Telling The Doctor I've Been Taking HRT Under the Counter & Self Acceptance of my Feelings

[black_cat_1980]

I am very nervous about going to the doctors today. I expect I will even more nervous when I am actually there. I think I am increasing the severity of the situation in my mind. I believe that I could be in denial that I am taking the HRT and anti-androgens up until now, or maybe I just didn’t realise what I was doing. If I look at myself from an

Comments

[eriktrips]

I don't know how things work where you are but here in san francisco the major public transgender clinic works on a harm-reduction, informed consent model that generally considers it better for you to be under a doctor's care if you are going to take the hormones on your own anyway. they don't do an extremely rigorous screening, but you do have to talk to a mental health professional for an hour or two just so your general stability and non-psychotic-ness can be established.

as far as accepting yourself goes, I can certainly understand the conflicts that doing so brings up. when I "remembered" I was ftm around age 33, I knew immediately what I wanted to do, but there were a number of obstacles I had to overcome to get there. nothing terribly major--just that I was headed off to grad school in a different city and I needed to concentrate on finishing my BA and then finding a place to live down here etc etc before I could really focus on my gender stuff.

that and knowing I was coming to the Bay Area made it relatively easy to sit tight for several months as life continued to unfold.

the one thing I would say is that with self-acceptance does come a certain amount of responsibility to yourself, depending upon just how much you feel you need to do in order to find a way to live with integrity and self-respect and honesty. the thing is, there are lots of options out there, lots of ways to reshape the body, if that's what you choose to do, lots of ways to learn how to move differently in the world--there is simply a plethora of possibilities at the intersection between gender issues and medical and psychological technologies.

do you have a counselor of any kind? someone with gender-related experience? it might help to have someone to talk to who is conversant in the alternatives that await you and your chosen method of gender expression. it could be good simply to have one person you can confide in no matter what you feel and see it reflected back to you as normal--though unusual--and good. if you are referred to a mental health center, try to take advantage of your time there to get support, if you can. it is often hard to see people in the medical field as allies in all this, but if you can get somebody with experience in gender variance, it can be really helpful in sorting out your own motivations and goals.