Five years ago, I met a younger trans woman, not out yet, just coming to terms with herself, and I decided to be our colleges welcoming committee. I took her aside, offered resources and community connections, and otherwise let her know I would be around if she ever needed anything, even just to talk things out with someone who might understand. She was skinny, awkward, tentative, and sweet, and I wanted very much to give her a helping hand Id lacked at her age, but in the end, she had more clarity about herself than I had. She pulled herself together, let the important people in her life know, and moved forward more decisively than I would have dreamed at eighteen. She had good friends, her family was confused but adjusting, and I knew she would be fine.
Lets call her Melissanot because I want to take away another womans name, but for the sake of her privacy and that of her loved ones.
Melissa and I never managed to be close, in the end; we had nothing much in common beyond being young trans women at the same school, and even less once we graduated. She was an irreligious libertarian, and I was a socialist looking at seminary; she struggled with the concept of empathy, with which I was overburdened. She was confused as to why I had reached out, presuming to help, and only came to me every few months, when she needed advice on where to find a decent doctor, where to get affordable hormone prescriptions, how to go about the process of legal name change. I offered the information as best I could, and she took it and didnt really ever say thank you, and that was okay. We were just different people, getting needs met, and we were not the kind of friends I would have liked to be. Her family came around. She had good, caring friends around her, a job, a safe place to live, and she didnt need anything from me, which was the best possible outcome. She was dating and working out and doing her legal paperwork and she was going to be okay.
A little while ago, Melissa was crossing the street in front of her apartment with her roommate, bringing home groceries late at night from the store right across the way. They were struck by a car in the crosswalk in what appears to have been an innocent, freak accident. Melissas roommate was killed instantly. She, because there was an ambulance less than a block away at the time, made it to the hospital with a shattered leg, head injuries, and Gods know what else, comatose.
I didnt know, when I heard Melissas roommate was killed on the morning news, because the news said shed been with a man, and my first thought was oh, God, is Melissa okay, does she know what happened, she must be so worried. I left a couple of voice messages, but couldnt get through, and it was only once I saw a report with Melissas old name on it that it hit me: there was not a man hit in that accident. She was comatose, with friends there, and family on the way. The prognosis was very, very bad, like we dont think shell make it till morning bad.
She made it till morning. And the next night. And the next. We all started passing around updates of how she was doing and taking time to mourn the schoolmate who hadnt made it. Family arrived, connected with each other, and everyone took a few deep breaths. Melissa started improving, against expectationseyes opening, snapping fingers when asked, responding in small ways to the people present though she was semiconscious at best and could not move. They made plans to fix her leg and skull and there was talk of moving her to a specialist facility closer to home, one with real support for people recovering from comas, and against all odds she was fighting. It should have been no surprise: she was always a fighter. She was going to be okay.
I didnt visit. Im not proud of it, but I was overwhelmed, and was never close to her. I trusted people she would have really wanted there to tell me how she was doing. I went to work, went about my business, went to my comfortable bed in my warm safe home, and she was moved to a newer, better facility that was going to bring her back from the brink of oblivion, and it was all going to be okay. I told myself that over and over, and did my best to ignore the awful, awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. Id been trying to keep an eye on the future happiness of this woman since she was a teenager. Id fancied myself some kind of distant big sister, or fairy godmother, or something else nonsensical. Id thought for some reason that somehow, in this world of all worlds, shed be okay.
The message came through from her family once she was far away: they were changing up some of the treatment protocols, for Melissas sake. It was going to be confusing for her new caregivers to deal with a womans name and pronouns while they had to take care of a male body, see. This supposedly male body had been on hormones for years. This male body was one with obvious hips and breasts, with no facial hair, with hair past the shoulders before they shaved it all off, with the effects of years of toning and athleticism and medical care shaping it into one that nobody on the street assumed was anything but a cis womans. But there was a penis, and that was enough. Enough to override everything else about the last four years of her life. Obviously.
