Thread by @_oatc_

@RozKaveney @ceemage Having been forcibly made aware of the possibility of/threatened, on my 3rd birthday, in 1950, with the rest of my life in an asylum, with daily ECT, "because that's what happens to people like you", I count from then, really. But comparisons are invidious & to be avoided.

@ceemage 1/ As my pinned tweet says, my mother was a nurse who had gone seeking an answer to my asking her some months before to find out if doctors had a way to make me grow up as a woman, & instead learned the official NHS "treatment path". So I believed her.

@ceemage 2/ I decided that such a fate was worse than death & within days planned what to do if I learned I was to be taken to the asylum. A simple & practical plan for a child that age living on the corner of a busy bus route. NHS psychiatrists have much for which to apologise.

@ceemage 3/ Even 20yrs later, when I'd found a prof of psychiatry powerful enough to protect us, & help us transition (the founder of CX GIC), as soon as my family GP received the courtesy letter informing him, he tried to persuade my father to have me committed to an asylum.

@ceemage 4/ Fortunately my father told him the whole family backed me. It was such a danger that, after assessing me, my psych's 1st condition to accepting me as a patient was that I move to London where he "could protect me". It went on until Thatcher shut the big asylums🖼️.

@ceemage TW
5/ NHS #ConversionTherapy mental hospitals still listed us as transvestites even after CX started providing SRS for those with #transsexualism in the 1960s

🖼️🖼️UK accounts of aversion therapy from 'Curing Queers'
🖼️🖼️A US account of ECT on a child from 'Gender Shock'

@ceemage @threadreaderapp unroll SVP