Well weve got a year to get to the next step. However, I’m already working towards making sure that the next step is easier. So we are having conversations, right now and for the last six, twelve months about preserving his eggs or you know, birth children before he starts cross sex hormones. If that’s his choice if that’s what he wants to do, you know, we have to kind of pre-empt what the [Gender Identity Development Services] and what the judges and what the local authorities are going to say he needs to do. So it, it is continual working and being that two, three, four, five steps ahead of everybody else.

And how did you find out about the fertility preservation option?

Google [laughs]. Yeah, just Google. There’s not much out there. I did have to contact the CCG myself. I sent them an email, the Clinical Commissioning Group. So I did contact them myself and asked them what their policy was for trans youth if they was accessing fertility to be told that this local authority doesnt prejudice against trans, trans young people. So it would just be a case of the GP referring if that’s what he wanted to do. And then looking at him going through the process, whereas many, many, many, many other local authorities don’t support trans young people in fertility whatsoever. You then need to pay privately. Bearing in mind, eggs are only viable for about ten years. So if a 13 year old, 14 year old, 15 year old is looking at preserving their eggs, you know, they have to have had children by 23, 25, 26. You know, most people arent starting families until their 30s. Why are our kids having to think about it at 15, 16. It’s a big conversation to be having.

I think that they communicate really well, I mean you’re not inundated you usually get something with the birthday card, you know, when we, when we had this get together a few years ago that year they sent a booklet summarising, just giving a little summary of the whole thing from the beginning which was really interesting and it does give a list of all the papers and it’s not difficult to find out more if you want to. And there was once or twice were I sort of rung up to discuss things, it’s been easy to get hold of somebody.

And, right just thinking about the consenting process which we’re so focussed on nowadays. Obviously you didn’t get to consent?

No [laughter] not at all I just found, I arrived [laughter] obviously my parents did as far as I remember they were very happy to help out so I think it was totally random, you know, they just, there were six babies in the bed and in the ward and they just choose three of them, you know, I think it was half, that’s how they did it, it was pretty simple. I suppose if you didn’t want to do it then you, you know, they found somebody else to do it but that’s what they were looking for about half of the people, those children born at that time.

Yeah. And when you became an adult yourself
Yeah.

as there a sort of re-consenting process?

I can’t remember one, I can’t remember one but there probably was but I probably didn’t realise, you know, they were just probably on the form that, you know, that you are happy to give this information, you know, and I always was. I never, I never thought of not doing it to be honest.

Yes.

It seems a good, good thing to do, so yeah, so I didn’t have to worry about consenting, I was involved already.

He transitioned at school in primary year five. Primary school was really supportive. They couldnt have done anything more. They didnt quite understand how they didnt have the right to tell every single parent in the school that he was trans. They thought, you know, because he wanted to use the boy’s toilets, he wanted to get changed separately from the girls. That they had to inform everybody. So it was just a case of updating them in regards to the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act and the Gender Reassignment Act. Once theyve got the swing of that they changed the policy and they created a whole new trans policy for the whole school. The transition went really smoothly. We did send a letter out, a very generic letter saying, there was a child in year five who has started at the school as female and will be coming back as male after Easter. The only phone call school got was my child is confused. What name do they want to be known by?’ You know, what pronouns do they want to use. There was no negativity from the parents or the kids. When he went back to school, he was accepted near enough straight away.

But there were papers, there were papers, that you had to read and fill up and I’m sure there were more tests that I can’t remember. And I know in the latter years, you know, I have had people come to the house and had medicals and memory tests was one of the things. Now of course they talk about memory and physical, you know, standing up on chairs and sitting down, all these things. Standing on one, I think you’re, one interviewer mention standing on one leg but that’s another one, especially with your eyes closed which I find is almost impossible now to stand on one leg with your eyes closed [laughter] but there we are, that’s getting old for you.

It sounds like it’s sort of quite fun, not too arduous?

Well it’s perfectly alright and it’s not arduous at all, no it’s not arduous at all. It only takes an hour or so all in, in the scheme of things, that’s nothing is it? [Laughs]

I’m sorry, but I don’t, I don’t really remember the initial kind of joining or, or being part of it until I was a young adult when I started to have my own address and they kept, I somehow got information from them through the post to say I was part of the cohort. So really it’s been purely something that I’ve just re-registered over the years to let them keep up to date with where I am and agree to continue, you know, agreeing to their requests to continue to use any of my medical data and so on.

That’s right we had discussions in groups, and we were mixed up. We weren’t, you weren’t sitting necessarily with people that you were at school with. Although we did meet up with people we were at school because I think they did, they did our school, they did a photograph of groups of people from different schools, I remember that. It was quite, it was quite general discussions. I don’t think, I can’t remember if we had topics that we had to discuss on the table, but it was basically just going round the room and just talking about our experiences of growing up in the fifties, what it was like; our schooling, you know, our homelife. Just, just how different it is to, you know, children growing up today really. I mean, it’s so totally different.

What it was like to grow-up and live in the 1950’s

I mean when you think about it, the war had only been finished a few years earlier. I think by the time I was born rationing was finished, but yeah, so it was, times were tough.

I honestly, I mean it’s meant to be safe and secure but I really don’t know that. I’ve trusted them; they are one of the, you know, foremost medical research centres in the world. If they can’t get it right, who can, so I think if it was probably somebody less known I’d be a little bit worried about it but I’m not worried about them. I, you know, I’m sure I can trust them to do the right thing.