What follows is a transcript from Luna''s video, which you can watch here: https://youtu.be/f09iNHM5FYw
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Hi, I'm Lana, and my pronouns are she/her and I'm a transwoman.
I want to talk about how HRT saved my life. When I was like, I must have been like 15, 16 when I came out. I was miserable all the time, and up until then, I didn't really understand why.
I just didn't really feel right ever. I was like 14. 14, 13 years are hard. I came out as bi and I was like, this is something. But I still don't feel whole, really. And I just sort of continued to feel that way until I figured out that I was transwoman.
And everything in life just immediately started to make more sense. I was happy. I felt like myself and my social life was just right and I had never felt that before. But dysphoria was really, really hard.
I spent years where the only thing I could think about was going to the bathtub and castrating myself, because I just needed relief from that. And the urge to do that. It was something I managed to resist because I knew that I would probably bleed out in the bathtub had I tried to do that, and that would have been not right.
So when I started blockers about two and a half months ago now, I felt so much better almost instantly. And when I started estrogen a month ago, I felt even better.
My life is so much higher quality and so much happier, and my body feels like my home for the first time ever. So. If you ever question that and I think you should pursue it, because I found so much better of a life for myself by doing it when I actually came out, my family was, you know, pretty shocked and pretty confused. Took them a while to understand, and I got delayed for a few years because I. Well, I had an unrelated medical issue that made it so I was not physically sick, physically or mentally stable enough to start for about two or three years.
And then immediately after that, I was like, I'm finally ready. Let's do it, aAnd coronavirus happens and I am not going to go get the various blood tests I need at the very beginning of the pandemic when we still don't know what's going on. So that delayed me another year. But we're here now. That's what matters.
A lot of us, my family, just needed time to understand, and my mom took on some papers and beliefs that weren't well founded like Lisa Littman's idea of like rapid onset gender dysphoria, and that wasn't really her fault. It's easy to make these mistakes if you don't have like a good source for someone telling you that this is wrong. It's easy to make that kind of mistake, especially ones like, you know, a well accredited DR prestigious university.
Even if it all turned out to be bullshit later, admittedly, like so it was about reeducating my family. It was about being patient. And then it was about the medical issues where I fell very, very sick because of my allergies, actually, because vaping was just starting to become popular. And in my high school, people were vaping indoors and I was just getting really, really sick in school. And it actually damaged my body so much that I was pretty much immobilized for several months. And yeah, so it took me a very long time to recover from that, both physically and psychologically.
So that delayed me for a while because I didn't want to start the process in an unstable place and then fail and have to start again, because after the other challenges I had, I figured that type of trauma would destroy me.
So I waited and that was hard. That was probably the hardest part, knowing that I had to make the choice for myself to wait, because if I didn't, I would be putting myself in an unsafe situation by doing it.
My relationship with my family, it struggled for a few years because they didn't have the understanding they needed to support me. And I wasn't in a place where I could really teach them. So we struggled with that for a long time.
But eventually it all worked out in a sense. And it also really got kicked off when I got this job with the government and I said, I'm not going to do this as a man. And this is it. Like, you can't stop me and this is going to be how I live. And that seemed to turn around for them, I guess. And now they're really supportive and it's really great.
I'm just less afraid now. I know I still you know, I'm still going to be clocked as trans, but I'm OK with that. My body feels like mine. My. Head feels like mine. My thoughts feel like mine now. In the past, they didn't really feel like they fit and they didn't. And now they do. And I know that's a bit Rambley, but I feel like myself. And that has been the biggest joy of all of it. Really.
My dreams are really to continue to pursue my studies in environmental resource management. And, you know, maybe un-destroy the world from capitalism can be pretty great. But in regards to myself, I really just want to keep living my life. And I'm you know, I haven't made any decisions about surgeries and whatnot, but I know the options out there and I feel good about them. I just you know, we'll see how my body and mind feel at the time.
If I could talk to myself in the past, I would say that it's going to work out. There is a reason you feel disconnected from society. You're not wrong. You're not broken. You struggle to socialize for a reason. It's not a mental health condition. It's not you just being wrong. It's the fact that you're not who you really are and you will get there and it will be OK.
What I've learned is that I can be myself, that I don't need to stop being myself, that I have freedom and I have a life and that I, I get to live it how I want.
Don't question people's identities. Even if you're part of the community, there may be a person's identity or sexuality that you don't understand. But that doesn't mean it's any less valid than your own. By slicing up the community, drawing these like battle lines between like who you think is valid and invalid, that only hurts us.
People with neo pronouns are valid. People with more complex sexualities are valid. And to try and say that we have this line of acceptability that's only going to hurt the community, only going to make it easier to hurt us.
People's identities are valid, and none of us are in a position to tell anyone how to live their lives.
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