I went to a psychiatrist at student health who I knew was “diversity-friendly.” We talked for a bit less than an hour, about my desire to transition and what that might involve for me. She asked about my childhood, about my relationship with my body, about my sexuality and how I currently identified my gender. None of my answers fit the paradigm of the DSM. For example, when asked about my sexuality, I said, “I am attracted to people.” I specified that transpeople, and gender-diverse or queer people, were usually people I was more attracted to, but there isn’t a label for that. Except maybe “queer.” When asked about my body, I could honestly say that I felt comfortable in it for the most part but that socially, other people didn’t seem to understand what my body meant. I didn’t think that having breasts should mean I was female, but when other people saw my chest, they assumed I was a girl. The problem was not me, I said, it was the assumptions of the people around me who knew nothing more than the binary of male and female.

After all of these discussions, the psychiatrist looked at me, sighed, and said, resigned, “I cannot diagnose you with Gender Identity Disorder, or Gender Dysphoria.” I agreed, enthusiastically. She asked what we should do. I suggested that she write a letter to the endocrinologist (for I was first seeking hormone therapy/testosterone) saying that I was mentally healthy and capable of making this decision. She did so, right there in front of me, and I appreciated it. When I saw that she was using female pronouns for me in the letter, I asked if she could change them to male pronouns, which is what most of my friends were using for me. She said no, because “it would only confuse the doctor.” I didn’t want to push my luck, so I said okay.

Later I reflected on how frustrating it was that I was asking to be recognized as the person that I already knew I was (even if that’s somewhat ambiguous because we’re all in the process of becoming all the time), and how the pronoun issue represented that because here was me being asked to identify as male, in order to access testosterone, but in the same hour being told I can’t have male pronouns because other medical professionals will get “confused.”

I’m expected to identify as male (and I don’t, I identify as genderqueer or as trans or as masculine) but when I do, for example, asking to be called “he” instead of “she,” I am told that it is too confusing for the professionals. I felt like I was being asked to prove I was who I knew that I was, but that I wasn’t granted the authority, after all, to be who they wanted me to be.

It’s a double-bind. Like the one where the DSM says we’re supposed to feel “significant distress” about our bodies or genders, but we’re not supposed to have depression or anxiety or anything “too significant”!

The other highlight of the interview was when she said “some people say that they’re trapped in the wrong body” and I said “yes that’s true for some people but not true for me, and I want to make more room for other narratives, other ways of being trans.” She then pronounced me “post-modern” like it was akin to “paranoid schizophrenic” or “delusional.” I was glad she didn’t include that little epithet in the referral letter.

When I refuse to tell the DSM story... I can draw on my educated, middle class, white privilege, and the worst that happens to me is I get labelled “post-modern.”

But this is not the experience of people who do not share my privileges, and I wonder about how to address this. I have since discovered, in my interactions with my endocrinologist (hormone specialist) that my identity as “trans” trumps all my privileges and renders them, if not useless, definitely not useful. I am still not able to determine my own treatment path or insist that we use a model of informed consent. Being diagnosed with a disorder, which I avoided, would have officially labelled me someone who was not capable of knowing themselves or knowing what was best for them (that was my interpretation of it anyway). But I discovered that even when I resisted that diagnosis, the fact that I was seeking a medical transition put me right back into that box. I didn’t tell the right story, but all of the stories I did tell didn’t lead anywhere. I needed to create another box, another ending, another possibility for where those stories could lead. To this day I haven’t worked out how to do that, except through writing a thesis that includes my stories and those of other gender-fabulous people.

By joey macdonald, NZ
Otago university, department of sociology, gender studies and social work

I come from a small(ish) country town in central WA called Kalgoorlie. As a gold mining town, it can be a bit rough at times. The pubs are open from six in the morning right through until three o’clock the next day, to cater for the shift workers. Kal is famous for its brothels (being the only ‘legal’ brothels in the state- for historical reasons) and teenagers wear work-boots to school. Even so, Kalgoorlie is an alright  good place to grow up. The schools are pretty good (for a country town) and there is a huge range or sports and community groups. There are churches on every second street corner and nothing ever opens on a Sunday morning. Overall, it’s a good place to raise a family.

Except if you are gay.

As a child, I loved Kalgoorlie. The people were nice, I had good friends, life was good. Then I hit high school and realised that my hometown was not always so nice.
When I was thirteen, I came out to my best mate, who I later found out was gay too.
When I was fourteen, I told my mum I wasn’t so straight. She didn’t believe me.
When I was fifteen, I had sex with a girl for the first time (it was a one night stand). Later on that year I also became a Christian, which changed my whole outlook on life.
When I was sixteen, I came out at school. Now that went down well. In a school of a thousand students, I was the only queer person out. You can imagine the kind of attention I got for it!
When I was seventeen, I started to get really vocal. I’d had enough being treated like shit by people in my school. I would wear slogan shirts (which Mum banned at home after my little sister started saying “what does ‘Dip me in Honey and Throw me to the Lesbians’ mean?”), and I would call people out on their homophobic comments.
When I was eighteen I was on Youth Exchange, and a whole new world of Gay Belgium opened up to me. But it didn’t feel right. Empty somehow.
When I was nineteen I moved to Perth for uni, and everything changed.

I went from a tiny town where I was branded a freak and weirdo, to this big city where it isn’t such an oddity to be gay. Finally, I could be myself, and no one would care! The campus Queer Department quickly became a second home, in a way that Tels Quels (a Belgian gay and lesbian youth centre) never did. Mum is still in denial over my sexuality, but now I don’t live at home, I can’t shove it in her face anymore. We are both dealing with it in our own way. It is strange to call Kalgoorlie home now. A place I loved for so long is now constricting. I go back and I feel as if I am being shoved back into the closet. I thought I came out when I was sixteen, but now I realise that I was still trapped in the door. Now though, I am out and free, in this big, wide world that is quite happy to let me be.

By Suzie Day, 19 - Perth, WA
My life has changed so much through out my teenage years. Originaly written from a university assignment.