I'm lucky!

[davinia1963]

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Well there has to be some explanation and, without getting too metaphysical and ethereal, luck is the easiest way to describe it! I’m talking now about my transition and, the way it had totally and utterly changed my life around! Sadly I’m now suffering from Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and needing two arm-crutches to walk around the luck may not stretch to all areas of my life. But then again in some ways I’m lucky there too! I don’t have to worry about walking as a woman, just walking! (lol)

There is of course another explanation as to why my Primary Care Trust (PTC)/Health Authority are paying for me to become a patient of probably the best transgender doctor in Britain, Richard Curtis, and it is part of our apparently much maligned - at least recently in the USA - National Health Service (NHS) it won’t cost me a penny!

The explanation is some have been campaigning for years to change the system for dealing with Gender Dysphoria and transgenderism in the area of Britain in which I live. That is really why ‘I’m lucky’! I was lucky (that word again!) enough to be able to travel to our parliament in London to campaign against the way we girls were being treated, by those supposed to care for us and also speak up for change to our district council, not to mention to human rights lawyers! And we were successful, with local MPs and the entire district council behind us, including the far from trans friendly far-right British National Party!

I consider myself so incredibly lucky (that word again!) to be almost acting as a ‘guinea-pig’ for the new system and way of working. I’ve just received my first appointment for speech therapy, which is great as I always think as soon as I open my mouth I’m so obviously male! (Thankfully others disagree, already) My first laser hair removal appointment will be within the next month, and I get Derma Color Camouflage Cream free from my doctor on prescription, as I’m on Incapacity Benefit as the MS makes me unable to do paid work. (I do, however, do a lot of voluntary work.)

I also feel so incredibly lucky, (that word yet again!) that in the town where I live, and was indeed born and brought up in, people have been so accepting of my life choice. I reckon I must now have ‘come-out’ to almost 900 people, yet I can count the negatives on the fingers of one hand! And everyone keeps commenting on how happy and positive I now sound and I am! I describe it as. “My lights are on and this time some one really is home!” I spent over ten years on anti-depressants when my marriage collapsed, due to my wife’s infidelity not my trans issues. However a few weeks ago I suddenly thought, “Why am I taking these? I’m happy!” and went ‘cold-turkey’ and stopped taking them. Indeed I’m the happiest now I ever have been in my life, and truly contented, and how many can really say that? That’s what luck can do for you!

However, lucky as I do feel, and yes as Joan Amatrading sang. “I can walk under ladders”, I’m not about to start doing the National Lottery, as with help from others I’m making my own luck and finally living my real life, and that is a prize that’s way beyond price!!!!