Lived body |
The role of the body in experiencing the world and shaping identity | *1. “All I could think about was how much I just wanted to be my authentic self, how much I wanted to be a woman.” — Participant 12 *2. “I decided that I would live my life as a female for a year and then if it felt like this is truly me, then I would medically transition. So, then that’s what led me to the next year at 28 to medically do it.” — Participant 14 *3. “I felt like they weren’t really clear on those, like minor details... like if I should get electrolysis, if I shouldn’t. It just felt like it was not really explained to me thoroughly.” — Participant 14 |
The lived experience of the body in shaping human connectedness | *4. “My general concern about medicine in general, which has kind of led me to distrust it a little bit more, is that it’s very physiological and it’s very based on aggregate statistics. I don’t think that, at least in the hospital context, I don’t think psychosomatic elements are taken into account quite well. I think psychology goes ignored. And I feel like a lot of treatment outcomes would improve if we also considered the mental aspect as well.” — Participant 8 *5. “And if I was to say that there was 1 issue, it was that there wasn’t the emotional, social support, even if it’s as simple as just sitting for 5 minutes and talk.” — Participant 15 |
Intersecting identities | *6. “I would say the variety of trans lives. How in depth different trans lives can be.” — Participant 9 *7. “This person is a person of colour and trans … . No, this person is trans…as soon as you put the trans in it, it ends the intersectionality. It really does. It makes all the different factors 1 factor and erases the rest.” — Participant 15 |
Emotional pain | *8. “And I used to cry myself to sleep most nights, and I’d have to muffle my sobs and my blankets and stuff, so I shared a bedroom with my 3 older brothers. Didn’t want them to hear me crying and I used to pray.” — Participant 12 9. “I think that because before I went into my surgery, they told me all these things, I kind of had a little breakdown.” — Participant 14 |
Lived time |
Experiential passage of time and progression of events | *10. “I actually went for the approval for surgery 3 times. One time my doctor forgot to submit it. So that never actually got submitted.” — Participant 15 *11. “I was able to convince [Practitioner X] to request ministry approval, shift the approval to [Doctor A], and again it took some convincing to get [Practitioner X] to write them that letter and resubmit. I was basically fully advocating for myself and pushing it along.” — Participant 10 *12. “Delaying care leads to suicides.” — Participant 6 13. “When I was being put out for my surgery, I used to pray. Please God create this miracle. Let me go to sleep and wake up as a girl. I’m lying there and they’re about to put me under and I thought thank you God. You know, I’m gonna go to sleep now. When I wake up, I’ll be, as you know, I’ll be a girl. But you know, obviously it’s cosmetic more than anything. But you know it. It was a dream come true.” — Participant 12 |
Lived space |
Environments inducing existential anxiety or fostering affirmation | *14. “I have anxiety, a little bit. When I walk through doors, what I find myself [doing] is looking at my phone or my chart all the time, and then looking at the doctor looking at the chart. I’m waiting for that ‘What?’ comment.” — Participant 13 15. “I would just say my entire stay at Women’s College was so good, like everybody was so good. And I will tell anyone who will listen, I love that hospital. Like every single staff member has been so fantastic. [E]very time I go back for follow-ups … the people at the reception desk are always so nice and so good about names and pronouns and all that. No one made any assumptions about how I identified the whole time I was there … Everyone took really good care of me. I wish that every interaction I had with a person within medicine was as good as my time at Women’s College Hospital. Like, it was the best.” — Participant 7 *16. “There’s always anxiety when you walk in.” — Participant 13 *17. “Largely inconvenience, largely not having to go out of the province to be in [City X] as I’m recovering and everything, and have ease of access.” — Participant 9 |
The role of technology in shaping the understanding of the body | *18. “I feel like I’ve gotten working knowledge that’s comprehensive enough to understand what my anatomy is like, what it was like, what surgery did, what its like now, what the various surgical techniques offer in terms of the ability to manipulate where I’m at right now. So, I’m able to have informed conversations with my surgeons. That was a lot of reading. [A] lot of searching for papers using Sci-Hub [a shadow library providing free access to publications] to get through paywalls.” — Participant 10 *19. “Within the trans population, like, how do you get access? I mean, people ask each other. That’s the main source. So, like either a group or friends or like I’m on a couple of [Province X] … . social media groups there. It’s just trans people asking the same questions about services.” — Participant 1 |
