whereas in a private healthcare system every test makes money. So I think, I’ve always been quite scared of and not really got what I needed from GP’s. So, I think that’s the first thing. I think the second thing is that I think that I have a bit, I have some of my own cultural stuff around it, because most of the GP’s in my service, in my area are South Asian, my family is South Asian, and I think that that acts like even though none of them, like we’re different like ethnic groups mostly, my family is like quite a different ethnic group than, is a very small, globally very, very small ethnic group, so like it’s not like I’m scared of actually literally bumping into my actual uncle, but the experience of it feels like they’re all my uncles, or my aunties and so which is about my internalised stuff, but it’s still a barrier, it still makes it a barrier to kind of want to sit down or like feel safe to sit down and talk about things around trans identity specifically. And then the third and final thing I want to say is that, I think that we often get in this rut when we talk about trans healthcare, about, of only talking about trans specific healthcare, and I think one of the biggest threats and risks to trans people is general access to healthcare because you’re like when you’re trans and the barriers that face, and so it ties into the passing question of like I could pass as much as any trans person, like might ever want to pass, if I go in the doctors and I have, I’m having digestive issues or piles and I want the doctor to investigate that it doesn’t even have to be to do with like my genitals per se, but like as soon as I have to take my trousers down, or you know whether I’m pre or post-surgery, there is a whole different set of expectations and assumptions, and I, you know I’ve got trans friends, obviously when you take hormones, particularly if you take hormones and it’s not, it’s not through the system, but also even I have friends who take them through the NHS, who end up caught up in the system for months waiting for surgery that they need because their hormone tests have come back as an anomaly. Even though they’ve done like, it’s on the record that they’re taking T, and there’s just so little literacy about trans people in the system that it prevents us getting health, the right healthcare for a whole host of other issues, either because of the psychological and emotional barrier of even asking for the help, or because when we do they don’t understand why our bodies are saying the things that they’re saying.

I think the thing that, then, the kind of single biggest spanner in the works  – this may be a way to talk about it – was puberty. Because I mean well, school uniforms are like, I went to a primary school where I could wear what I wanted; secondary school we had to wear – I went to an all-girls school – so we had to wear skirts. And then yeah puberty hit. And my body suddenly changed very significantly, and like I’d always, I’d always been very sporty, like in play, in the playground I would always play football with the boys at lunchtime or at break or whatever, and like played cricket, football, rode my bike everywhere, and then puberty hit and I didn’t want to run anymore. And I think I just became much more kind of self-aware and self-conscious. And I think it’s, it’s hard in some ways to disentangle that from like to disentangle kind of teenage discomfort with gender, like gender identity. Because everything is just confusing. And so yeah but that was definitely a thing, and like I, like my boobs were like very big as a teenager, and they like, aside from just that, being really uncomfortable and gender, like from a gendered perspective, which it really was, like it also just hurt to run, or like play sport or anything else. And so I think my whole relationship with my body shifted at that point in like different ways because of that.

I think something that’s important is that there’s a lot of associated costs with top surgery that people don’t think about. So whether or not you’re getting the surgery on public or private healthcare, and all the associated costs with that, there’s like you have to buy a lot of stuff, like there’s specific things you need to wash with the night before. Because you can’t move your arms there are aids that like, that cushion, or a lap stand that particularly if you’ve got like any kind of back issue or anything, like become obviously even more essential. But like for anybody when you’re sitting that much or trying to sleep upright, have a profound difference. But also like surgical cleaning stuff after the operation, to clean your own wounds and scar ointments… Trying to think of all the different things that cost money… There was just like, like if you don’t have access to people who can come and make you food then you’re going to end up having to buy more takeaway, like. There’s just lots of, there’s lots of costs that people don’t think about with it, I think is what I’m just trying to say, is a big thing. And so not to underestimate that because basically if you’re not meeting those needs and those costs then you’re paying for it with your body, and so being aware of like how expensive it is, not in a way that scares people off doing it but in a way that helps inform people.

So some of the most helpful stuff that I found out about top surgery, as opposed to hormones, like aside from I think for people who’ve never had surgery some of the stuff that’s true like lots of surgeries, like how it can affect your digestive system, or your mood, and like that sort of stuff. I think there’s, like a lot of really helpful to me was what to prepare for the recovery. And so like people saying to me like if you can afford it then things that you, that will really help, that you could buy or try and find are like a lap table, because you can’t move your arms, like, get a lap table. A husband pillow, which is hilariously named, but honestly is one of the top tips. If I’d have bought one thing after surgery, I think it would have been that, if I could only have afforded one thing. it’s basically like, do you know what it is? It’s like a pillow, it’s like a backrest pillow that then has arms that come either side of you, and so because you have to sleep upwards, or like just because of sitting all day, and like holding your posture it was actually like profoundly helpful. I think information about what you can and can’t do with your arms, like the doctors kind of give it to you, but in a very, like it is very like you’re not going to be able to move your arms away from your chest, but they don’t really tell you why, or they don’t tell you why, they don’t tell you what you can do to help you prevent it, and they don’t tell you things like, well some of your nerve endings are going to be cut, so you are going to be able to do it, but you shouldn’t do it anyway. And so people then think like well it doesn’t hurt, so I’m just going to do it, but they’ll end up pulling their scars apart or something. So I think like a more humane explanation, or not humane but like accessible I guess explanation of like the what and the why, and like one of the most common questions I get from people, and I think I had it at the time is like can you, can you wipe your own butt? Like what level of care is needed here? And I’ve not, I’m sure that for some people they haven’t been able to, I’ve not met somebody who’s had top surgery yet and who hasn’t been able to wipe their own butt, but I feel like just knowing that is significantly less terrifying than not knowing that.

How did you come to that decision then, that you weren’t going to follow a medical, medicalised pathway or that you weren’t going to get a referral for example?

I think, I think so I think there’s different, there’s different routes into this, cos there’s the kind of like surgery and then there’s the hormones. And they’re overlapping but they’re slightly different. So with the surgery I think there’s probably some hangover of the breast reduction surgery that I had, and feeling like I wasn’t going to be heard and listened to and it was going to be traumatic. Alongside having friends who’ve like been on the pathway for two years, and then been told because they’re non-binary they’re not going to get anything. And having lots of trans friends who’ve had kind of humiliating at best, or intrusive and violating at worst, experiences and so being in community long enough to know enough of those stories to know that that’s a real risk. And then my friends saying that they would fundraise for me, I think just gave me a different option. And I think going through the medicalised pathway is part of why it took me so, or like the fear of doing that is why it took me so long, and having a different option made it not feel like a wrestle, because it felt like choosing between my safety or one, one form of safety for a different form of safety, and having to like make a decision about which one I wanted to feel safe about.

I think in my experience, you know, obviously we talked about, I grew up under Section 28, and etcetera, etcetera. Having, the shame of having, the shame that, I think a significant portion of the shame that prevented me ever coming out, some of that was to do with overt transphobia in the world, that’s absolutely true, there is a lot of overt transphobia, or homophobia etcetera. And some of it is, was to do with just not having any of that counterbalance, so there was no positive representation, or positive affirmation or even kind of like value signalling, at being trans being okay, or there being other trans people. And so, I think like, you don’t have to teach a class about trans people to reference a trans person, or to validate an experience. And then I think also to create spaces in which kids can just express themselves freely. Which may or may not be because they’re trans, but it’s going to help them either way.