Ok several points come to mind here, and none of this is official medical advice, just points based on my own individual experiences.
First VeronicaLynn you can't have SRS without HRT – seriously you just can't medically, or you will be in fairly terrible state within a decade. Your adult body can't function properly without enough steroidal hormones and once you have SRS your steroid factories are gone. So HRT is then pretty much a matter of life and death.
Second and more important point (which is also slightly more generally relevant) – you are assuming that all therapy and all therapists are the same which is like saying all fruit is the same and that because you had bad experiences with a banana an apple and a grape then you KNOW for sure that you also won't like strawberries.
Point is, taking the definition at its widest even a doctor is a therapist. Yes the therapy that they provide is mostly via the physical domain rather than the psychological, but if you look in the dictionary you will still find that treatment IS synonymous with therapy and thus all doctors are therapists. You don't want therapy now? – fine forget the whole darn thing and enjoy your life unaltered, because surgery is a radical form of therapy!
Ok you may think I'm just playing with words here, and in a way I am, but what I am trying to get you to see is the level to which you have pre-judged a whole class of things based on a few bad experiences – and that frankly defensive behaviour, however honest it is in motivation, will always tend to make clinicians worried, in case it comes with a hidden agenda.
In law all treatment is technically a form of assault. Which is why we have to get consent before we touch you. If I, as a medical student, or future doctor, treats you in any way without your informed consent we can be had up for a serious criminal offense – and it has happened. Doctors get struck off, put in prison even, because they failed to get meaningful informed consent before treating.
So what does this mean. Well unfortunately it doesn't just mean that you rock up and say "I want this, ergo I consent." We actually are required by the courts to demonstrate that the treatment was necessary, or at least had a rationale, that you understood what would happen, and that you were in your capacitous mind (that is to say you were not delusional or in an altered state of consciousness) at the time you consented.
If any of these tests fails and you later have regrets, suffer ill effect, or worse die as a partial consequence of the treatment we provide, then we can be, and indeed often are, criminally charged.
So the bottom line is this – no one goes into medicine wanting to say no to people. Every one of us does it because we WANT to help people live better, happier, healthier lives. But at the same time while we live in a society ruled by law and lawyers, we also have to take steps to protect ourselves, and that is where the screening requirements come in.
IT IS NOT repeat NOT supposed to be about stopping you doing something which you legitimately want to do, nor is it supposed to be about persuading you to do something else. It is about ensuring that when you give your INFORMED consent, that consent IS legally valid and properly informed.
To do this you don't have to go and sit in a psycho-analysts chair for weeks talking about the effect of way that you doggie barked at you when you were three.
What you do have to do is see, at least once, and probably two or three times, someone who is either psychiatrically trained, or a qualified analyst with experience of gender work. These people do NOT want to section you, analyse you, or indeed anything much. However without their sign off, any surgeon or doctor who lays a finger on you can be struck off, sued, and imprisoned for assault, and much as they would all love to help you, you can't ask them to take that much of a risk on solely the basis of the word of someone that they have never seen before (you).
I hope this helps. Believe me I do feel for you. I was mildly intersexed at birth, and was allowed to grow up androgynously. However I didn't have any corrective surgery until I was a young adult. I thought because I had a medical basis for the treatment that I would be allowed to go through on the nod. I wasn't – in fact my reluctance to see the therapist and get the paper signed cost me a few years delay. Ultimately I found a compromise that I could live with, but even then I had to go and see a psychiatrist and prove that I was sane, simply to protect the surgeon. The irony is, when I finally did it, I found the psychiatrist I saw to be very pleasant, and indeed we later became very good friends.
So my message is this – you don't have to spend years at this, and it doesn't have to be a battle, but you will have to compromise with the rules enough to protect your doctors. If you really can't do that, then sadly you may not be suitable for treatment, because part of being suitable is to be a reasonable adult person, and willing to work with your doctors rather than fighting them.