Liminal spaces | *20. “I knew some things about medical transition, but I could’ve desperately used a counsellor or some sort of support system at that time. When I moved to Canada, you know, things were a lot more conservative over here than they were in [United States, State X], and so I just kind of slowly drifted back in the closet and just kind of, you know, identified as genderqueer.” — Participant 1 *21. “The number of times I was worried that people actually wouldn’t believe that my ID was me … and that I would have trouble like, okay, I need to get a blood test … . Great … OK, here’s my OHIP card … has a picture of somebody that doesn’t really look like me … has a name that I’m not using, so what do I do? Do I go in the office and introduce myself as [Participant 6], that I’m here for a blood test or do I do the horrible mental health thing and go … . Yes, I am deadname or having to out myself to unknown people when I didn’t want to … which has a huge mental health impact. It is terrible, but I definitely hit that period in the middle, where I was like I don’t know if people are going to believe this is me.” — Participant 6 |
Lived human relations |
Communication and language | *22. “If I get like, misgendered or deadnamed by like, just random strangers, like, that’s one thing and I can kind of blow it off. But like when it’s health care providers, like, people should [expletive] know better. Honestly. Stuff like that, I tend to avoid. Like any sort of walk-in clinic, I hate going.” — Participant 7 *23. “I did have to keep doing talk therapy with him, which again was quite traumatic. His questions were even more invasive, even more inappropriate. At one point, he just flat out asked me if I’ve ever tried having gay sex and if I did, I might like it enough to not transition.” — Participant 2 *24. “When I started having these interactions with people, I am supposed to trust like medical professionals, you know, and a lot of the same stuff is happening, it just kind of reinforces that idea that, you know, the world is dangerous and that I don’t fit in and like my identity is something to be ashamed or something to keep hidden.” — Participant 2 |
Empathy and compassion | 25. “My overnight nurse who was on call when I was there … I absolutely loved her. I thought she gave me such a good experience there. She made me feel so comfortable, like she would always come in and check on me. And she would give me lots of pillows, make sure I was very comfortable … just, you know, talk to me. Make me feel like not so alone. She would just strike up random conversations about things.” — Participant 14 26. “My mom was quite resistant to the whole thing and, in the weeks leading up to my surgery, [there] was a lot of pushback and I was very thankful that [Doctor Y] was willing to book an appointment in a meeting with him and my parents, which, like I’m really, really, really grateful for, because I know he’s a very busy guy.” — Participant 7 *27. Being visible is a danger, but if we’re not visible, then our voice isn’t heard. Minds can’t be changed, so they keep going with the old adage, the old story, or the fact that there is still people out there that believe it’s a mental health condition or, you know, conversion therapy was still around until it was just outlawed. These still exist and people are still subjected to it … . People think we can be cured instead of treated …” — Participant 6 *28. “You have 2 options, either sexually active or not. If I’m active, why wouldn’t I want to get tested? Why do I need to justify and have somebody make me feel like I’m doing something wrong for being active?” — Participant 6 *29. “I feel like, you know, when you misgender one of us, you misgender all of us. It hurts. In their hallway conversations, they need to be gendering correctly as well.” — Participant 1 *30. “And I am always misgendered over the phone.” — Participant 12 *31. “It’s just like I got deadnamed from a system and it’s just like, you know, really hard because I was there for mental health services. I was getting deadnamed. And I was in crisis.” — Participant 1 |
Loss of trust and connection | *32. “The person who brought me to my room. He kind of was unclear about what my gender was, and that made me feel uncomfortable. And then one of the female nurses [referred] to me as like, a he. And that was a little, like, annoying.” — Participant 14 *33. “Yes, I take estrogen. Yes, having estrogen in my body increases my risk of blood clots from a cis male. Yeah, it puts me in the same category as cis females. What’s the big deal? That’s what I want. I want to have those impacts on my body.” — Participant 6 |