IWT 4: How Did We Get Here?

If you’re reading this, I’ve started HRT. If all goes well and you’re reading this the day it releases, today is the day I started. Over half a decade of trauma, dysphoria, mental illness, and struggle has finally come to fruition. It is December 9th, 2024, but this story begins waaay back in 2019. On June 2nd, 2019, at 1:49 pm, I received a text message from a friend of mine where she came out as bisexual. Ironically, she’d later come out as trans too. This would immediately shatter the dam of repression that had built up in my mind over the course of the past 5 or so years. Years of memories came back and were recontextualized in the coming hours. I was exactly 15.5 years old when I realized that I wasn’t cis.

I wish I could say that you know the rest. Wham, bam, I come out to everyone important, they’re all supportive, I’m on HRT within the year, roll credits. That’s not at all what happened. In the coming days, I’d come out to the major social circles I was in, some teachers at my high school, and then my parents. I told my mom first, just cause I almost threw up from nausea due to dysphoria. Early on, dysphoria felt like this mental anxious feeling. I could cope with music, or if it got really bad, I could exercise. Pretty shortly after coming out, I asked my parents if we could chat about me starting HRT. My mom offered to do it over text, which I accepted because that’s what I was comfortable with. My dad instead overruled and in his words “If you aren’t mature enough to talk about it out loud, you aren’t mature enough to get it”, in reference to HRT. That was not the first time he had a dodgy take on something that only more recently came into acceptance, he’s had insensitive takes about my autism too.

This is where things don’t happen for a while. At the time, I thought you couldn’t legally start HRT till you’re 16, so I had to wait. In the meantime, I was able to study up on what to expect from HRT and where to potentially get it. 16 came and went, but no progress was made. Then the COVID lockdowns started and that made any progress impossible because everything was shut down. The only things that really happened during junior year was When I returned to school senior year, I was able to connect with some resources to find a good spot to get HRT from. I settled on a clinic that offered a program that would allow me to access HRT and some other services for free till I turned 24. At the time, I was 17 and would need parental consent, which I was able to get from my mom. With everything set, I should be off to the races and on HRT in a month or two. Yet again, this was not to be.

The biggest roadblock I would face was not external, but internal.

Now let’s go back in time a few years. To understand what is about to unfold, we have to take a trip down memory lane to 2016. I was 12 at the time. During a routine checkup, I needed some vaccines. I expressed significant anxiety at the idea, but instead of trying to understand why, the nurse called in an orderly to have me held down while she gave me the vaccine. The result is a memory so traumatic that I would repress it for 7 years until finally remembering it. Even when I reaquired the memory, it always remained elusive and for good reason. Even just thinking about it too hard would result in flashbacks that would subtly persist for hours. Recently, I’ve been able to grapple with it better and find its place in the larger story of my trauma.

That would not be the first time the needle phobia wouldn’t be dealt with properly, resulting in further trauma. I was diagnosed with it in 2017 and my mom didn’t tell me till Fall of 2022. During that time, I had to get the COVID vaccine and that went about as well as you can expect, given my previous story. Due to the needle phobia, I only have the original 2 shot run that I got back in 2021.

Alright, back to the “present” in this story, so it’s now winter of 2021-2022. This is when I first go to Callen-Lorde, off the recommendation of someone who worked at my HS, who I would later become close friends with. I also considered going to Planned Parenthood, but ultimately decided against it due to some things I’d heard online being corroborated by this friend of mine, as well as the glowing reviews of Callen-Lorde and its Health Outreach To Teens (HOTT) program. The HOTT program accepts people as young as 16, if memory serves me correctly. The oldest you can be when you sign up is 21, but regardless of when you get in, it lasts till you turn 24. What it enables is access to queer-specialty healthcare, like PreP, STI testing, and HRT, in an affirming environment, for free.

Callen-Lorde is a rarity in the trans healthcare sphere because it offers services to minors at all, despite the parental consent requirement. In general, minors are denied autonomy, much less autonomy over their health. This has been changing in recent years in more progressive states, with programs enabling teens to get access to birth control and condoms without their parents needing to know.

Initially, I was optimistic. It’s always “By the end of the year”. The reality is that it would take a whole lot longer. In retrospect, the failure seemed inevitable. I was new to being in the driver seat of my healthcare, plus I didn’t even know that the needle phobia had been diagnosed. I knew I was scared of needles, but felt that my doctor didn’t take it seriously enough. In my mind, I had to overcome a fear that had resulted in me being physically restrained on multiple occasions to have injections. I hadn’t even begun to conceptualize the trauma I had to overcome. Plus, I had bigger fish to fry. I was a highschool senior, so college was on the horizon and all that entailed. It just wasn’t the right time, so despite my intentions, it failed.

