LGBT Youth Issues Today by David E. Newton

Author:David E. Newton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Road to Transitioning: Danielle White

We thought we had a good idea when we offered my two year old, “Pee in the potty and we’ll buy you underwear like Daddy wears,” but the response was, “No thanks, I prefer pantyhose.”

—Mom, circa 1976, about me

As a transgender individual who was assigned male at birth and identified as female, that statement was my first known expression of my gender identity, but it was far from my last. I grew up in Rural/Small town USA in Pennsylvania. It was an area that was conservative in about every sense of the word, particularly politically, religiously, and socially. It was a region that wasn’t great for an LGBT individual.

As I grew up, I was aware that something wasn’t right, but I lacked the language to describe it. That I was a girl informed so many of my thoughts, including my dreams. I learned that there are pink words and blue hobbies. I learned to play that role to survive.

In the early 1990s I began attending a small junior college in the same area. During lunch one day a group of students had a then-popular daytime talk show on in the lounge, and the topic was transsexuals. The show’s treatment of the subject was abysmal, but the positive for me was that I finally had a word to describe who I was; I gained the start of having a vocabulary.

I graduated from that college and went on to another institution that had a slightly more expansive library and two books in their collection about the topic. One was a doctor’s description of treating multiple trans patients. Written in the 1960s, its language and the treatment described left much to be desired, but it gave me the powerful notion that transition was possible.

After college, I decided to try to transition and began by seeing a therapist in my hometown. I had no idea that one needed to see a specialized therapist for this, and I paid for that mistake. My transition was effectively delayed for just over a decade, during which time I found a career in information technology (IT) and married. Still, I knew that I was a woman, if in the proverbial “sheep’s clothing” of a man, and I was lesbian.

Finally, in 2008 after having moved to central North Carolina, I tried again. This attempt was vastly more successful but not without its troubles. I faced a lot of classic gatekeeping—the patriarchal approach of medical and mental health professionals toward transitioners in which the professionals set themselves up as absolute authorities on trans lives. My transition proceeded along an extremely slow path: more than a year to have estradiol prescribed, an additional nine months for an antiandrogen to be added, and years further to reach an effective dose, defined as one which would feminize my body.

There exists a concept of agency that an individual has, defined as the capacity for an individual to exert power in his or her life. In the context of transition, that power is heavily dependent on the providers’ permission.

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