Ireland does not have trans healthcare
Transgender care waiting list to close due to resourcing concerns
The National Gender Service (NGS), which provides healthcare for transgender adults, is closing its waiting lists due to a lack of resources, Prime Time has learned.
Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI
Hello. Been a while since I’ve done one of these. Life has been extremely busy. In the interim Ireland has elected a new president and several things I’m going to link to touches on that. Also Mike Egan has moved his own monthly reading roundup posts to their own website. Check out What Else Is On?
Also, Vócalóid…
Tá súil agam é.
When Catherine Connolly began her election victory speech in Irish and continued in it, O’Connor admitted admiration for her fluency but could not resist wondering aloud how the English-only establishment figures beside her must have felt. The implication was that Connolly’s Irish was somehow impolite - as if speaking one’s own national language at the inauguration of an Irish President required apology.
That mindset - the instinct to pathologise authenticity - is the hangover of a post-colonial elite that still measures respectability by distance from our own culture.
I also liked Molly Noise’s thoughts on this.
Irish nationalism has historically avoided crass nativism (an Irishness defined by “blood and soil”, if you like) by dint of being anti-colonial and neccissarily recognising a common struggle with other anti-colonial movements and, of course, not ignoring the fact of our massive emigrant diaspora.
the 21st century irish far-right morass, ignorant of its own history and internet addicted, takes on the right wing nationalisms of the UK and USA, oft quite comfortable with NI Unionisms worst trends
And another way Connolly is frustrating the commentariat.
Collins doesn’t need references – he’s a Serious Guy. If you’ve ever picked up a broadsheet you’ve encountered them. They’re usually male and middle-aged, wearing a solemn expression indicating anguish about the prospect of falling house prices in south Dublin. They say things like politics is the art of the possible and this budget should be sensible and at the end of the day, elections are about getting votes. Their mugshots next to the serif font. This is a Very Serious Publication.
And then a somewhat different view into Ireland provided by Laura Michet.
Joe Wintergreen talks about the loss of visual identity in the remake of Metal Gear Solid 3. I am somewhat reminded of Kayin’s more acerbic words on the Demon’s Souls remake, though that is coming from a very different direction.
This connects to something I’ve talked about before: the way the costs associated with the visual end of game development have shifted around in counterintuitive ways. It used to be that photorealistic graphics were the most expensive goal you could strive for. They aren’t anymore – we have very efficient ways to do this now. And the more real the assets look, the more they’re interchangable – the exact same kinda-rotten fallen-over tree trunk is in InFlux Redux, MGS Delta, COD Warzone, and dozens of others. Which is fine in itself, as a labour-saving device, but you have to be careful about which labour you’re saving.
I love reading the Dolphin progress reports and it’s always a fascinating read when the blog does a deep dive into something unusual.
In 1992, the Starlight Children’s Foundation partnered with Nintendo to bring video games into hospitals in a way that complied with stringent hospital regulations. Instead of subjecting children to magazines, books, and daytime television (if they were lucky), the foundation wanted to bring premiere entertainment right into their rooms by creating a hospital approved all-in-one media and gaming station. Their belief was that giving kids a well-needed break from the hardships of treatment, injury, and illness would promote recovery.
Arcade Idea is back after a long, Polybius-induced absence, with some pretty scathing words about Snatcher.
This may be a Hideo Kojima game, and many of his tics and tendencies are already right here… but looking at Snatcher’s contemporaries and influences shows these formal tics and tendencies to be common and unremarkable within his scene. It’s only later, especially when he becomes removed from this context, that he becomes an odd specimen, the “auteur” — in particular, the 1992 PC-Engine CD additions to the text are far more akin to what is thought of as Kojimish, including an entire new conclusion which is essentially a 30 minute cutscene full of twist upon twist.
And Misty De Méo documents a Mac game that never saw the light of day that Outlaw Star’s Takehiko Itō worked on.
Spellgram is described as a “space fantasy” incorporating heraldry and hidden spells. Unfortunately, this hint is close to the only taste of what the game might have been; the catalogue is vague about the story they hoped to tell and how it would have played. The screenshots don’t reveal much about gameplay, though they imply an interesting setting. Even though the ship designs and space scenes are a bit generic, the contrast between them and the protagonist’s elaborate fantasy clothing is intriguing. Based on Bandai’s history, it’s likely it could have been either a CD-ROM film with limited interactivity or a more-involved Myst-esque graphic adventure.
