[medical bullshit]

For #TransDayOfVisibility, I want to talk a little about medical transitioning with medical trauma.

I've got medical PTSD from a whole slew of stuff, ranging from medical assault to literally 3 decades of gaslighting me about my embodied reality...
...so for a long time, I didn't even consider medical transition because I didn't feel comfortable allowing medical professionals to get their grimy little violent hands anywhere near my gender.
But over the past year, as my mental health has healed slightly, and I've watched trans friends and acquaintances begin their medical transitions, it was something I became more interested in.

So at the start of January, I called the local gender clinic to make an appointment.
I got that intake appointment, with the counsellor, in mid February. During that intake, as I was listing my health conditions, they said, "that's a lot of stuff." An honest reaction, but also one that raised red flags for me.
Typically, my local trans health clinic goes through the psych evaluation process with the counsellor, then you get passed on to the nurse practitioner who evaluates whether HRT is likely to be physically safe for you.
They suggested instead that they would refer me to an MD who works with their clinic who would "hopefully" know more about my chronic illnesses, in order to be able to make a judgment call about whether T would be safe for me. They said I should get a call within 1-2 weeks.
I finally got a call yesterday, 6 weeks later. I have an intake appointment for the first week of July. (Which is a tiny wait compared to folks in the UK but still...)
This is the clinic to which I've been referred 🙃

So yeah, I somehow doubt I'm going to be starting T, and I'm kind of regretting deciding to seek clinical care, as I do every time I decide to pursue clinical care. Screenshot of the clinic's ...Screenshot of a question on...
All of which is to say, there are a lot of reasons why people may not transition medically, and medical trauma is a huge one.

Also, fuck the clinic.

(Also also, I am SO VERY NOT looking for advice here.)

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More from @alexhaagaard

2 Apr
This appointment is going to go SO well Screenshot of a section fro...
They asked if there was anything else I thought they should know about 😃 Text: "I am aware taki...
The cool thing about receiving absolutely no goddamn healthcare is that I no longer give a flying fuck what they think of me as a patient because what exactly are they gonna do, give me less than zero care somehow??
Read 4 tweets
1 Apr
Anyway, I'm just gonna go ahead and thread about my experiences with it, because it's hard to describe accurately in general terms.

But this has been one of the biggest factors that has prevented me from doing physio/strength-building exercises over the years.
It resembles Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, which is a common and well-known phenomenon, in that it's highly localized, and involves aching and loss of muscle strength in a particular muscle group, about 24-48 hours after exercising that muscle group.
What I've never been sure about is whether the magnitude of what I experience is "normal."

Because all resources on DOMS are just like "hurting's normal but if it hurts too much you're working too hard and it shouldn't like...immobilize you or anything."
Read 12 tweets
6 Feb
We’re doing social model discourse tonight so here’s some stuff to know:

a) the social model, as originally formulated, explicitly defined disability as the oppression that is experienced by those whose bodies/minds are *perceived* as deviant...
...which, intentionally or not, leaves out a lot of disabled people. While there have been attempts to rehabilitate the model to address the experiences of those with chronic pain, as far as I have been able to find, there has been no attempt to comprehensively resolve...
...the problem that medically invisible disability poses to the model’s assumptions, or to contend with the impact that those assumptions have had on the advocacy and policy shaped by the social model.
Read 10 tweets
28 Dec 20
Winter’s awesome because literally every time I walk the dog I end up wanting to cry out of exasperation and pain because everything is so goddamn inaccessible #NEISvoid
I just got stuck on a patch of black ice for about five minutes because these assholes who can afford a $500,000 house apparently can’t afford a snow shovel and sand.
Then I got stuck at an intersection because the pedestrian button stops working in subzero temps and the lights won’t change at night without it. So I had to cross the other way and jump a curb cut that’s hazardous when it’s not covered in snow, to try the opposite button.
Read 4 tweets
13 Dec 20
Pretty sure @bennessb has talked about this before, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how symptomatic (descriptive) diagnoses do very different things than etiological (mechanistic) diagnoses, and how rarely that difference is acknowledged in clinical practice. #NEISvoid
Symptomatic diagnoses are valid and important to accessing things like disabilities accommodations and palliative care. But they’re often treated as an endpoint in the diagnostic process, while etiological diagnoses are important in accessing effective treatment -
- especially when a single symptomatic diagnosis can result from a variety of different etiologies.

Moreover, symptomatic diagnoses are linked to the phenomenon of medically invisible disability:
Read 5 tweets
12 Dec 20
That is to say, I can only explain things in excruciating levels of detail, otherwise I end up getting confused by whatever I’m trying to explain because it requires me to flatten complexities that feel essential to a thorough understanding of what I’m trying to describe.
But neurotypicals quickly disengage from those lengthy explanations and if they do read or listen the whole thing, often end up becoming more confused than they were to start with.
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