I’ve been fairly lucky to find a lot of support through like online communities but I think at least more so in the last year than at any point before, the sort of media coverage and media stories particularly around young trans people has been vile, like it’s so awful and sort of being confronted by all of these negative stories has been really overwhelming a lot of the time and I found a lot of value actually in not checking the news, not looking at the news stories or if I do look at the stories particularly not reading the comments underneath them, so if they’re shared on Facebook I might read the actual but I will not read the comments because they are just so awful and abusive a lot of the time and I don’t think it’s productive or healthy.

I for like most purposes would just say that my sexuality is gay because I am a masculine presenting person who is attracted to masculine presenting people and so it’s easiest to go with the term gay because most people get what that means and it’s a lot easier than having to explain the intracies about actually like well to me it doesn’t matter whether a person identifies as male or not like if I’m attracted to them, I’m attracted to them but usually it’s more masculine presenting people. But if it’s a masculine presenting person who identifies as female or non-binary or whatever I’m not gonna be like oh I’m gay so I’m not gonna date you, so like it’s yeah but I just tend to go with gay. But I think being trans makes me so much aware, so much more aware of the complexities around gender and how restrictive some labels can be for sexuality.

A lot of it is stemming from misinformation and it’s like no-one is trying to give like 11 year olds hormones like we’re not gonna be, like that’s not happening like there is no point fighting over it because it’s just not happening. Like that’s not even part of the argument, we’re not saying you should be giving 11 year olds hormones, like that’s not anything, like it’s just not true. And so much of it is from misinformation but then they put in bits of stuff that are, like that is true and it just is so, like they’re so awful and the stuff that people are saying is just so vile. And I find it really hard knowing, so working with like the under 12’s group knowing that there are really little kids who are seeing this stuff about themselves and it’s like that’s, like you shouldn’t, like know, like it’s just wrong and people posting this stuff like they’re talking about real children, like this isn’t some like hypothetical these are real children who are living, who like are living their lives and hearing this stuff being said about them and I don’t understand how they can possibly sit and say this stuff and be okay with themselves. But I think there is still a lot of progress happening and it’s the voice of, although more than there should be it’s still the voice of a few who are like spreading these negative messages, there are a lot of people in support of it and I think it’s just rather than necessarily challenging the negatives about raising the voice of the positives.

I don’t think my gender had a huge amount to do with my mental health. I think for me my dysphoria was less connected to my actual mental health because I had so many other things going on with my mental health that weren’t tied to gender. Obviously it had sort of some impact in that when my dysphoria was really bad my mood would be lower, my anxiety would be higher but it wasn’t completely tied into it because I had so much other stuff going on in my life outside of my gender identity because it wasn’t like most of the issue.

I think finding people that I could talk to as they kind of got it, so not so much sort of counselling in the like typical I go and talk about my problems and the person either just listens of maybe sometimes offers a little advice but someone who could actually really like bounce off what I’m saying and share their experiences as well and like talk through really constructively I found really useful. So I found working with one of my youth workers a lot more helpful because she was willing to share bits of her experience as well, it wasn’t just sort of like I was just talking about myself the entire time. And also talking to people, looking at it from like an academic point of view as well so like again my youth worker would sort of share pieces of theory with me and sort of we’d look at the way I’d interact in the way other people interact like really look at it from like not just from like a personal experience of like this person does this and it makes me feel like but academic point of view of like this is a theory of how people interact and being able to apply it when I’m in situations was really useful.

