On gender therapists

So I've seen a lot of confused people showing up and seeking advice about figuring out their gender identities, and the usual advice seems to be to seek out a gender therapist for help. I did that already, and had a rather unhelpful experience.

I'd had fantasies about being female in different contexts (some sexual, some not) ever since I was 13 and was struggling to figure out what they meant and who I was. In some ways I still am wondering about them. Specifically, I've often felt like having a feminine figure and breasts would be something I'd like, and just being able to interact with people as female sounds appealing. When it's possible to create my own characters in RPGs I often make female ones. Yet my own self-image of myself is male, I tend to identify with male characters in media (to the point where trying to play Legend of Zelda while maintaining a female identity actually felt like it hurt me), and I have no problem at all with my genitals. Needless to say a lot of things were confusing me.

Anyway, I posted this on a different forum about my experiences before:

I'd had three different people on an online trans support group recommend one particular therapist as the absolute, hands-down best one in my area, and had high hopes that she'd be able to help me sort things out. Being told by people that going to a gender therapist would help me sort things out added to my hopes.

What a disappointment. First off, she was very out of touch with a lot of the cultural specifics (details of different roles I played in video games, etc.) that were causing me confusion and got everything about them wrong when she tried to research them. So no help there.

Second, she gave me a handout showing a very outdated concept of "degrees of being transgender" that included different levels of sexual desire and orientation as indicators of how trans someone was. I'm not sure she believed all of it herself, but she did react with interest and took notes when I mentioned I was bisexual.

Next, she made one major foul-up that affected her perception of me. On the intake form, she had indicted that I should write my legal name and whatever name I preferred to be called. Naturally, I answered accurately that my legal name was James and I preferred to be called Jamie. Jamie was a diminutive form of James that my parents had called me since I was a baby, and because it flowed better with my last name I had kept using it instead of James. She, however, assumed there was only one reason why i would want to go by that name: Jamie was a name that could be female, and since I was there, I must have adopted Jamie to express a female identity. Attempting to correct her didn't really help.

That leads to the major problem with her. She seems to have assumed I must be trans from the beginning. To her, the people she saw tended to be trans already and just needed help transitioning; that was what she was doing. That was confirmed in her view by, in her words "You told me that you wanted to be called Jamie instead of James. That tells me something." What she tried to to with me was to help me accept the inner identity she felt I was trying to express, whereas I didn't want that kind of help. I was really confused about my identity and needed someone who would actually help me figure out what it was. And she was so set on validating my supposed identity and letting me know it was OK to "be who I was" that she didn't realize that was not what I was looking for!

Really, everything that did help me I did not get from her, and like everything else my sessions with her only added to my frustration. To be perfectly honest, I think the recommendations I got about her being "the best in the area" were misguided and the people making them were looking at it from an angle of "Which therapists will sign off on letters for HRT/surgery most quickly and painlessly?" Which, of course, is what a lot of people do want, but I was specifically looking for someone who could help me figure myself out, not someone who would just sign off on something I wasn't even sure I wanted in the first place.

Eventually, I hit a point where I just realized that I was happier before I'd started questioning my identity so much, and decided to just live life and focus on other things instead. I told her as much at our last meeting, and she said that she could tell I was happier. Yet she also warned me that a lot of people repress being trans for a long time and eventually end up having to transition anyway. Again with the assumptions!

So anyway, I'm not sure the advice of "See a gender therapist if you're questioning" is really the best thing to do. It may be different for different people, but at least in my opinion it was a waste of time and money.

 

The problem with her was that I'd specifically asked that support group about someone who would actually work with me on figuring out my identity from all possible angles. I said that I didn't want someone who would oppose me if I realized I did have to transition, but that wasn't my primary concern. First and foremost, I asked them to recommend someone who would help me find my identity, and they didn't deliver on that.