Quote from: Jen on January 05, 2013, 12:59:48 PM
Whoever wrote that is super empathetic or has actually been there. It's really encouraging for me to see that in an official guidelines document. Maybe the world is starting to understand.
Pretty sure that section is a paraphrase or even a quote from the Benjamin Standards. I'm sure you can find endless debate about the Benjamin Standards in trans dialogues... it's been a subject of heated debate now for at least several decades.
In practical terms, I wonder whether it might be productive to discuss Lana Wachowski's speech at the HRC visibility awards with your therapist, if you're having some issues with those pressures to present in a form your therapist is willing to view as female? I don't know how much you've discussed this, and I'm also not very informed about what your practical options are if there's bad chemistry between you and someone that NHS is paying for. My impression is that, given the limits and restrictions to access, there is a potential for problems with therapists who many not yet have entered the 21st century.
I'm hesitant to say this after such a short reading, but I can really sympathize with the temptation to offer an ultimatum about self-medicating. Granted, it would be better to strategize with someone who has already managed to negotiate the rat maze that the NHS system often sounds like it has become.
One afterthought that is probably painfully comical to you at best: What you describe about skin conditions, could they be expected to improve with HRT? Is there any way to get a dermatology consult and treatment that would address the issues that make using make-up painful and require an impractical skin care regimen? In short, is there any way to improve the skin condition, putting aside your entirely valid point that at this point in time very few cisgendered women wear that much make-up, and that one could make a case that wearing make up in this day and age, beyond something very subtle, tends to get one identified as a drag queen, not as a contemporary woman in one's own age cohort?