Before coming out I identified as a lesbian I have never been attracted to woman particularly or like feminine people that’s just not something I’ve been attracted to. But for me identifying as a lesbian gave me an excuse to present in a masculine way and so I did it in that way and sort of convinced myself that I was attracted to women because I wanted to be masculine. Now I can’t rationalise why that made sense but it did make sense for me at the time and so yeah so I identified as a lesbian, I’ve identified as bi-sexual but as gay I identified as a-sexual for a while, I’ve sort of tried out all the different labels I kind of see sexuality a little bit is like a coat that you can put on and you can take off and at the moment I’ve got a coat on that’s my like rainbow gay coat and it’s like that works for me now and I might keep that on forever or I might get like ten years down the line and be like no actually I don’t want this one anymore I’m gonna put this like and change it and whatever and it doesn’t really have to stay fixed for me it’s just the label that I like using at that point in time. And I know that that’s different for other people but for me it’s just sort of fairly fluid and doesn’t really matter too much it’s more about articulating to other people what I’m like looking for or what I’m attracted to rather than any reflection on myself.

So in terms of aftercare you have dressings on your like incision and surgical site for, so you have full dressings on for like a week and then depending on how well you’re healing and how quickly you’re healing they slowly reduce the number of dressings you’ve got on. So after like two weeks you just have dressings on, or at least for me just after two weeks I had dressings just on my nipples that I was able to change myself. I had drains in for the first three days which removes excess fluid form your chest and then they were removed like before I left the hospital. Different surgeons have different procedures and different like ways of reducing swelling and stuff so sometimes you’re given a post op binder, I wasn’t given one of those they then once your like incisions are fully healed so there’s no scabs on them or anything it’s just the scar line they recommend using stuff like silicone scar strips or bio oil massaging your scars and making sure you wear sun cream if you’re wearing anything that’s too thin or not wearing anything at all. I didn’t follow much of that advice I would occasionally massage them using stuff like coconut oil because it’s anything that sort of for lack of a better word a lubricant to make sure you’re not sort of damaging the skin and I’d wear sun cream if I was going out without my shirt on. And everything all healed perfectly fine but there are, there are like scar treatments you can do to reduce the redness or whatever of scars and some people find those really useful and some people don’t and some people like use a lot of them and some people just don’t use any and I’m, I didn’t use any and I’ve had like really good results and my scars are super pale and flat which is great.

I was just really listening to what my body said and trying really hard to not push myself any further than I could comfortably do. So it was stuff like not moving my arms too much and not lifting my arms too high because it sort of stretches like the incisions and scar sites. I slept a lot for the first like week or so just making sure that I could like really rest and like let my body heal but I think I was so happy with the fact that I’d had surgery done that a lot of it was really easy because I was just so relieved to have had it finally done that like my mental health improved massively just by having like surgery and so looking after myself was so much easier because I was just, although I was a little bit uncomfortable because obviously I’d just had fairly major surgery I was also so much more comfortable in my body that everything all just, it just made up for everything else.

I found it really easy. I know that when you get referred from GIDS to adult services you don’t get put on the normal waiting list so it’s not like you’re going to end up waiting then like, 2 years again before you get another appointment. So I essentially got fast tracked into adult services because they have to do continuity of care or at least that was my experience of it when this happened 3 years ago. And so it was, it was really easy and then I was given, like, I had the crossover appointment where they just sort of shared the information and I was able to ask any questions that I needed to ask with someone that I already knew there and then I was just seen by adult services from that point which all, well it worked out okay for me.

So Nebido comes in little vials and it’s a very viscus like liquid, it’s the hormone suspended in voile I believe and you get it injected into one of your large muscles, so usually your butt every three months, it’s not particularly pleasant, it’s a little bit painful it, in my experience if you hold it in your hand and like warm it up before you have it injected it’s a lot easier because it warms it up and like makes it slightly less viscus and then I’ve always, like I remind the person, I go to my GP to have it injected and I remind them to do it slowly so the slower they inject it the less it hurts because, I don’t know the science behind that but it just does. So warming it up and then having it injected slowly makes it less unpleasant but yeah so it’s, I’m okay with it because it’s only every three months and so it’s not too bad but yeah.

