Experiences of trans and gender diverse young people

The only thing I can think of besides being trans which we’ve obviously talked about quite a bit would be the psychologist effectively saying he thinks I’m autistic, I think it’s probably that sort of thing is pretty much the only other sort of factor I can think of. He isn’t the first sort of professional to suggest that that might be the case. I’m fairly sure it probably is the case, but haven’t been formerly diagnosed or anything and working out how to get that to happen is another thing I don’t understand. Yeah it’s sort of like especially with, with GIDS who I said the main experience I’ve had with healthcare besides teeth and eyes. It’s sort of just the sort of like a lack of understanding of just me in general and the sort of idea that I can’t be trusted to make decisions about my own body or to understand myself. And I feel like the fact that it hasn’t been diagnosed and that I don’t actually 100% know for sure if I’m autistic or not sort of doesn’t help this, but with seeing my GP about mental health stuff, a lot of it feels like it would be a pretty vital bit of context to understand especially with like social anxiety and stuff feels like it would be very essential thing to understand because like whether I am autistic or not. My experiences of social interactions seem to be pretty different to most other peoples. I feel like that’s something that I don’t know how to adequately explain without saying that I’m autistic and I can’t say that to a GP because I haven’t been diagnosed and it sort of feels like that’s a barrier to properly understanding my situation.

Yes, I am definitely autistic. And like, I’ve it’s nice to have actually realised that. Because it gives me like an excuse for ‘cos there are so many times when I’m, when I’m trying to talk to people and I can’t or when I have all sorts of issues with socialising and things and I just think, why am I like this? And, and, yeah, all of these little things correlate with the symptoms of Asperger’s and I’m like, okay, this is, I do have this thing and I have an answer, you know, like, even though all it really means is there are other people that have it, you know, to some extent or another, but just having a name for it is so helpful. The things is like, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s when I was like 12 or something, but then my mum decided that I didn’t have it because like, oh, I’m super sociable. But, I mean, she kind of whenever I mentioned having it, she’s like, ‘Oh, but your super sociable.’ Like it’s not in a massively toxic way, but it did get under my skin a bit. Like, because I like, sometimes I am sociable whatever that means, but it’s like, it’s such a struggle a lot of the time in so many ways and just like, yeah, like I guess I do wish I was, because my partner is super neurotypical like in a lot of ways and they can really deal with a lot of situations that I can’t and that makes me more aware of it on a daily basis. But like, hey that’s just another thing to live with and own and, you know.

Does it impact in relation to being trans?

Yeah, I think so, because it means a lot of stuff I don’t have to blame on my like male upbringing. And, you know, when I think, you know, so let’s say I was struggling to make conversation with someone, my brain can be saying to me, that is because you never had to learn to make conversation because you were brought up as a man and you have male privilege and you still feel, you know, like you are entitled to interrupt people because of your male privilege and blah, blah, blah. And then I can say, well, actually, maybe it’s because I’m autistic. You know, maybe it’s not because I’m like irrevocably male in some like gender critical, yeah, bollocks way. Like maybe actually, you know, it’s just—it helps me to siphon off some of the shame and some of the dysphoria in just saying, ‘Actually, okay, so maybe some of it is because I had a different upbringing to most women, but some of it is not.’ I think it’s because my brain is actually wired differently to other people. But also, before I knew to call it autism it made my transition more difficult. I couldn’t just like oh, you know, I’m being a girl now. I’m gonna like have my girl group and girls are suddenly, women are suddenly gonna talk to me in the office and I’m gonna make loads of female friends because you don’t get that if you don’t have the passing privilege and if you don’t have the neurotypical privilege of being able to get along with people. So, both of those things have made transition harder.

And then with make-up it’s the main issue with that is that I have tried a couple of times to put make-up on. I’ve never gone out wearing any make-up or anything. But… Since I’ve never really done it before, I am terrible at it and since it’s something that basically just need to keep doing over and over again until you get good at it. Since I don’t feel any pressing need to wear make-up and I don’t especially like how having it on my face feels because yeah, got difficulties with sensory stuff as it is and then also having to try and put stuff on like try to do anything with my hands, like my hands sort of shake a bit all the time generally and then trying to do something precise with them makes that worse than that doesn’t work very well if you are trying to carefully put something on your face.