Some notes on the history of a genre and corrects some common misconceptions that I was labouring under.
This isn’t to say that there’s nothing of AC6 in WARHOUND and its daughters. The AC6 story trailer, a short which heavily centers the handler & hound imagery only vaguely present in the actual game, was the catalyst for the idea which became WARHOUND. But it is that word, catalyst, which is key: it was just a single spark, dropped into a container of already-prepared themes and ideas, to synthesise them into something new, and singular, and cohesive.
I don’t think this is actually a great article. The author is extremely credulous of people describing the behaviours that people are fetishising and takes them as sincere expressions of the things people are actually doing or goals they are achieving and not just part of what they are getting off to and calling it a movement comparable to the Tea Party is ridiculous on its face. But still there is some simple amusement in reading a Harper’s Magazine writer trying to write something in grand and serious terms while using the word goon one hundred and fifty times.
When I asked Gooncultist to describe the average gooner, he insisted that such a person is a “statistical fiction.” The community is too vast, composed of too many distinct and overlapping spheres. Gooncultist himself is fairly ecumenical, as far as gooners go—he has his niche fixations, which I won’t ruin your day by describing, but he seems to dabble in much of what the space has to offer. There are definite camps in Goonworld, as I was quickly coming to learn.
If you call anything I make “content” I will shoot you with a gun.
And I suspect the core problem that has wended its way through the history of cryptocurrency is that the vast majority of people involved do not actually care what the thing they’re flocking to is. What they care about is that it has a graph, and that they get rich if the graph goes up, so they say whatever might make the graph go up. The graph even looks exactly the same for every coin and NFT and Whatever else: x-axis time, y-axis dollars. The only place the thing appears at all is in the title, where you can safely ignore it.
Seen via Rabbit’s link roundup.
It has been a while since I linked to Devon Price. I am a bit less infatuated with him than I was when I first came across his writing and this is a little bit of an agony aunt column but the questions of how to navigate polyamory has come up in my life again and it was a helpful read.
“What do you do about jealousy?” is one of the most common and annoying questions that the non-monogamous get asked from people outside our community. The fact that jealousy happens and cannot always be fixed is a problem that we are expected to answer for, a bug in our relationship structures, whereas monogamous people get to see jealousy as a feature that helps preserve relationships.
First in a series of blog posts trying to put some data to the question of how much work would a typical medieval peasant actually do and the general shape of their life.
Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see.
And finally, some maths.
I get annoyed by people saying that they met such-and-such politician and actually they’re really nice in person. Of course they are! It’s part of their job to be. They are advertising themself to you. I actually dislike them for the policies that they enact and ideals that they espouse, not that I was under the impression that they had poor social skills!
It bothers me more than it should when I hear Irish people, or anyone outside of North America, call a Mega Drive a Sega Genesis. It’s quite common among people younger than me; people who didn’t grow up with the machine itself. They know about it from the internet, from the video game history that gets talked about and passed down online, and that is generally the American history of video games. The great video game crash, the dominance consoles over home computers and the dominance of the “Super Nintendo”1 among consoles—all things that did not really happen here. There were only two countries where the Mega Drive was called a Genesis but one of those two countries is the United States of America which is, of course, the only country that matters.
This is a pretty trivial aspect of the general cultural imperialism of the U.S.A. and this is nothing new. The U.S. is a huge country, the largest economy in the world and has spent the last hundred years dominating the media and cultural output of the rest of the world. It drowns out all other voices and perspectives, especially in a small English-speaking, and up until recently, very poor country like Ireland.
And as the internet allows us to be more connected and allow other voices to get out this it also accelerates this. Now the world is not only watching the same Holywood movies but following the same big accounts on U.S.-based and -designed social media networks, having the same conversations about the big American political news. Which, to be clear, there is good reason to do2. America is, again, the biggest economy and most powerful country in the world. What it does impacts all of us but also what its tech companies do shape the information we see and the ways in which we see it.
