Every once in a while I see a blog post or hear a comment about how easy it is to transition these days, and shouldn’t people be waiting longer? Little snippets of panic about people rushing into things, usually coupled with the assumption that, as medical transition becomes more easily accessible, more and more people will do it, and will end up regretting it. I’m not going to link to the post that triggered this one because it is a steaming pile of bullshit that, amongst other things, uses an episode of CSI as proof of our slippery slope into a dark, apocalyptic transsexual future. CSI, the most reliable of sources. Moving on.

As well as being paternalistic, privileged scaremongering, this is also a pretty blatantly transphobic position, with the underlying understanding being that ending up with an ‘unnatural’ transsexual body is the worst possible thing that could ever happen to a cis person, and must be avoided at all costs. The precautions being increased obstacles to medical transition, and the costs being the vastly larger amount of trans people who have to climb over them to get to it.

The other ridiculous thing about this (the first being the ratio of people who regret it to people who don’t) is that the preventative measures don’t work. For as long as there has been access to medical transition, there has been gatekeeping, and there has been regret. The thing with transsexuality is that it is self-diagnosed, in the end, and anyone can jump through the hoops if they want to. And in my personal experience, those hoops require personal dishonesty, and denial of doubts and fears.

I remember in the early days of my trans experience, hearing about these people, who did it, who regretted it, and being told not to worry because ‘that hardly ever happens’. Of course I did worry, though, and I don’t think many transsexual people don’t worry – that they might be the one who regrets it, who ends up with an awful surgically constructed body when they didn’t even have to. I think most of the time this fear is internalised transphobia, a desire not to be a ‘fake’, second-class human being, and a clinging to the possibility of being a ‘real’, ‘natural’ cis person. At least, after six years of struggling with doubt, that’s the conclusion I have come to regarding myself.

But the interesting thing is how this doubt came through and how I dealt with it. When I set out to access medical transition two years ago, and came up against mental health professionals who questioned and interrogated my identity and choices, I found myself feeling more and more certain. I had never been that certain before apart from when I had just come out and was having to justify my identity to my family and friends. See the theme yet? Having to prove myself forced me to push the, quite substantial, doubts and fears I had about medical transition to the back of my mind. And it worked, and I eventually, finally, got my hands on a testosterone prescription, and it was all very exciting. Until my voice began to break.

It was like the floodgates had opened, and all of the things that I hadn’t allowed myself to think about for the last two years came pouring back in and overwhelmed me. I stopped testosterone. I started seeing a private counsellor. I started to deal with my doubt again. I did all this and didn’t tell the NHS anything about it because I was terrified they would cut off my treatment if I did. And that’s the thing about uncertainty: you don’t know what you want to do. Because I wasn’t sure if I wanted the treatment I had access to or not, I didn’t want to risk being honest about my fear and losing that access. I decided to continue with treatment again, after a lot of help from a fantastic counsellor – I will probably write more about that journey another time. The point is that the gatekeepers’ net failed to fish out my uncertainty, and more than that, it actually prevented me from dealing with it.

What gatekeeping, and the self-policing trans community that swallows the medical industries’ bullshit trans narrative does, is prevent people from being honest with themselves. If transitioning is the wrong direction for someone to take, then following a script and burying their real feelings isn’t going to help them figure that out. I think that concern about transsexual regret, most of the time, is an elaborate and patronising cover-up for transphobia. If you really want people to stop making bad choices, then maybe you should stop trying to police them.

For a more academic (and excellent) deconstruction of what’s wrong with the gatekeeping system, check out Dean Spade’s essay, Mutilating Gender.