I've been told in the past that I'm not actually trans. It's just because I have autism. I've been told that. Which obviously it's, I don't even know what the word is for that. Quite disrespectful. But if it like, I don't really know how to put it. I just, it's a bit, it's just disrespectful to say that to somebody but. I just sort of doubted that and obviously I'm, I don't know how to put it. I just sort of took that on the chin and just sort of “well who are you to tell me who I am”. “Doesn’t really matter what you say does it?” Like I’ll do what I wanna do.

There is a big thing when it comes to trans healthcare stuff, where people with neuro-divergent stuff are terrified at saying so. Or terrified of getting assessed for it before they go through the gender pathway because there has been reports of people being turned down because they believe that it is something to do with autism, or that their autism diagnosis could be held against them. I don’t know if that’s necessarily as common as it once was, but its definitely been a thing, and I’ve talked to many people who have had that fear and have those experiences. So maybe realising that people with autism spectrum disorders, like they know themselves, just as much as anybody else does, you know. Like I’ve never met an autistic person who’s just like, “I don’t know about me.” They tend to know who they are in very strong ways.

Like I’ve never met somebody with autism who has been unsure of themselves, lets put it that way.

And there’s something about accessing one service that makes you massively enquire and question the way that you interact with the world, for better or worse because there are massive problems with the way that neurodiverse people and neurodivergent people are treated. But simultaneously, what that means in terms of like, when that self-enquiry opens you up to at the same time. I think when people point towards like neurodiversion and say, oh, that classic TERF line of you’re not trans, you’re X you are just depressed. Your autistic. You’re a tomboy. It’s the, it’s the notion of these things are mutually exclusive because they both require the same amount of self-inspection is, I think, a hugely detrimental thing. Because it means that people who are autistic like my friend, [name] or people who are trans, again like him, but like other people, never want to find out the other thing because they are worried that one will negate the other. That there’ll be some inauthenticity, I think. Which is again, another reason why people don’t wanna access healthcare one way or the other. I agree with you like being able to like, being able to support people in your own proximity like that whole, trans communities are ephemeral. They’re about holding each other up. And that sounds like really goofy, but it’s true.

I discovered the possibility of me having ADHD fairly recently, it took about a year, I saw a meme on line about washing up with ADHD, making the point that ADHD people can’t see when there’s a massive pile of washing up next to the sink. And the actual act of doing it hurt sometimes, some people. I was like, “Oh.” And I’m at first, I was just like, “That sounds like me. I should probably get my arse in gear, you know.” It, its like I’m acting like I’ve got ADHD which is a thing I don’t have. In over a year I saw more memes like that, talked to some people, a combination of three things happened that got me there. One, another person said that they thought I was autistic. So, I went to my GP and she was like, “No, I can refer you if you want. But it doesn’t look like its been a major problem, source of problems in your life.” And I’m like, “I agree. This doesn’t feel like it fits, but I’ve been told by ten people, some of them working in healthcare. So, I thought it was something to ask about.” Then I saw on the show Big Mouth, a character on that, Jay, got diagnosed with ADHD. Some people thought it was quite problematic, maybe it is, I don’t know as much about it so I’ll submit to them, but he said the thing about losing time, that clicked it for me, cos I lose time all the time, and finally I had a conversation with my friend [name], I showed him a picture of my bedroom, I think we were talking about fans of the podcast being starstruck by me, and I was making the point, no-one should be starstruck by me ever, cos this is how I live. And I took a picture of my trashed bedroom. And he was like, “That’s an ADHD thing.” And we had a conversation, it just sort of all clicked in together there. So, then I went to the GP, tried to get an ADHD assessment on the NHS, it was going to take 12 -18 months. I’ve been on benefits for years already, if this is really the thing, like the other part of me that has made working so hard, apart from coming out as trans and being, you know, all of that stuff. I couldn’t wait. And then they screwed up my referral, so it became a two year wait and I was just like, “Ah right fine.” So I threw the podcast crowd-funded the money to get a private assessment, which is something I never wanted to do, but I felt like I had to, cos it was like I can’t wait two years. I’ve got to know if this is a thing, and if it is a thing, I want to get started on a treatment now. Preferably before Brexit happens, cos fuck knows what’s going to happen then. So, I got on-line, found someone, did the assessment on Skype, £350, got my diagnosis. And the person I saw was great, I get the feeling they’ve seen a lot of trans people, cos I think neuro-divergent stuff is really common, and ADHD comes under that thing.

