Documenting my journey through the mental health system

I have felt absolutely sick to my stomach. I can’t eat, could hardly sleep. I can’t get my mind off the VA and my job and my healthcare and the fact a far right, obsessively anti-LGBT oligarchy is taking over.

I haven’t heard back from my provider yet, so I’m calling back today after work. I doubt she’ll have more guidance or information for me. We are all in the dark all the time now. We just get random emails and edicts handed down to us.

I feel like the carpet is being ripped right out from under me. Over ten years of healthcare for trans vets, gone. Closely reading the memo does show the currently enrolled vets already receiving this care will continue to receive the care but then it talks about the formal rule-making process for actual healthcare delivery being revised.

Why the obsession with trans people? Especially now? Seems a little late to get outraged about something that’s been a thing a long time.

Among veterans, we are less than one tenth of one percent. All total, there are just over 130,000 trans service members and veterans. Around 15,000 are still in. 1 in 5 trans people served in the army, more than twice the rate of the general population. Trans men born female are three times more likely to have served in the military than all adult women. It’s a little late to get mad about us in the military now.

This isn’t just gender-affirming care, at least not to me. It’s life affirming care. It is the bedrock to who I am. Those shots are a lifeline to stability, just as much as my psych meds, if not more so. There are times I struggle with med compliance, but that has never been the case with my testosterone. It is what we call a constant in life, always there. And now it really might be taken away from me.

I worried about coming out on this blog. I worried the focus would be on my trans diagnosis when that is not the focus of this blog. I have never been “out” as a trans person; I am just a guy. I also worry it will make people look at me differently, treat me differently. Whether we like it or not, people do treat each other differently based on gender. And yes, you women get the short end of the stick.

I am doing my damndest to not react like a borderline person – with petulance, immaturity, and extremes. My first reaction is to do just that – give up, turn away. If the VA is going to give up on me, why stay around? But it’s not that simple, or so black and white. But I know myself. If I lose this healthcare, I could see how I might collapse into relapse as I give up. If I lose this healthcare, I don’t see how relapse is avoidable.