Until the Dragon Comes

Sorry I kinda buried the lede amid all my paragraphs of rambling here, so the tl;dr is that I can probably have top surgery after all, in Germany.

I'm really glad that last week my counseling session touched on the difficult feelings that come up when a system that has been arbitrarily discriminating against me stops doing that.

I think it came up when I made some reference to the fact that, in my current workplace I sometimes get a real strong feeling that I know the instances in which white middle-aged and/or middle-class men are treating me better, because they understand me to be one of them, than they would have if I'd had this job while everyone (likely including me) was under the misapprehension that I'm a woman.

I said it made me think of coming back to Manchester Airport, a source of so much trauma for me since 2004, and how much easier it was to breeze through it the first time I had a UK passport which was in 2017. I was shaking and almost crying by the time I got out of customs and down to baggage control. I was angry, I was so angry it felt like my body couldn't hold all of the feeling, which is why it was leaking out of me like that.

We talked about the seeming counterintuitiveness of being angry (or in less dramatic cases maybe annoyed or unsettled would be better words), when "good" things are happening, or when there's also the relief that an experience I would previously have braced myself for is suddenly better. It helped to acknowledge that feeling surprised or shocked by this is something I've probably been trying to suppress because it felt like a bit of a betrayal of all the times I'd heard of this happening (like those men who have to pretend to be women on the internet in order to understand that Being A Woman on the Internet Sucks rather than just listening to the women who say so), or maybe it made me feel like my previous understanding of borders or patriarchy or whatever was somehow incomplete.

I know that being taken aback by something just because it's happening to me doesn't mean that I have to be surprised or making some kind of judgement about my previous understanding of the thing,, but I think I was trying to "skip to the end" or reach the "correct" response, rather than letting my soft animal body feel what it feels.

I'm glad this came up because today I had the video consultation with the German clinic that was personally recommended to me as being both good and explicitly reassuring on social media that they don't care about BMI and it was fine.

(At least, it was fine once we worked around the problem of not being able to log in to the video portal because the computer declared our postcode invalid when it definitely isn't, which greatly frustrated D who was helping me and made me just want to run away, it was fine -- we got all the problems out in that case, and it made us five minutes late, but that didn't present a problem at all once we got started.)

The surgeon was cheerful -- he said they love doing this type of surgery, and I imagine it must be incredible to see people at this stage in their life -- and gave me all the information I expected in a first conversation and I know when and what kind of other info to expect if I pursue this. They're used to people who aren't local so I'm very ordinary and expected to them in that way too.

It is such a relief to be normal.

It's tiring being an edge case all the time.

It's also, of course, infuriating because I have never been treated like my requirement for top surgery has been ordinary or manageable before.

I have only ever been treated like I am a problem, and I have fix that myself. And I have to do it via intentional weight loss, something that I know is basically impossible. I know that weight-cycling (and minority stress from anti-fat stigma) accounts for almost all the negative health effects that are usually, erroneously, associated with being fat. I have inadvertently already been through a couple of "gaining the weight back and then some" cycles (from phenomena such as I'm in college and I'm suddenly walking everywhere and also I'm poor so probably not eating enough) and I know there are people who've done far more so I feel silly treating myself as so fragile but it really upsets me to think about having to subject myself to that again just to access some healthcare.

And here I am, treated as if my requirement is routine, everyday. Because it is for this dude.

And that means (with a lot of money that I only have because of The Economy; it's equity from the house I used to own, and you bet I'm angry about this as well!!), it can be ordinary and respectable and possible for me, too.

The appointment was more than 12 hours ago, and this reality still doesn't feel entirely real to me.

But I'll get there, I guess.