I actually could get some shit done, like I could tell you some stories about the podcasts like my favourite one, which also combines a story about what ADHD can be one of the plus points, and I’m not one of those people who thinks that ADHD is a superpower, it is a disability. It is, had a drastic affect on my life in very negative ways and its still a struggle even though I am on medication now, but there are still things that I struggle with incredibly so. But also, a thing with being ADHD is it makes you very impulsive and not think things through. And I was trying, and I was covering Pride in [city] for the podcast. I got a media pass, I was running around the parade room, I looked at my phone, it said that I did a marathon on foot that day, running up and down the stretch, over and over again, trying to find people to talk to. And I loved it. I loved that; I love being out on assignment trying to talk to people at big events like that. I love covering that stuff. If there was a job where I could just do that, I could do that every day until my legs fall off when I’m 80, I would do that. And Billy Porter, from the TV show Pose was doing the headline set on the BAME stage at [location] and I turned to my friend who would, I’d met up with that day, just like, “I’ve got to try something, I don’t know how this, long this, is gonna, I don’t know if its gonna work, I don’t know how long I’m gonna be, so if you want to go back to my place you can take my keys and go back to my place and wait for me there, otherwise wait here, I’ll be back at some point.” And she was like, “I understand,” and so I ran back behind the thing, and my media pass did not get me back stage, that’s one thing it didn’t do, but I found a security person and just like, “Hey, I would really like a minute with Billy Porter, can you help me out?” And that is something that you don’t do, alright most people wouldn’t do that because it would be like, well I can’t do that, they haven’t given me backstage access. But I didn’t care cos the ADHD was powering me at that point, just like, “I’m going to get an interview with Billy Porter, and I did. And he now opens every show we do. I’ve got him, and I asked him like, “Could you record a thing so that we can open the show with it?” And he was like, “Well what do you want?” And I was like, “I don’t know, whatever you want.” He was like “Well what about if I do, And the category is what the trans,” which is the name of my podcast, “Absolutely.” And so now every show opens with Billy Porter going, “Hey darlings, the category is What the Trans?” and then the music kicks in, and it, I love it, like that’s the good side of ADHD right there, cos I don’t know many other people that would have done that. Or even thought to have tried it.

So I have what’s known as Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome which is essentially a, it’s a connective tissue disorder and so it effects everything in your body that is all the collagen which essentially acts as the glue. So it does things like, some people’s skin is very stretchy, mine isn’t. But my joints are unstable and I take a long time to heal and all, all that sort of thing. It also means that I’m in pain quite a lot and quite tired. So with regards to how that impacts the way I present in my transition in general. I find that binding takes a bit more of a toll on me than it does for a lot of people. So, because my ribs and my spine essentially aren’t completely happy with sustained compression I can’t bind for as long as a lot of people and, and that sort of thing. And less so for me, but I know another person who has Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and is non-binary. They would prefer to wear trousers most of the time. But their skin is very sensitive. So it is much easier for them to wear skirts when that’s not how they want to present, but the skirts don’t kind of rub against their legs in the same way and so, of course, all that pain. But it does have the bizarre benefit of making me look younger than I am, which you already get with being trans and having a trans baby face. So I’ve been told I look about 12 by some people [Laughs] which is slightly concerning as a 23 year old. But yeah, for the, for the most part, they kind of work alongside each other more or less. It’s mostly just binding and fatigue. Yes, so not being able to have the energy to put as much effort as I want to into my appearance and then ending up looking more feminine as a result can be quite frustrating.

Has it affected the way people treat you in any way?