How we access information and what information is prioritised is controlled largely by companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Facebook’s algorithms, policies and moderation are responsible for genocide. I perhaps cannot as easily level such a claim against Google yet but its search, the most common tool for accessing information in the world, has gotten worse and worse at doing that, prioritising profit, advertising and keeping you enclosed within a Google ecosystem. And now, of course, funnelling you away from links to other sites entirely, links to other resources and perspectives, and towards their chatbot output.
Large language models are swallowing so much of the internet right now and lot of people already swear by them, turning to them for questions, for help with writing, for ideas for when they’re stuck, for therapy and for companionship. There is a lot to be worried about with this but one thing I have been thinking about is how these chatbots—whether Google’s or Open A.I.’s or whoever’s—is that they are probably all going to call a Mega Drive a Genesis unless specifically prompted against it.
These models are trained using the internet as a corpus, an internet already dominated by American perspectives. They are made and shaped by American tech companies who are increasingly cosying up to an ever-more chauvinist U.S. state which is itself embracing “A.I.” tools as much as it can.
There is reason to think that the current bubble is unsustainable (and I do hope it bursts), but if these tools become normalised as a primary way of attaining answers, of seeking information and perspectives, I think it will have a horrifying flattening effect and accelerate the general Americanisation of the world beyond what is already happening.
And everything I said above is assuming no outright maliciousness. Twitter has repeatedly shown us that the people who make these chatbots can deliberately steer them to avow certain perspectives, from promoting South African white genocide myths to conspiracy theories about Jews. There is nothing really stopping Google from, say, deliberately trying to seed racist, anti-vaccine or anti-transgender propaganda into its chatbot and search summaries if it thinks that might get it points with the current regime which is already demanding idealogical purity from such systems, in effect ordering the limitation of acceptable perspectives.
Another shibboleth. We called it a “snez” here. ↩
And I am not saying the internet was a mistake or being connected to people around the world is itself bad. It has been a wonderful thing for many of us weirdos to connect with people who actually understand us. One of my best friends is in Australia and even though I have not yet met her in person and I am very glad to have the connection I have to her through the internet. ↩
the president doesn’t have much power or particular influence but if Miggeldy gets replaced by some Fianna Gael gombeen it is really going to drag down the vibes of the whole country a little bit
I started taking ADHD medication one week ago. The path to get these has been humiliating. In the end I went to a private clinic but I have wasted so much time with a public health service that has completely eroded any trust or faith that I might have had with it.
I have known that I have had ADHD and autism for years. The more I talked to people over the year that have them the more it became obvious that their experiences matched my own, the more that I was drawn to people who had them, who were like me and shared my experiences and understood me1. The people who I love most in the world are other AuDHD trans women.
But these are disorders and come with their problems, too. Doing even the simplest things is a struggle sometimes. Taking care of myself, doing the exercises that stop my back from being in pain, keeping things clean and, of course, my job. I have so often fallen behind in work and then in a burst of stress powered through what needed to get done at the last minute. I used to stay in late all the time to get things done that should have been finished hours before. I have lied to people over and over again about work, pretending I had more done than I did, hoping to make it up afterwards. My original masters project fell through when I got caught in a downward spiral of paralysing stress and lies about making progress while continuing to stare at a blank page. Eventually I broke down crying to my supervisor after admitting I really had basically nothing. He helped me start over and my family supported me massively through writing a new thesis. Over time I have learnt how to manage things a bit better, how to recognise my limits and work around them, but I continued to struggle daily.
But I did not seek treatment for a long time. A large part of this was due the the ableism and transphobia of the “National Gender Service”, the largest gender clinic in the Republic of Ireland, located in Loughlinstown, County Dublin. I was referred to the clinic in January of 2019. At the time I was informed that I was number 200 on the waiting list. That wait, sitting so far up a list, proved intolerable. Before I was seen in Loughlinstown I started taking minoxidil to try and prevent hair loss, began laser facial hair removal, started hormone replacement therapy with a private clinic, got a deed poll and a gender recognition certificate to legally change my name and gender, and the National Gender Service lost the records of over one hundred patient referrals. The news of that last thing broke in November of 2019 but it wasn’t until April 2020 that I was sent a letter assuring me that they still had my referral and that the clinic was no longer telling people what position they were on in the waiting list.
