Personal Experience

What is it that I am feeling?

And how can I translate that through art?

I am feeling many things along this journey that can be hard to express through words. But for the first time ever it has felt harder to express through my art.

To be told since you were 11 years old that your choices will take away your parents wish for grandchildren is a wildly uncomfortable feeling. What 11-year-old is thinking about giving birth or raising kids? At 11 years old I just wanted to figure out why I felt so out of place in the world, so lonely and isolated and lost in my body and my mind. This is not to say that being trans meant that I was lost for I am not a detransitioner despite what others may believe. I have just learnt to feel comfortable in my body and the things I craved when I was small have been achieved no matter how I present or identify now. This being said, telling a child that their choices will lead to infertility, will make said child so indifferent to that idea that it won’t matter to them anymore – or until its possibly too late. 

I started this journey because it would make my mother happy. I have since learnt that many trans+ people did the same. Going through this painfully invasive experience wasn’t for themselves but for their mother’s peace of mind – which at no point will have been understood or met with gratitude. Trans kids wait for years to receive medical care, years of torment due to a system of misunderstanding, yet to preserve their fertility they have to choose to wait longer. Most will not make this choice. 

I personally started HRT through unsupervised ways; this is known within the community as DIY HRT. DIY HRT is where you receive hormones through unlicensed and unregulated ways and administer the drug on your own. For example, my personal experience was through my Leeds based friend who was and still is on DIY HRT. He helped me find where I can buy needles, and the correct Testosterone online (paid through bitcoin) and I used information from online sources and a google doc of information to administer and monitor my HRT. This experience personally taught me how to read my own blood tests, and, like most trans+ people, I have a better understanding of my medical needs than most healthcare professionals. For example, a gynecologist once asked me how the administration of high testosterone effects my reproductive organs. 

Since I started my HRT journey “off the books”, I received access to fertility preservation three years into my medical transition. This is something I had written off and assumed impossible, but I have since learnt that HRT is not as detrimental on AFAB fertility as previously thought, however it is still safer to go through the preservation process just in case there are more long-term effects. Part of this process is coming off hormones, which I have done, and have since been left with uncertainty of when I am able to come back on. Luckily for me, I am not sent into the whirlwind of panic and dysphoria that many would experience from this which would make the uncertainty unbearable for many. For me, it’s more of an inconvenience as testosterone helps me to regulate my moods which I now must be hyper-aware and careful of. I have also found myself incredibly fatigued and unmotivated as an effect of hormonal changes. 

So, back to how am I feeling?

In my first, and only session so far of the clinic I had an internal ultrasound, a blood test, and my medical history taken. The internal ultrasound as a process is relatively distressing but for some it is impossible. During my medical history I was informed that even though the hormones should have no real effect on my fertility, the fact that I unknowingly had chlamydia for six months has most likely scared my fallopian tubes to the point of infertility. This isn’t something they could officially confirm, I would have to go elsewhere for that test, but it is highly likely. This is something that has hurt me deeply as it was up to a once incredibly close friend to inform me of this fact and they did not. It is hard grappling with the idea that someone else’s shame and insecurity will have a lifelong impact on your health and wellbeing. 

I am uncertain as to whether it is the fact that I am currently faced with these topics and choices that have made me realise I actually do want to have kids and specifically carry a child in the future, or whether it is the act of being told I may never that has brought these wants and needs to light. It is a distressing process.

To combat this distress, I have been writing. But how else could I explore these feelings?

And how could I translate this desire enveloped in sadness and distrust and uncertainty and pain into art?