Not that I’m aware of. I’m often worried that it might, given that I mean if you, you walk into a doctor’s place and you go, ‘I’m trans. I’m queer. I’m disabled and chronically ill, I’m mentally ill.’ And they kind of go like, ‘Okay, well, that can’t all be true,’ essentially. In that there’s this sense that you can only have so many protected characteristics and that sort of thing. So, which is bizarre and completely false, but this sense that you can’t have so much different about you to the, the norm. So I do often get quite worried so things like and I went to my first gender identity clinic appointment. I didn't use any mobility aids even though I knew that I should have done, because I was in a lot of pain afterwards, because I was worried about being judged as essentially attention seeking for being someone who is both chronically ill and trans which doesn’t make an awful lot of sense the more I talk about it. But just that anxiety is something that’s very real and I think exists. And I don’t have a good way of fighting it yet.

I have a fibromyalgia which makes it quite painful to bind sometimes so often I do skip out on binding because it’s too painful or restricts my ability to kind of move around more than I’m able to which make me feel really dysphoric but, you know, it’s kind of the comfort versus safety sorry yeah comfort for myself versus like the safety of not binding for too long which is a drawback. And then also the issue that binding for too long can impact the results of your top surgery or if you can even get top surgery in the first place which is ridiculous I mean it’s just, you know, what happens but it seems ridiculous to me that it’s not more of a, you know, that it takes so long to access top surgery and especially when you see in the news all this crap about how three year olds are being forcibly Transed and surgically experimented on when it’s the furthest thing from the truth and it’s so clear that these people have never spoken to a Trans person in their lives.

I don’t actually know if they have any options now, yes so I must have signed up like two and a half years ago, or something like that, but I don’t know what their options are now. I’m also worried about being a trans person of colour within like trying to access my GP services. Right like I only recently at the beginning of the year got a diagnosis but I had to oh, frankly fight for like over a year, like almost two years. From a chronic illness and it was just that it got so bad that they finally gave me this diagnosis, and like they just weren’t interested in in trying to find out what was going on, and they kept saying, “Oh it’s stress, it’s mental health, and blah blah blah.” And it’s like, and we know that that happens with like chronic illnesses in general, but it’s made worse if a) you’re AFAB, or read as a woman, and, and b) if you’re a person of colour, like, your experiences with it and healthcare are so often dismissed, pain is so often dismissed, you know and I am nervous about increasing opportunities for these things to happen, especially because I’ve been dealing with mental illness since I was a child, and my diagnosis there as well, would make me, it would arguably make it so that people might feel even more like of that bias towards, “Oh this person’s just making stuff up or is overreacting.” Or whatever. So yeah it’s something that, it’s something I would jump at the chance for, you know, changing my you know gender marker or whatever, if it was something that was more reliably like employed, right like actually like people are trained to take it seriously, people, the doctors want to take it seriously for the most part you know, I’m sure you’ll always get people who are just a bit discompassionate, right? But like at the moment it seems like it wouldn’t necessarily help me, and it might make things worse.

But I think that sort of really sitting down and considering like the illness of whatever kind of goes beyond just tests, right, and treatment goes beyond just tests, I think that healthcare professionals have a lot of power over their patients. I think, you know, and especially within like a trans context, the ability to you know approve or deny hormone therapy for example, or you know approve, like approval, deny your own identity as a person, your own experiences, and again like yeah that’s from a trans context, it’s also from just you know disability and illness context, right, of actually being able to just put in your notes like what the patient is experiencing isn’t real, or it isn’t what they think it is, you know. And of course, like medical professionals have so much you know knowledge and expertise, theoretically, that you know, and certainly like on a medical level like of course. Like you know, I don’t, I’m not a medical expert but I am an expert in how my body is reacting to things or you know how I’m feeling. Right. Of who I am, right, like of course we are all our own experts on that.

And I started my periods when I was 10 years old and they were excruciating. I took a week off every month from school because I couldn’t function. And they made me sick and yeah, and it just made me like hate that aspect of my body. So I think even if I hadn’t felt conflicted about having been told that I had to act a certain way because of my gender, I think that I would have had that resentment against like womanhood and the fact that everyone was like, “Oh well you’re a, you’re a woman now.”

And the fact that like every time I’ve ever been to like a gynaecology unit or seen a doctor, it’s very it’s always in like the women’s hospital, it’s always in you know this area, which even though it was in [city] and they do a lot of stuff to try and make that better for trans people, it still wasn’t great at the time.

