Thank you for your kindness. I am very well supported now and my life is dramatically better, but it has been a struggle to find health/mental health professionals that know what they are doing and have compassion. Seeking support for a mental illness can be hard anyway, but when you are also Transgender it can be very traumatic and problematic. If people refuse to call you by your preferred name and use your preferred gender pronoun (he/she) then that's the first thing that will put you off continuing with support. But there are also many professionals who have prejudice and ignorance that get in the way of providing even the most basic duty of care.
My gender psych 9 years ago wanted me to be mentally well and off my meds before he would give the go ahead for surgery, which is ridiculous. The psych eventually changed their mind thankfully. But I did not receive the proper care I needed, as the psych (although specialising in Transgender identities) didn't have much knowledge on the mental health and wellbeing of gender diverse people and didn't really have any therapeutic skills, except to find a topic that hurt me and then challenge me on it continuously. If I could have seen someone else I would have. I know lots of Trans people are still continuing to have to see this person in order to transition and it worries me. Just because a person puts their hand up to treat us, doesn't mean they have what it takes.
The best GPs, Psychs and counsellors I've seen over the last 9 years have been professionals who are willing to learn and explore along with me, to see me as an equal and to see the strengths I already have. I'm glad there are many youth services offering support to LGBTI youth now, and I hope the trend continues. I'm also glad to see more and more Trans people go into counselling and other helping professions and to offer training and consultation to services that know they could be doing more. But the fact remains, that Trans people are high risk of suicide along with many other risk factors and we receive some of the worst healthcare. Just an example, I went to hospital with UTI pain one night and the nursing staff were great until they found out I was Trans. Then they treated me like I was a leper, threw away my urine, did STI blood tests and demanded to do invasive investigations of my genitalia that were both humiliating and painful. I was then sent home and had to put up with the pain for a whole night and wait to see my GP the next day. I then had to wait another painful 24 hours for the positive UTI test before I could go on antibiotics. I am now too afraid to go to hospital again.
In the majority of situations, we Trans people don't even receive the most basic of healthcare and this is something that must change. It is no wonder that Trans people are 17 times more likely to suicide than the general population. It is almost impossible to find professionals that we can trust and certainly impossible to find health/mental health professionals we can trust without having to put ourselves at risk first.
