Receiving gender-affirming care was like pulling teeth
I received the treatment I needed, I would never have a “normal” body again
Today Patrick Silvanic writes about the gutting of the availability of gender-affirming care for minors in the U.S. and his own experience struggling to be allowed to become who he always was as a child.
"What was 'best for me,' as a child, was never truly about what was best for me. It was about assigning me to a lifestyle where my family wouldn’t have to feel ashamed of me anymore," Silvanic writes.
"I was told I could find my identity when I was 'old enough.; Not when I was a child. Not when I was a teen. But I was transgender through every minute of my childhood and I am still transgender at twenty five."
"Kids are told to just be themselves, unless that self is imperfect, in which case fuck it, you should probably just pretend you aren’t such a disgusting weirdo. We tell them this to their faces. Be like this, not like that. Always be yourself, but be the way you were made, don’t grow or change or evolve. Be the “yourself” your parents made, not the yourself you made. Your parents, and all the other concerned parents everywhere, know what is best for you, even if that’s being someone you are not."
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Since it is St. Patrick's Day you may also appreciate this piece about the long tradition of hunger strikes around the world and particularly in Ireland.
Luke O’Neil
At any one time, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of people undertaking hunger strikes around the world. Many of these strikes go unremarked, but the fasts are a binding agent within the groups that undertake them. The line between fasting-as-protest and a hunger strike is largely one of semantics. A hunger strike draws on the language of labor movements to evoke a work stoppage, an action by community members. A fast suggests a moral goal. But in reality, there is little difference between the two. More than a protest against conditions or a call for attention, fasting in protest can express solidarity, and solidarity means trouble for the powerful.
We’re trying to protect the children. That’s why we took their rights
by Patrick Silvanic
In America children are considered sacred. At least that’s what we’ve all been told. Their protection is often declared to be our first concern. Even when it’s proven time and time again that our protections for our children are in fact very weak. Gun violence, for example, is the leading cause of death for children here, and has been for years, with very few meaningful changes at the legislative level even attempting to alter this pattern. American parents, and those who govern in their name, insist, all the same, that they know best. After all how can we keep a child safe if we cannot control their every move? Even, or especially within, the borders of their own bodies.
Our children's waning ability to determine their sense of self without parental approval can be seen everywhere. It’s in the tracking measures implanted into the technology we give them so we don’t have to waste our time entertaining them. It’s in the mass banning of books ranging from A Clockwork Orange to And Tango Makes Three in school libraries. And now it can be seen in the almost complete loss of gender-affirming care for minors in the U.S.
For many “concerned parents” this loss for trans children has been considered as a win. I’ve seen many thrilled chronically Facebooking moms cheer that they no longer have to worry about what will happen when the big scary transgenders come and – I don’t know – transgenderize their child forcibly (?) As they’re known to do.
As absurd as that sounds, it is so hard to get the idea through their heads that even if there is no care available for trans kids, children will not be any less transgender. They will simply languish without the care recommended to them by a doctor who is in fact not getting a huge cut from Big Pharma to “mutilate” your child’s breasts.
(It’s believable that rich doctors would take a cut from performing unethical surgeries on young girls, but we already know where to look if we want to deal with any of that.)
It is unbelievably tough to force a child to identify with a different gender than the one they internally identify with. This is a reality that almost all trans people who came out during adolescence know too well.