So they were instructing caregivers to call her by her old name, call her he, because otherwise it would just be too confusing to explain. They took her off the transitioning medical regimen shed been on and started talking about memory reconstruction. Her memory would be heavily damaged because of the injuries to her brain, they said. There would have to be a lot of recovery, and it would just be confusing to her to bring up her transitioned life. Shed been a boy with another name for eighteen years, right? Wasnt that who she really was, at the core? Wouldnt that be more normal to her? Wouldnt she just be better served by rebuilding her from the ground up, from the beginning, with the memories that seemed more normal? Maybe if she recovered significantly, if she recovered enough memory and motor function and consciousness, they could start bringing up her transitioned life, but otherwise, they said, she didnt need to be confused by all of that. The four years of life shed found worthwhile could just be wiped away like a bad dream, treated as confusion when she woke up, if she woke up, and they could rebuild her on terms that made sense.
They had ultimate power over herher body, her brain, everything. She was disabled, and couldnt speak for herself, and couldnt express her own preferences, and they were next of kin, and they knew best, and the authority for medical decisions was in their hands. They loved her more than anyone, and had her best interests in mind, and were just looking to her recovery, just listening to the doctors.
And if she woke up as from a deep sleep, shed wake up into a world where her best friend was dead, where her body had been forcibly edited back to its pre-transition state and given a few more years of the influence of testosterone to boot, where her memory and self were hazy and confusing and nobody was calling her by the right name and pronouns, they were in fact pretending four years of her life, the four years she finally got to be honest and true to herself, those had never happened, and shh, shes just confused, shhhh, calm down, lets work on fixing your memory some more.
If she wasas many people deemed unconscious, or low-functioning, or unaware by medical professionals, as many many people with disabilities who cant communicate the right way areaware in any way of what was going on, laying there helpless and voiceless while her body and life and mind were edited and mutilated by loving people, wise professional people in complete control
I actually cant finish that sentence, because I am shuddering too hard, because I have a hard time imagining a real scenario closer to Hell.
This is not an unusual scenario. It happens all the time, and in worse, far worse, forms. This is still practically standard in the history of how people with disabilities are get violated, and the intersection with trans status only magnifies it. If I got into a car accident tomorrow and fell into a coma, it could happen to meI cant marry legally, and my parents who are not part of my life could walk into the hospital and have my partner removed and do pretty much whatever they please with me, a possibility that gives me dry-heaving panic attacks. There is pretty much nothing I can do for Melissa, except what she is doing for herself: since the beginning of the new treatment regimen, all of her improbable recovery has disappeared, and the doctors are at a loss to explain why she is slipping away again, withdrawing further away than before, and wont come back when they call what they think is her name. They are now bracing for what has become the inevitable.
What I am doing is this: learning the law. I went to a sympathetic lawyer to make sure I would get what I was working on absolutely airtight. I discussed all this with my partner, with close friends and chosen family, and I am having legal documents drawn up to make sure that the people making decisions for me if I cannot are people I trust completely to make the decisions I would want made. I cant afford it, but Im making time and budget for it, because the alternative is no longer unthinkable; its right there, staring me in the face. I am having those conversations and I am getting them down in writing, notarized, filed, and copied, and I am going to carry a copy everywhere, and so is my partner, so this never, ever happens to me. And I am spreading the word so it doesnt happen to anyone else.
This is what I want you to promiseme, yourself, someone you care about. Have these conversations. Be aware of these issues and educate yourself. Learn your local laws and get legal documents drawn up. Please. If you can afford a lawyer, hire one. If you cannot, do some research online or at the library. Get this done and get it ironclad.
Do it as soon as you possibly can. I dont care if youre young and able-bodied and well-to-do, I dont care about your operative status or your assumptions about the people in your life. You know what, do this if youre cis, too. Think about this, and how it affects the trans people you know, and whether or not a twenty-three-year-old cis woman in a coma would be physically altered and have her memory edited just because her family thought she should have been a man and she couldnt speak for herself. Recognize that, but do this for yourself, too, because anything is possible. Make this explicit. Figure out what your wishes are about your care, write them down, and share them with people you trust, and then make them official, because you cannot know what will happen tomorrow. You cannot know that you wont be struck down at random by a sober driver in the crosswalk in front of your apartment. You just cant.
Gay Gaffer here just dropping a post for support/ love Transgendered people. <3333 