I had, as I said, already started medically transitioning, assisted by a private clinic, but that is expensive and I still wanted to go through the public system. It would save me money and it seemed like the way it “should” be done. I hate private healthcare as a concept. Everyone should be taken care of, not just those who can pay. I was finally seen in Loughlinstown in June of 2021, over two years after my initial referral. If you are referred today it will take you over thirteen years to be seen. It was a three hours drive to Dublin, a three hour interview with a psychiatrist, and a three hour drive home. It was utterly exhausting.
I was asked about my entire life and medical history. Like many others, I was ask about sex and masturbation so that my sexuality could be scrutinised by the man interviewing me. I have heard of much worse and more invasive questioning from people. When I was not comfortable answering certain questions I was not pressed on them. I passed enough of the other unspoken tests that meant I was an acceptable, respectable trans woman. I had stability, safety and independence. I was already out to friends, family and people that I worked with. People who are struggling, who have difficulty with employment or who are afraid to socially transition are often denied medication by doctors in Loughlinstown. If your life does not line up to their expectation of stability and normalcy they reserve the right to deny you treatment until you are ready, in their eyes, to transition. For those who do not have the means to seek private treatment they may not see any alternative except a public system that can deny them anyway for not meeting the standards of a comfortable, stable environment (that is, in our society, wealth) that is seen as a perquisite to be allowed to decide what to do with your body.
Patients have stated publicly or reported to TENI that they are being denied or delayed treatment for reasons such as suspected autism, ADHD, unsatisfactorily answering overtly sexual questions or for not bringing family members into assessments which community members continue to report to us, despite public statements by the HSE to the contrary. Assessments include questions about masturbation, porn habits, sexual history, thoughts during oral sex, detailed genital descriptions of themselves and sexual partners and even racial preferences.
Lilith Ferreyra-Carroll in GCN
Trans people of course share these stories with each other. About being rejected for being unemployed, for being fearful of coming out to bigoted family, for having untreated ADHD or autism. And when we do the doctors who run the Loughlinstown clinic accuse us of being “coached” to fast-tracked sex changes. Donal O’Shea, endocrinologist in Loughlinstown, is incredibly concerned about the rise in autistic people seeking to transition. He is worried that it is linked to “visibility around Kardashian personality Caitlyn Jenner” and compares people coming to a doctor and wanting to medically transition to a patient who asks their doctor to treat their pneumonia by amputating a lung.
Paul Moran, consultant psychiatrist in Loughlinstown, is also concerned about screening for neurodiverse people and wrote an opinion piece in The Journal welcoming the findings of the Cass Report, which he consulted on, which has been criticised in a joint statement by WPATH, ASIAPATH, EPATH, PATHA, and USPATH2, which was headed by a supposedly independent pædiatrician who reportedly had previously expressed shock at medical transition practises and strongly recommended anti-transition literature to colleagues, which current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch suggested was commissioned due to “having gender-critical men and women in the UK government” and never would have existed otherwise.
Yale’s Integrity Project’s review of the report described the Cass Report as levying “unsupported assertions about gender identity, gender dysphoria, standard practices, and the safety of gender-affirming medical treatments”, as repeating “claims that have been disproved by sound evidence” and that it “misinterprets and misrepresents its own data.” But it is a wonderful document for those who wish to justify more roadblocks towards transition. Who will forever see the struggles of trans people not as a civil rights matter but as purely a medical question where doctors do not merely assist or facility their trans patients but hold power over them.
And the Loughlinstown gender clinic, originally a regional endocrinology unit that over time started to take more and more trans patients, have decided that they should hold their authority over all trans people in the Republic of Ireland. They declared themselves the “National” Gender Service without authorisation and write letters to people’s GPs to advise them not to do blood tests for trans people who are sourcing hormones from other providers.
I’m not sure where the title ‘National’ derives from [...] I do not consider at this stage that we can view this service appropriately as a ‘National’ service, as I have not received evidence to validate government or HSE recognition of this status.
Siobhán Ní Bhriain, national clinical lead for integrated care, Health Service Executive, in a 2022 letter
The ability of the men who run this clinic to gatekeep who gets hormone treatments is very important to them. They urged for years for the HSE to drop the WPATH model, which the HSE eventually did, walking back a promise from the 2020 programme for government. The WPATH 7 guidelines allowing for other models of care such as informed consent was far too liberal for Loughlinstown.