And so I was off to college. I moved into college on August 28th, 2022 and because I was so far from home, there was no chance I could continue the path towards HRT. Freshman year was fine though, I enjoyed my time and made good friends. That’s where I met someone who I now consider to be my sister. I made some theoretical progress towards HRT, but in retrospect I was barking up the wrong tree. I thought it could be eventually resolved with exposure therapy, basically training my brain to not freak out when exposed to needles by exposing myself to them in a safe environment. Of course, the reality is that I just had trauma and needed to deal with it.

Now let’s jump forwards to last year. Attempt 2. I was able to actually attempt to get the blood tests, but of course, it failed. I was given 1 mg of Xanax beforehand in an attempt to mitigate the anxiety, but all that did was make me sleepy. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to let the needle get anywhere near my arm, so I went home in disgrace and had to sleep off the Xanax. For the week leading up to the appointment, I was getting random panic responses to remembering that it was happening and I had to keep reassuring myself that it wasn’t going to happen yet. The night before I had a big one that made me have to go to bed early. I tried to get the blood tests again a few weeks later, but the morning of, I got super nauseous cause of a panic attack and had to cancel it.

The third attempt to get HRT started this spring, after getting kicked out of college. I decided to try to centralize my healthcare somewhat and try a different place. This is a decision I would live to regret. During my first visit, Dr. Alexa Goldstein at the Judson Health Center, took one(1) look at my chart, saw that I had been to the psych ward recently, and immediately refused to proceed with HRT for me because I was too mentally ill. When I talked back, I faced gaslighting, with her and my psychiatrist there stating that they only wanted me to succeed. She wanted me to get situated with the psychiatrist there, get my meds adjusted, then be on my medication for 2 months without any changes before she would approve me to start HRT. I’m being this specific because I don’t want anyone else to go through what I did. Do not go to the Judson Health Center, they fucking suck. Even after I explained the circumstances that lead to me going inpatient for all of 20 hours, she refused to relent and couldn’t promise me an exact start date, despite me asking multiple times. I go further into this in my previous article, linked here. I usually don’t get as specific as I do here about who’s involved, but in this case I see it as a genuine safety issue for other trans people and I want to avoid other people being subjected to what I was forced to deal with as much as possible. If you’re in NYC and looking to start HRT, look no further than Callen-Lorde. I plan to get most of my healthcare from Callen-Lorde because they don’t just specialize in providing trans people with HRT, they also provide all other services you may need for generalized healthcare. Unfortunately, transgender healthcare is a specialty. That’s why I’m not going back to the Judson Health Center for anything else. If you mess up what your clinic specializes in, can you really be expected to do anything else right? What I experienced at Judson was an all-too-familiar story of lifesaving healthcare being pointlessly gatekept by a system not designed to help trans people succeed, but to keep cis people from failing.

Now, on to my 4th and final attempt. Because it had been almost a year since I had been there, Callen-Lorde wanted me to follow up with a provider before approving me for blood tests just so they could get an idea of how things changed. That was on Thursday, November 21st. It was fairly routine, I talked my doctor through what has happened in the past year and how I’m now medicated. I forgot to mention being diagnosed with a few things, but I doubt it would have mattered. I’m likely going to be able to finally get a psych eval through Callen-Lorde too, which will finally explain what’s been going on this past year. The closest I came to a barrier being put up was when I mentioned how I lost most of my friends at college and my doc asked if I had a social circle, which I’m able to proudly say that I do have, thanks to getting into activism in NYC. On my way out, I got my next appointments scheduled. First, labs. I was able to get those done the following Monday, on the 25th. Of course, you already know the follow-up was on the 9th, exactly 1 week after my 21st birthday. I’d say the day of the blood tests was anticlimactic. I wasn’t worried in the leadup to it, even as I was walking into Callen-Lorde. I took the 2 mg of Xanax I was given, but I don’t think that was the reason it went so well. I had resolved the trauma, so I had nothing to be afraid of. When it came time for the blood draw, it took all of 30 seconds. The nurse nailed the vein on the first try and I was in and out of that room before I could think. I was mildly uncomfortable, but it was the normal “Someone’s about to stick a needle in my arm” type of uncomfortable. I hardly noticed the needle going in and it was over before it even started. My doctor wanted me to come with a friend to make sure I got home safe cause I was taking Xanax there and I agreed since 1 mg made me super tired and I wanted to make sure I got home fine. Turns out, this measure wasn’t needed because I hardly noticed 2 mg of Xanax. I was thankful for my friend to be there, if only as someone to share the experience with because of how much it matters for me to get to that point.

That week I got the blood tests, it was the best week of my life, at least so far. The week I start HRT would of course blow it out of the water. Between publishing several of my poems to a great response earlier on in the week, the follow-up on Thursday, and GNX dropping on Friday, it was amazing.

Now I leave you with the selfie I took on my way out with my friend.

Well, we got here, didn’t we?