I don't know if this thread is the place to vent about things like this, but after the utterly devastating news I've received today, I just feel I need to connect, to reach out. And, well, to vent. I'm trans, and have been transitioning socially for two years now, after a life-long soul searching centering on just why everything about me and my life felt off and strangely empty until I realized what it all meant. Unfortunately, the country I live in isn't exactly accommodating to people like me, and the one endocrinologist who is willing to provide gender-affirming care requires two separate professional opinions confirming our suitability for hormone replacement therapy, one from a clinical psychologist and one from a psychiatrist.
I've just gotten the first one, one that I've had high hopes for, feeling like I've been very confident about my identity as a woman, identifying the signs I've noticed in retrospect, the manifestations of my gender dysphoria, and the psychologist even saluted my "exceptionally high level of introspection" and my general good handling of psychological terms that they attributed to my social studies education as well as the literal decade I've spent in therapy at that point. I've read through it, and I'm just... completely devastated. She misrepresented every word I said, completely disregarded everything I've said about body dysphoria, my vivid recollections of dissociating when seeing a man's face in the mirror (and the overwhelming sensation of truly seeing myself for the first time ever when first seeing myself in make-up) or being disgusted by my body hair, my wide shoulders, my rectangular figure, and latched onto my social dysphoria, feeling disconnected from the boys my age growing up and only ever feeling any commonality with the girls, connected it with my answers to the questions about my childhood where I talked about how my sister and I have been routinely pitched against each other, and while any expressions of negative emotions from me led to being disciplined by my father, my sister was always appeased when she did the same. From these points, the psychologist reached the conclusion that I envy women because they're allowed to feel the emotions I have learned to completely repress in myself due to the emotionally distant environment I grew up in, and that led to me wanting to become like them; she ultimately suggested psychotherapy focusing on mourning my unfulfilled emotional needs, proposing that it might be the cause of me "wanting to change my gender" in the first place.
The same therapy I have spent a whole decade in with three separate therapists, without any apparent improvement (the only "improvement" being attributed to me learning to control my emotions even more tightly, lending an appearance of being more stable), with my last therapist even letting me go because I was deemed too emotionally repressed to be able to work through my trauma through psycotherapy. I just... I feel completely lost and hopeless. I don't know how to stand up from this. The life I want to live, the body I want to have, the brain I want to see free from this stupid testosterone haze reducing me to an emotionally suppressed half-alive state, all there, just out of reach, taunting me forever, without hope.
I've just gotten the first one, one that I've had high hopes for, feeling like I've been very confident about my identity as a woman, identifying the signs I've noticed in retrospect, the manifestations of my gender dysphoria, and the psychologist even saluted my "exceptionally high level of introspection" and my general good handling of psychological terms that they attributed to my social studies education as well as the literal decade I've spent in therapy at that point. I've read through it, and I'm just... completely devastated. She misrepresented every word I said, completely disregarded everything I've said about body dysphoria, my vivid recollections of dissociating when seeing a man's face in the mirror (and the overwhelming sensation of truly seeing myself for the first time ever when first seeing myself in make-up) or being disgusted by my body hair, my wide shoulders, my rectangular figure, and latched onto my social dysphoria, feeling disconnected from the boys my age growing up and only ever feeling any commonality with the girls, connected it with my answers to the questions about my childhood where I talked about how my sister and I have been routinely pitched against each other, and while any expressions of negative emotions from me led to being disciplined by my father, my sister was always appeased when she did the same. From these points, the psychologist reached the conclusion that I envy women because they're allowed to feel the emotions I have learned to completely repress in myself due to the emotionally distant environment I grew up in, and that led to me wanting to become like them; she ultimately suggested psychotherapy focusing on mourning my unfulfilled emotional needs, proposing that it might be the cause of me "wanting to change my gender" in the first place.
The same therapy I have spent a whole decade in with three separate therapists, without any apparent improvement (the only "improvement" being attributed to me learning to control my emotions even more tightly, lending an appearance of being more stable), with my last therapist even letting me go because I was deemed too emotionally repressed to be able to work through my trauma through psycotherapy. I just... I feel completely lost and hopeless. I don't know how to stand up from this. The life I want to live, the body I want to have, the brain I want to see free from this stupid testosterone haze reducing me to an emotionally suppressed half-alive state, all there, just out of reach, taunting me forever, without hope.
