I am off to get consultations for surgery and I am left to ask myself what does a consultation mean to me? I know what the world, well the usa and Canada at least, think of a consultation in this light- a meeting to discuss and facilitate the acquisition of surgery. But to me and hopefully other Trans people it comes across as a time to prove we are Trans.

 Why do we need to do this? What does it mean to prove yourself or an aspect of your identity to another? Well enough with the small questions, why the heck do I feel once again that I have to placate others so that I can live my life? I could come to the whole ‘well I am asking someone to chop me up so they probably don’t want to get sued’ argument and that is comforting to a degree. But it generates more emo thoughts, like why are we as a people so lawsuit happy and why are we so awful to each other that it is one of the only recourses to a potential disaster in one’s life?

Really, I don’t mind the whole consultation for the physical part of the surgery. It is important I know what I am getting into and what to expect (although most of us Trans people have already done stupid amounts of research online). It’s that arbitrary proof that I am Trans that bugs me. The standards for that proof could literally have been set anywhere given there is no physical or biological thing a Trans person could point to that demonstrates ‘look here is the thing in my brain that proves I am trans!’. But why are we stuck with cis-people creating standards for us? They have no experience of being Trans. It’s sort of like colonialism all over again. There is the mother country (the cis people) looking at us colonials (Trans people) and saying ‘well aren’t you quaint, now let me tell you how to be superior like us even though we know you will never achieve our status’ or in other words ‘let me show you how to live and be happy because you clearly don’t know how to do it’. Sure the standards creators pay lip service to Trans voices now, but it’s the cis people who still create them.

They still consider Trans a mental illness after all, because we are not like them. And yet irrational bigotry is not a mental illness (because all bigotry is irrational), perhaps because again it’s so common amongst people that it seems a rather normal state of mind. So do we consider everything that is not common to be a mental illness? We all know how many other things that were considered mental illnesses that have been taken off the list.

 It would just be nice if trans people could create standards for trans people. At least we all have a grasp of what we are going through. And it’s rather clear that cis people don’t have a clue.