What else was I gonna say? I’m just going to look at my notes quickly. And yeah also like definitely being read as female I think people were more likely to dismiss the pain I was in, so I, from when I was about twelve till when I was seventeen, when I was actually diagnosed with endometriosis, which was the cause of all the pain, I had so many doctors just say to my Mum, with me in the room, they’re making it up, they’re not in pain, they’re not, you know experiencing this, it must be psychosomatic, there must be something else going on, and so yeah I spent a lot, I was very depressed for a very long time. I spent a long period of time trying to figure out why no-one would listen to me.

And I, like definitely thought at the time that was because I was considered a woman or a girl and that they saw that as a reason to not believe what I was saying. And I also, like I don’t feel like that’s got better as I’ve now identified as non-binary, like people don’t like to listen to trans people either, but I feel a bit more agency in myself, when I’m like, “No I am non-binary and I feel this thing,” because it kind of gives me some control.

I’m really aware of like how whilst you know some trans stuff, like tran, in trans specific healthcare certain things have been kind of de-pathologised, that to a degree that there’s, there’s still a degree of like the interactions that people of colour might have with other psychiatric, with other parts of mental health services, and other psychiatric services, might like negatively impact how you received trans healthcare, I think it’s like, and also especially around disability as well, right in terms of like disabled people getting denied their treatments they need for various things, also depending on like what kinds of disabilities and people with intellectual disabilities, having much more difficult to navigate and stuff, it’s just like all of that stuff has to like, all of the, all of those like elements that might influence your treatment really need to like, that all needs to be, that all needs to go, that all needs to be challenged. Yeah like I was thinking a bit about how, like so black and ethnic minority people or like black and people of colour, are more likely to have already had interactions with the mental health services, or to be like I’ve represented those resources, in those services, and I’ve, I guess I’m thinking about like how that, how that also influences the other forms of healthcare that we might need, ah, yeah, I think just, Britain’s such a fucking mess, and like, you know with, in terms of economic inequalities and stuff, it’s all racialized it’s all, and ableist. And it’s, yeah it’s, we just, we just need like, we need way more, we need way more provisions in terms of things, we need, we need more involvement, we need more voice, we need more power, we need more horizontally organised things that are not hierarchical, where some, some psychiatrist has power over the rest, over what happens to you, and if you get what you need or if you don’t get it.

I’ve always find online community really helpful, I find it quite frustrating when people say that social media is really bad, and really terrible because normally the people who say that are the kind of people who can find people like them by opening their door and shouting, you know you could throw a stone and find twelve people that are like you. Whereas I think especially with queer people, like the internet is a big deal, and I, I grew up in kind of the period where people started getting smart phones when I was about 12, 13, and it became so much easier for me to find all of these communities that I couldn’t physically connect to, and especially for people who are queer and trans and are aware of it when they’re younger finding that community online and not having to tell your parents what you’re doing, is really important.

So like when I was working in, in the LGBT youth group I wanted to make sure that that other people who were working there and, and the company we were running under was aware that the people who were coming to the youth group were the, the only the people who had marginally supportive parents could get to the area easily, could afford it, like the, the group didn’t cost anything but travelling there did. And so like online community can’t just be passed off because you know physical community’s considered more important. And hopefully because of the Coronavirus, people will start to realise that.

And I think that being disabled is the same experience, like knowing that I don’t have the energy to go out sometimes, I don’t, my body is not co-operating with me but I can talk to other people who have the same experience without going anywhere, without really needing to do anything, like laying in bed, holding my phone sometimes is quite painful, but it’s better than nothing. And it really helps with isolation, and I think that it’s difficult to see like companies and workplaces and stuff just now saying, “Actually we can do working from home, actually we can do this, actually we can do that,” when if it was a disabled person asking last year, they would have said, “No, that’s impossible, you can’t work with us then.” Or you can’t come to this school, or you can’t go to college, or you can’t do university study.

Like my college would have refused to do any teaching that involved me being able to do it from my bed, and I did, I taught myself my GCSE’s essentially, because I wasn’t really able to go to school. I did go, but I had like thirty percent attendance and I think that making resources available online and building communities online is much more important than people want to believe it is.