I didn't come to the need to be a woman until later in life so I didn't fit the traditional ' trapped in a mans body since birth' model;.  I just told the doc that I had thought about it, and this is what I wanted to do.  That seemed to satisfy him, coming from a 53 year old man and he started me on hormones.  History doen't matter. It's just what you need now in your life.

margie 

Quote from: Lydia on May 16, 2007, 09:19:36 AM
.... Well it took about 4 months to write (was pretty painful to rehash my childhood and everything else) and ended up being about 7000 words long. I sent the bio off about a month ago and received appointments for both docs' a couple weeks ago. The first appointment was today and the next is in early August. ....

My god!    I would die an old man, if I had to do a "book" like that, to get hormones.   

My GP asked a similar question and I monologed at him for about 10 mins and then when I got to the part in my life story where I started going to school I just burst into tears, I still do if I think about it too much....

Anyway, he said he'd reffer me to two gender clinics (one private one NHS) which he did and I recieved letters of refferal three weeks later and I got an NHS appointment 6 weeks after that.

By the time that I saw my NHS doc I was already FT and a passable happy woman so she only asked a couple of questions like when i'd changed my name and when i'd decided to transition.

I've read so many of the "how to convince the medical and psychiatric folk" stories from various places, that it makes me both angry and sad.  For me..........I didn't follow a guided path, but took matters into my own hands (Okay, let me again repeat myself here:  Do not do this very dangerous thing.  It could kill you!).  I self medicated, properly, and did not seek medical assistance until I was just over 2 yrs into transition. 
For me, I had no one to convince.  I was there, in front of them, convincingly being female.  My very excellent doctor did blood levels, liver function, etc, and kept me on my regimen.  I met with my therapist for the first time last week, and am going again tomorrow.  She was great!  Wonderful woman, with a wonderful sense of humor, and a very realistic perception of reality.  Hehee...!  I say that anytime someone else's perception of reality matches mine.  Anyway, she said I had a very firm sense of who I was, and how I fit into society.  Here, I'm looking for my letter, and some conversation on how to make this easier on those I love, and how to make it easier on me, and who I work with.  I think the letter should be a snap.

Bev

Quote from: joannie on May 26, 2007, 08:23:37 PM
I didn't come to the need to be a woman until later in life so I didn't fit the traditional ' trapped in a mans body since birth' model;.  I just told the doc that I had thought about it, and this is what I wanted to do.  That seemed to satisfy him, coming from a 53 year old man and he started me on hormones.  History doen't matter. It's just what you need now in your life.

margie

my guess would be that they'd be most stringent with what they let the younger patients do, and most liberal with what they let the older patients do?

Partly just that young people do silly things? think of how many grown ups are stuck with bad tattoos, they probably have some sort of image of the grown up stuck with SRS that seemed like a good idea to a troubled youth? But hopefully they'd give you more credit than that?

but also if you are older, you are not risking as much? Particularly if you already have a family. The biggest side effect of gender re-assignment as i see it would be loss of fertility. They really don't want a young person to loose that functionality if there is a chance they may be able to cope with their masculine mind in a feminine body (or visa versa) some other way? But if you already have a family, that's not an issue as much?

Yah I have thought about that question so much lately. It's hard for me because growing up I buried anything feminine that came out of me because I was a man and therefore should act like a man.

Over the last few months as this stuff became unburied, I have realized that I have always been self conscious of my lack of hair in certain places, my emotional state of being, hobbies, and problems with how I look.

But even if I can get over all of these things and still be a man....there's still something inside me that longs to be a woman. And I can't break through that locked box to figure out why. It's frustrating.

It is strange how times have changed in 30/40 years and when I hear about what goes on today I don't know if I would have survived the process.

I wasn't allowed to seek medical help until I turned 18 so I self-medicated when I could (which wasn't easy because hormones were hard to come by in the 1960's). Just before my 18th birthday I found a sympathetic gynaecologist who asked me to stop self-medicating - I refused so he wrote me a prescription anyway. He also arranged a psychiatric assessment at the same hospital.

I had been living part time en femme, whenever I could get away from home, and despite in-depth interviews by multiple shrinks I don't remember ever being asked "Why?". I don't think there was a need because it was obvious that I couldn't pass for a guy. The objective of the assessment was simply to determine that a person was sane and stable enough to make their own decisions. I came away from the day-long sessions with the unconditional support of the psych team and didn't see a shrink again. (Unfortunately it was 2 more years before SRS became available.)

Frankly, if I had been denied script, I would  have continued DIY. If I had been denied surgery, I would have offed myself. Everybody knew it and they did everything they could to speed me on my way.