They frequently coach their language in concern for children, that they are transitioning too young and cannot make informed decisions, despite the fact that they do not treat children and there is currently no public pathway for the medical transition of minors in the Republic of Ireland at all. Paul Moran and Donal O’Shea are, in fact, currently taking legal action against the state to try and prevent children from being treated abroad either. Loughlinstown’s vision of a potential gender service for children is, according themselves, indistinguishable from conversion therapy. In a submission concerning a proposed law to ban the practice they wrote that it “will make it impossible to develop a children’s gender service in Ireland.” When they treat adults they use a system that their own model of care documents call overly complex and inefficient and co-author papers that get the mechanisms of the medication that they prescribe confused.
Loughlinstown is widely hated by the patients that attend the clinic. In research by the Transgender Equality Network Ireland 80% of respondents were dissatisfied with their care from the National Gender Service with a full 60% of them giving it the lowest possible rating. This sort of treatment erodes people’s trust in doctors and can lead to hesitancy around healthcare in general.
There are no correct guidelines, there’s no actual structure in how we’re dealt with. It means that it could be literally one person standing in your way, telling a lie or doing the wrong thing, or they might be bigoted or ignorant. So you’re completely at the mercy of maybe one person and there’s no other protections in the system. That person might be good and might help you. But then again, it’s luck. It’s complete luck and it should be standardised.
Séan, a trans man quoted in TENI’s report Trans and Non-Binary Experiences of Institutional Violence in Ireland.
Faced with this institutional gatekeeping I saw an ADHD diagnosis and treatment not as something beneficial, that could bring relief to struggles that I face every day, but as a weapon that could be used against me, to question my humanity and autonomy, to deny me even more vital treatment for my wellbeing, and that if I tried to seek an ADHD diagnosis through the public system that it would be something that would hang over my head to be abused by anyone else seeking to wield authority over me. This is another, indirect way that people are harmed by gatekeeping. I was afraid to seek treatment for one thing because I wanted another even more desperately. Eventually, though, I’d decided that I’d had enough, that I needed help with my other struggles as much as I did with transitioning, and if Loughlinstown did decide to deny me future care for this or other reasons there are alternatives. Foolishly, I decided to go through the public system again.
I went back to my GP in March of 2023 to ask to be referred for ADHD treatment. Unsurprisingly it took, after several delayed appointments, just over a year to be seen at my local mental health services. I had practised and thought about what I was going to say. I laid out my struggles, staring at blank pages telling myself to to start writing and nothing coming out, not being able to keep things clean, deadlines only getting met at the last minute through stress building up and bursting the dam of executive dysfunction. I explained all this calmly, and was met by a man telling me that I seem to be handling things well. That I met deadlines. That my job gives me flexibility.
I realised that doctors are like dogs: They don’t really understand English; they just follow tone of voice and maybe pick out a few key words. In calmly explaining my problems I was not performing the required level of patheticness to be seen as disabled. He went out to speak to a consultant and left me alone stewing in that room for a while. I realised that to be taken in any way seriously I needed to strip away the walls I normally put up around my feelings and dredge up the self-hatred and misery I feel. I needed to drag up every thought of being stupid and useless and let them out. To make myself into a sobbing mess. This is a deliberate performance, but not a dishonest one, and without it I was not being taken seriously at all. Medicine is the process of engaging in ritual self-humiliation until a doctor deigns from on high that you are pitiable enough to be granted the boon of his charity.
My tears got me a few tissues and the consultant called in, who was quick to make comments about “overdiagnosis” and how pharmacological solutions are not the best for people who don’t have severe enough trouble, before making a pointed comment about how I had brought a book3 to read in the waiting room. I guess someone who reads can’t really have ADHD, or at least not severe enough to need treatment.
Even so, I got a second appointment scheduled for a month later. For that one they wanted to be able to speak to someone who knew me as a child to corroborate on childhood signs and symptoms. This is a standard procedure for the DIVA, the Diagnostic Interview for ADHD in Adults. My experiences two decades ago apparently matter more than the actual problems I have right now. Still, I rang my mother. She was surprised that I was seeking an ADHD diagnosis4. Like many her image of ADHD was that of hyperactive boys unable to sit still and causing chaos, certainly not a description of my childhood. But after after a few conversations where I explained my struggles, and also showing her articles about how ADHD presents often differently in girls she came around a bit.