So it’s metoidioplasty and they, so there are two main options for lower surgery which is meta or phalo and meta they, it’s essentially they use what’s already there and they sort of untether the clitoris and make it longer but they don’t really add anything. So with phalo they take a skin graft and sort of construct a penis, with this they sort of alter what’s already there, they can use a small graft from inside your mouth to re-route your ultretha so that you can pee standing up. They then do a hysterectomy and a ‘ovariectomy’ so they can remove your ovaries and like, everything. And they can do sort of, they can implant like, silicone or so it appears sort of more cis-passing but I think, yeah, there’s some really good videos out there that sort of detail what the procedure is without being super graphic.

So I had double incision top surgery: so two incisions were made like, under my chest tissue to remove it and then my, I had nipples grafted on as well so my nipples were removed and then re-grafted onto my chest after they sort of finished removing my chest tissue. So the initial stage of healing is just sort of the incisions healing so they like sort of scab and then like heal as you imagine. And then after that it’s more to do with sort of like nerve reconnecting and so some people never get full sensation back in their chest, some people get some sensation, I have like some sensation with like weird bits of like mixed like nerve sensations. There’s also stuff like if you have your nipples grafted how well they take, there’s a chance of like rejection and stuff but a lot of it is just sort of like incisions healing post-surgery they usually use dissolvable stiches so they just like dissolve so you’ve not got to have any stitches or anything removed. And yeah I think the most painful part for me was actually having the dressings removed rather than actually anything to do with the surgery it was just like having the plasters taken off but yeah.

I’m a lot more comfortable with my body now and I think something I’d decided that my goal was with top surgery even if my actual surgical results weren’t great, so even if I had like really bad scaring or whatever I wasn’t super bothered because I would be able to wear a T-shirt without having to wear a binder underneath it so although like physically it might not look great I’d be able to wear clothes and have a flat chest and that was all I wanted. So the fact that yeah I ended up with really good results was just an like added bonus but being able to like get up in the morning and just throw a T-shirt on rather than having to sort of wrestle myself into a binder and then put a T-shirt on has been incredible and then being able to go swimming like shirtless was also such an incredible experience like the first time doing that was just ridiculous it was so cool. But yeah it’s made me a lot more confident in myself as well even when I’m like just wearing clothes like no-one else knows this change that’s happened but it’s, yeah really clear to me how much my confidence has grown.

In my experience I got told that I’d be sent a letter at some point for a second appointment and it could be in about 3 months and so I waited the next 3 months and had another appointment. And I think for me a lot of what GIDS was talking because I was sort of 16 and a bit when I got seen by GIDS they weren’t going to – I was probably actually closer to 17 – they weren’t going to actually offer me any, they weren’t gonna put me on hormones or anything because their process for that would have actually taken longer than me just waiting and going straight into adult services at 18 and being given hormones through adult services because obviously with young people, like children and young people you have to be a lot more careful around giving hormones and whatever and so they advised and I agreed that actually it would make more sense for me to just like wait and go to adult services and get the medical support there.

But they continued to give me appointments so I was able to like talk about my experiences with gender kind of, a little bit more like therapy than actually anything like medically, like to medically transition. At the time it was really frustrating but looking back I think it was really useful to have that space to just explore like what I wanted even if I was like slightly altering my experiences for them. And they also talked to me about like what options I had in terms of like hormones and surgery which was really good to have those conversations so when I did go into adult services I was able to just be like this is what I want, these are the options I know that I’ve got like give me these things please. And just going in knowing exactly what I wanted and needed.

I was really overwhelmed by it because I always, it felt a lot more like, it felt less like a conversation and more like an interrogation on like, like who I was and whether I was like really trans and it felt like I was having to overthink all of my answers to get them to believe me rather than going in and being like supported which was, it was challenging. But I did have some sort of idea that that was gonna be what it was when I had been like talking to other people who had been through the service.

