A transgender journey: Are you experienced?

Juliet Jacques reports on the 'Real Life Experience' living as a woman required by medical professionals before she can set a date for gender reassignment surgery

    Juliet Jacques
    guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 January 2012 02.00 EST

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/23/transgender-real-life-experience

"You won't see us again until after the operation" says my secondary clinician at the West London Mental Health Trust Gender Identity Clinic, supporting my main therapist's recommendation that I be referred for surgery. The questions – about whether I've made the right decision, about how family, friends and colleagues have reacted to my coming out and how I've dealt with transphobia – are over. Having lived and worked as female for two years, I've finally completed the Real Life Experience or, if you prefer, passed the Real Life Test (as it's also been known).

I thought I'd be jubilant, but leaving, I feel strangely indifferent. Perhaps this is because the referral represents a strange mid-point: I addressed the RLE's main challenges and became comfortable with my new reality so long ago that it seems surreal to link this official end to the (sometimes fraught) process of managing my social interactions; but 27 months after entering the pathway, I neither have a date for surgery nor any idea when I'll get one.