In any case, she agreed to be on the phone for the appointment. She needn’t have bothered, though, as when I returned to the clinic I was, bafflingly, told by the doctor who had seen me the first day that he had expected a psychologist to be free to see me that day to go through the DIVA but had not booked one and there was no one to do it. I was just given forms to fill out at home and drop back.
This was stressful, I had friends with me while I filled them out for moral support, but also deeply frustrating. The focus on childhood is bad enough but the questions are also sometimes confusing (what the hell does it mean to feel like you are “driven by a motor”?) and sometimes a single line would ask two different questions that have two different answers! “Did you do well in school? Were you a good student?” Yes I did well in school. I was intelligent and interested in many of my subjects. I genuinely enjoyed maths. No I was not a good student. I would ignore my teachers, talk in class if I was bored and thought I could get away with it, did homework at the last minute (often while sitting in the class that was about to start before the teacher walked in or while they were setting up). I struggled massively in university without the structure of school to make me do things and when faced with material that I did not pick up effortlessly. But when it comes to disability how well one performs academically or economically is often seen as the primary metric. Getting a person to produce the desired outputs of those systems is the goal and if someone does then they may not be seen as needing assistance no matter how much they are being ground down as an ill-fitting cog in the machine.
Several months later I am told by a doctor who I have never met before that the local mental health clinic I was going to had liaised with the adult ADHD service and they think that I have ADHD but it’s not severe enough to treat. Later I will be told by a friend who had also sought treatment that she was much more bluntly told that they are only treating people who are “crashing cars and getting arrested.” I ask the doctor in the clinic if I could see that correspondence with the adult ADHD service and she says she doesn’t know. She asks the receptionist and this is refused. I leave while trying not to show the rage and despondency I feel.
At this point I know I need to seek private care instead but I also want to see what the ADHD service actually said about me. I want everything in writing. It could also be useful to have documents to pass on to another doctor when seeking treatment privately. I decide to file a freedom of information request. Even requesting this turns out to be its own ordeal. The public clinic seems to deliberately have no contact email address. I phone them and am informed by the receptionist that all freedom of information requests must be sent, in writing, not by email, to a specific hospital that handles freedom of information requests for all Health Service Executive operations in the city. I am not given a specific person or office to address this to. After several more phone calls across a few days I finally get in contact with someone who is able to send me the FoI form5. I send it back with a simple request for documents relating to my seeking treatment for ADHD. I think that I will wait till I have these before seeking private treatment. It shouldn’t take too long; HSE is legally required by the Freedom of Information Act to respond within four weeks.
Two months later I emailed to ask (in much more polite terms) what the fuck they were doing. I will not bore you with the details of these exchanges but over the course of the following months I persisted, always patiently and politely, to ask as for updates. It would take multiple emails to get a single reply. Sometimes an email would get ignored and when I would send another one I would get a sudden phonecall in reply a few minutes later. They’re busy, they’re backed up, they were on holidays, actually this was passed along to the wrong person in the first place because they handle requests for clinics on the other side of the city.
What a waste of another few months on top of all the time I had pissed away already. At this point I think the public service is simply not going grant me my rights unless I threaten them with legal action and it’s not worth it. This has caused me enough stress as it is.
I went to a private clinic. I paid a lot of money but I got seen quickly and was treated with some basic dignity. There was still the DIVA and the irritating focus on childhood but I was diagnosed with ADHD6—and this time I actually have that in writing—and I’ve started a trial of medications to see what works for me. So far it’s been really positive. I can direct myself and work much more easily. The house is getting cleaner. I can even relax more easily without thousands of ants biting at my brain telling me I should be doing something while not letting me actually focus on anything. I feel so much better in the last few days than I have in a while.
All it took is the destruction of my faith in doctors.
And would also frequently tell me that they thought I was probably autistic too. ↩
The World, Asia, European, Aotearoa and United States Professional Associations for Transgender Health, respectively. ↩
The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow if you were curious. ↩
She did say that she thought that I was probably on the autism spectrum, though. ↩
A friend who is much more experienced with these processes has since told me that there is a place I can email a request to and they cannot demand I use a specific form, but this is what I was told at the time. ↩
The psychologist also suggested that I might have autism. ↩
