Just learned that “you have to live as your chosen gender for two years before you can access hormones or surgery” was still the 🇺🇸 norm a decade ago.
As a young trans kid reading about that requirement in the early 90’s, it seemed like a impossible hurdle to jump; as an adult, it scared me even more.
My own first two years of living publicly as trans haven’t been the horror I feared. Mostly because of the wonderful people around me, but also because of medical support. Support—not gatekeeping.
That really did cast a shadow over the next decades; it never occurred to me that medicine or culture might actually change, or that one might be a woman—in any sense of the term—without meeting some preordained standard grocery list of physical attributes.
In thinking thay way, I was unconsciously furthering the same stereotypes by which I was myself being bound.
