I have done. I have made an appointment to be seen at the TransCan Unit of the Government of the Canary Islands.
He had been counting down for days, glancing at the calendar. For later this afternoon, I foolishly lag behind. My young son had to prod me to leave home – “Weren’t you going to go out?” And I have arrived late, due to an unconscious resistance at the last minute.
At the health center, the security guard, a two-meter tall man with a mustache, asked me where I was going, and my voice said “to the Unit of Attention to Transsexual People“It has sounded more piping than ever. Then in the waiting in front of the closed door of the office, the nerves have caught my stomach by surprise.
At last the previous person comes out, a child accompanied by his mother. “How lucky”, I think: “if my mother were here she would be astonished.”
The family doctor who manages the cases treats me. A charm. It immediately makes me feel at home, and I still gasp at the prospect of the interview.
He asks me how I want him to treat me. I tell him that with any pronoun that does not end in “a”. And that I don’t know if I’m a trans guy or a non-binary person, and that I’m there to find out. His smile widens, and I sense that I have come to the right place.
Yes, I am 53 years old, and I am a breast cancer survivor with a double mastectomy. as you read in my medical record. But also a biological woman, an activist since she was 20 for the feminist cause and LGBTI rights. Protagonist of one of the first lesbian weddings in the Canary Islands and mother of a large family. And, at this point in the story, starting a transition without a fixed destination.
And now that?
My emcee reassures me. Explains to me that there is a battery of public resources to help transgender people on the journey to their true selves. First a psychological consultation. After endocrinology, in case you decide to get hormonal. There is also a voice unit, in which they evaluate if you need the support of speech therapists or even a small surgery to make your voice lower, in case the hormones do not solve it. Plastic surgery for a mastectomy, as well as gynecology and urology, in the case of undertaking a change of genitalia.
My mind flies inadvertently to the hate speech that circulates in Spain these days, and that surely considers a waste that public health offers these means for something that half the country does not understand. Half a country that also does not know that the suicide rate among young transsexuals is alarming, as well as that of unemployment or the enormous difficulty of access to housing. Life is very difficult for those who suffer fierce discrimination, because unlike with disability or xenophobia, it does not appear to be politically incorrect aggression for those who think that this is a masquerade.
I tell my interlocutor that I like it to be male. But at the same time I feel like a fraud when I hear my voice, feminine and sweet, so far from where I am. My androgynous appearance sometimes puts someone who speaks to me without knowing me in trouble. And even more so to me, who no longer know what gender to adjective when I speak. It would be easier if it was clear to me that I am a transsexual boy. For now I am somewhere in the middle for which there seems to be no language that does not raise eyebrows around me. There are days when it is exhausting.
That is why when I decide to make an appointment with surgery and speech therapy to start with two changes that I know the body asks of me, which are to remove the prostheses that were put on me after breast cancer and worsen my voice, an inner voice tells me that maybe I’m trying to normalize my appearance to fit in something that society sees natural, and thus be able to stop naming me in feminine.
Because the place where I am is a direct candidate for “elle”, but there my philological training comes face to face with neutral pronouns, still so squeaky in our language.
Maybe I am wrong. And instead of going through the scalpel you should try changing molds. But my head doesn’t give for more. We will have to go looking, and give time to time.
I leave the consultation with a handful of phone numbers from support associations. And in the days that follow, I am pulling the thread of those supportive people who offer their time to give birth to those who follow them on a new and unknown path.
To clear shadows in mine, I make an appointment with a support group. The social worker who cares for me makes up for her youth with large doses of empathy. But he can’t help skating by asking me about my sexual orientation for the quiz. – Well, until now I was a lesbian, but now I don’t know. If in the end I am a trans man, knowing that I like women, I guess I happen to be heterosexual. But if my gender is neutral, what will my orientation be? I take her out of the square with the question, which remains in the air.
We fill in my file.
– You have a partner, daughters and sons, a good relationship with the family, a network of friends and friends around you, you are visible at work and you have not been fired, you have a house to live in …
Immediately, he looks at me with surprise and says:
– I don’t know how I can help you. It is the first time that I attend a trans person without problems.
I feel relief and at the same time like a slap without hands. This is the world that awaits those who travel. Families that deny, ridicule and aggression in the street, impossible jobs. A life on the sidelines.
I return home in a sea of doubts. I still have time not to fall into the stigma, not to mark myself forever. Maybe I’m trying something that I could avoid. But I have embarked on this journey to discover. I’m not going to throw in the towel at the first funk! So I take a breath and ask science a question: is transsexuality born, or is it made? Looking for scientific voices, I find Silberio Sáez, sexologist and doctor of psychology. I have been told that this Navarrese is one of those professors who, being able to sit a chair, prefers to impregnate his teachings on Evolutionary Sexology with debate and openness before successive generations of students of the subject in Spain. It is not easy, when the biological and the social coexist in the trans sphere throughout the world with so much effervescence in recent years. But talking with him about transsexuality and science I find clear answers that give me a plinth on which to cement my staircase.
A little light is coming on this landing. Let’s keep going up.
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