So when I cut my hair for the first time it was, I sort of just started learning about trans stuff and was thinking that maybe it might be me but I hadn’t like worked it out for sure yet. And I always had hair down to like, just like by my butt I had really long straight hair and I cut it off to like chin length and it was incredible and I felt so much relief that I didn’t have this, it felt like my hair was like dragging me down it was awful and then having it all like basically all cut off was just incredible. And then when I came out and had it cut even shorter to like a more masculine style it was again just another huge relief that it was, it felt right on my head like it just sat right and it was just doing what I wanted it to do and it didn’t matter whether it, like didn’t look great it was just so much more comfortable. And the same with clothes I’d always, always worn like jeans and T-skirts or like jeans and hoodies and never really been super into wearing like dresses and heels and all the typically feminine stuff. But being able to go and like shop in the men’s section and like buy like men’s jeans and things like that which is so ridiculous like jeans are jeans like it doesn’t really matter but being able to do that was really affirming and it was like yeah look at me I am a man and I can buy men’s jeans or whatever. Although I don’t think it actually made a huge amount of difference at that point the clothes I was wearing I think the biggest difference was getting a binder and wearing a binder for the first time and actually being able to put a T-shirt on and look in the mirror and see myself as a flat chest and it just looked right, it was how it like it was how I was meant to look. Although the novelty like wore off quite quickly as binders are so uncomfortable but it was so freeing to be able to do it and look at myself and see like what was meant to be there rather than what was actually there it was good.

How did you find out about like wearing a binder, accessing that kind of stuff?

I think it was like through sort of YouTube or through like Facebook and social media and stuff and sort of hearing about them as a thing and then doing more research and finding out like where you can get them and like what options there are and then saving up the money and convincing a friend to use their bank card to buy me one because I didn’t have a bank account and I couldn’t really ask my parents to buy me one so then like trying to work out how I could possibly actually get myself one after I’d worked out I wanted one. And then trying to like work out the ways that you’re meant to wear it so like how long you are allowed to wear it for and like all of the different stuff around binding safely which, there’s so much information out there on it now but there wasn’t a huge amount back then it was, it was more difficult to come across the information and also like listening to your own body and working out how you can bind, because for some people some binders work really well and for other people they have to go for like a different style or whatever that was, yeah.

It didn’t interfere with my life huge amounts, I at this point was like in college and I had a bunch of support around me like I had people there who were like on, like on my side and so I could sort of talk about it or not talk about it as I wanted to I was at an LGBT youth group where I was actually the first trans person to be able to start hormones who had like who was currently attending the group, they’d had people sort of attend and then leave and start hormones after leaving but I was the first person who was able to, who like started hormones while I was at the group. So it was really interesting being able to talk to other trans people who kind of wanted to be where I was and sort of share my experiences of that because I think really useful for not just me but also the whole group.

What was that like for you?

I really valued being able to share my experiences with people and so I’ve like done training in schools and colleges and stuff and being able to share my experiences in the hopes that it improves experiences for other people or at least gives them more information has always been like, like really rewarding for me.

So I think in terms of visiting GPs when it comes to visiting regarding gender issues or trans stuff I feel like I’ve always had to go in doing more of the explaining, so I can’t go in and be like I have this problem help me,’ it’s more I have this problem and this is how I need to fix it can you just please do this one thing for me so that I can access this service?’ So in terms of getting referred to gender services I couldn’t, I went into my GP and was like I would like to be referred’ and they were like No we can’t do that and we don’t know how to do that like we’re just, like we don’t understand’ that’s why actually I ended up having to go back several times and in the end I took, I literally took the pieces of paper and was like Fill these in, send them to this address please like this is what you need to do’ because they just weren’t able to help me. And then I found in terms of accessing GP’s for other medical stuff they always try and blame it on trans issues so like for physical health reasons going to GPs and they’re always like Oh it’s like the testosterone you’re taking, it’s the hormones’ it’s like No, no I’m pretty sure it’s not the hormones doing this like there is a lot more to my health than just being trans’ So I’ve always found it a really challenging experience going to GPs.