It’s been a tough week, it started really roughly on Monday, and I’m struggling with difficult emotions now.
The aspect of shock from being told on Monday that my contract could not be renewed has subsided, leaving space for the other emotions: disappointment, sadness, worry, anger.
One of my close friends asked me on Tuesday if I felt let down by my advisor. I wasn’t sure then. Now I know: yes, among other things, I am also feeling let down by my advisor. And abandoned or neglected or rejected by the whole department/institute where I’ve been for almost two years now. I sense a painful confirmation of an undercurrent feeling that has been there for a while now: I feel undervalued, not valued enough, not really seen for my full & real professional (& human) potential. And this is hurtful, disappointing, painful. I feel sad and hurt but also angry about this.
I’m also feeling sad and angry because I’m pretty sure this was my last shot at a career in academia and I blew it. And it’s not wholly my fault: I wasn’t really given all the chances or means to grow professionally, I feel that I wasn’t fully supported in this position. And this is additionally hurtful and disappointing for me because it was my last chance in this field.
Additionally, I’m feeling angry and hurt and disappointed because I don’t think I’m getting the support I would deserve specifically as a non-binary trans person. And I feel this lack of support both from my employer and from the medical establishment.
On the one hand, professionally, I believe that if I had had more “common” medical issues such as needed parental leave or needed extra care/leave to recover from child-birth related issues or if I had needed time-off for mental health reasons, I would have been given more slack and/or my relative “unproductivity” would have been understood & accepted. But as is, nobody really understands (or accepts) that what I have been going through in the past couple years is so hard and can be so crippling that it does impact one’s life, albeit temporarily, even on the professional level.
On the other hand, I realize time and again that I’m often not getting the best care, or really careful care, from the medical establishment. “Trans medicine” is understudied due to biases in the medical/scientific establishment (one example of many scientific biases, unfortunately). But on top of that, I believe I’m not really given the whole picture of options or solutions for my medical issues related to gender identity. The latest example is “ablation”. Since the beginning of my “medical gender journey” I have always made extremely clear to all my physicians that I identify as non-binary, more towards the male side of the spectrum but not fully as a “man”, rather more like a genderqueer “boy”. Thus, I’m not interested in bottom surgery (I’m actually very happy to not have a penis!) and body-hair feels just as dysphoric to me as breasts did — and I’ve always made this clear to the physicians treating me. Hence the low doses of testosterone for my GAHT. One of the consequences of this is that I still bleed and get my period randomly, anywhere between every 2 to 8 weeks. Which is frustrating and can be dangerous for one’s health (chances of endometriosis, among other things). So when I discussed stopping my period/bleeding with doctors, the options I was always given were either hormonal (using “female” oral contraception, i.e. “female” hormones) or hysterectomy. Both of these alternatives are totally unacceptable for me, for important & serious reasons. So the only other solution presented to me to reduce/stop my bleeding was to increase the testosterone which in turn increases body-hair growth. Exasperated by bleeding every 2 weeks, I increased my testosterone GAHT in January and promptly my body hair started growing so fast & coarse & abundant that I got gender dysphoria and stopped GAHT — which in turn has affected my mood, of course, because probably the estrogen produced by my ovaries is taking over again. Only yesterday was I finally given another option to stop my bleeding: “ablation”. A simple, easy, safe surgical procedure that would not only stop my bleeding without the need to increase my testosterone but also make me sterile (YAY!).
Now why the heck wasn’t I given this simple option, that aligns so well with my medical needs & gender identity, sooner???
The Little Prince and the Fox 