Awaiting Eighteen

By Strauss <ostraussey@yahoo.com>

When my friends at school turn eighteen, they always sarcastically exclaim, “Now I can buy porn!” (For whatever it means, they’re never as excited about getting to vote as the whole porn thing. Such is our society.) They make fun of me for being young—I won’t be eighteen until my freshman year of college—but they don’t understand why eighteen is such a magic number for me.

Health providers aren’t very friendly to minors. Most minors are on their parents’ insurance, if they have insurance at all. Unless their parents are unusually cool, it’s highly unlikely that transgender and transsexual youth will be able to find the support they need, let alone transition if they want to.

I remember the shrink my parents used to make me go see. She would meet with my parents after me, and tell them stuff I’d said. I had no recourse, as my parents were paying for the “treatment.” I know that I’ve been lucky. I know who I am and that only dorks refuse to acknowledge/validate my identity (though that’s often hard to remember after a long day at school). I have a support network of both online and real-world people. My dad has a great insurance policy. Oh, and yeah, I have a really hot boyfriend.

I was harassed for all of 10th grade due to my gender presentation, and assaulted on school grounds by one of those harassers. The school then refused to take action. I tried to kill myself.
After that, my parents let me see an lgbt-friendly therapist, not the one they’d been making me see.
Very cool. But I remember the day I finally stopped dancing around the subject and told my therapist, “I want t [testosterone]. I want to get my chest chopped off.” I remember her response, too. Nothing about how scared I’d been to tell her, or that I’d been talking around it for eighteen months. Nothing about what options I had, or if she would support me through my transition. “You’re not eighteen,” she said. “You’re out of luck. We can talk again after your eighteenth birthday.”

So far I’ve been patient, though if I knew where
or how to get illegal hormones, I’d be a lot happier.

I’ll be eighteen in six months now, and can hopefully live my life the way I want to. I don’t know whether my parents would have okayed me starting t, especially while still in high school. I highly doubt it, though I’ll always wonder. They never got the chance to say no—the mental health clinic in my town did it first.