#for therapy

I knew I'd prefer being a girl by age 10, though I thought of it like wishing I could fly. Puberty was a nightmare come true for me, but I endured it because I believed I had no choice. I could have been spared all of that, the medications I needed had existed for decades by that point. And you know, sometimes, life sucks, accidents happen, people fall through the cracks, it's horrible but it's life. We deal.

Except. This wasn't an accident or oversight. I did look for answers and ways out, and I found... AGP, and Blanchard's typology. And transmedicalism, with unreasonable (and since discredited) diagnostic criteria I could not meet. A single clinic in a 16mln pop country. A claimed prevalence of 0.01%. A law that declared transsexualism (sic) incompatible with a desire to have children by requiring sterilisation. And adults who shut down (parents) or ignored (teachers, doctors, psychs) any attempt to get help.

Later, much later, when the resultant resignation and repression was finally broken by meeting another trans woman who recognised me as one of her own, I started reading back the history and learned. Ray Blanchard and Harry Benjamin and all their ilk, psychologists and sexologists and medical professionals, people who claim to know things and whose job is to help, intentionally set out to minimise the number of people who transitioned. They deemed us a pathological anomaly and turned their feelings and cissexist politics into medical "science". They 100% had all the data they needed to know that gender dysphoria was common, and they rejected it, and suppressed it by writing the rules to exclude almost everyone affected from diagnosis. Including me.

I didn't suffer an accident. I suffered a crime. And the oppressor class is 98% of society. And true allies who get it, among that 98%, are about as common as truly aware allies in any oppressor class, which is "not very". And somehow I need to live with that, and with the fact that the camp that wants to round us up for V-coding seems to have more political momentum than the camp that wants to apologise, offer reparations, and prevent repeats.

Humans cannot live without a society. I'm no exception. So I need to learn to live with a society that deeply harmed me for 20 years, is not sorry, still condones such harm against others like me, still wants me to jump through hoops for the right to exist as myself, is still filled with people who simultaneously think of themselves as nice to me while thinking of me as "not really a woman", and has half a mind to dehumanise us further.

So do I said my demons

Rattling in their cages locked away

Though never quite gone

I can always hear them

It can be dangerous I said

Both to you and myself but I

And my demons know