Doctors vs David

the nuts and bolts of medical transition

Art by Mattie Lubchansky

Last week, Sabrina Imbler and Lauren Theisen of Defector reached out about a piece for a new series. Histories of Transition, whose inaugural installment was written by the inimitable Casey Plett, appealed to me for its straightforwardness: This is what the bureaucracy was. These are the steps I took to get through it.

While the point of this Defector series is to provide functional, if not dispassionate, information about medical transition, writing about mine reminded me that the primary emotions it inspired are, and have remained, joy and rage. I’m in love with transsexuals because we are beautiful, despite each of us knowing countless people—not just doctors, insurance reps, and employers, but family, friends, and partners—who would have happily watched us die from lack of healthcare.

Being white and straight size, not wanting bottom surgery, and having begun medical transition at 30 (instead of at 19 or 20, when I became aware that such a thing was possible) means that my experience was easier than it is for many—but it was still profoundly traumatizing. Being gay at the doctor didn’t prepare me for it. Nor did being chronically ill or having done sex work. And yet, as I’ve often reflected over the past five years, if I woke up tomorrow in my government-issued body, I would do it all over again without a second thought. There is no alternative for me.

While at times frightening, this reality is also deeply reassuring. For me, being trans is like writing: it’s vocational and essential. Both give purpose to my survival. That anti-trans fascists must find their animation in my death is harrowingly sad. Their lives are lived in the negative space of my perfection, and their deaths will be all the more meaningless for it.

Read me on Defector here. Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.