Cover Me

Living without healthcare is a VERY dicey proposition. There’s not a one of us who would willingly want to do that, and if we were living without coverage, I’m sure it would be super-high on our priority list to get something in place with utmost haste.

But what happens if your chronic ailment isn’t covered by insurance? Well, essentially, that’s the same as not having coverage.

As I’ve stated in the past, there seems to be more and more evidence that people are born trans. Something happens in the womb, wires get crossed, and someone like me gets born.

Now you can look to the majority of the posts that I’ve placed on this site to see the amount of mental carnage that this bestows on someone. I don’t want to get too sidetracked with covering that ground again, so let me just say that it’s hellish.

The RECOMMENDED treatment for people such as myself is cross-gender therapy, which consists of hormones and other cosmetic procedures designed to get your body in line with your head. However, the costs of these treatments are well beyond the point of being called “substantial” and pretty much crash through the threshold of “egregiously obscene”.

Electrolysis, for instance, costs anywhere from 70 to 100 dollars per hour and it takes anywhere from 100 to 400 hours to clear an average face of hair. I’m already 200 hours in and I still have so much hair left on my face that I can’t even really think about the outlay of time and money that waits for me, because it seriously makes me want to die. I’m at least going to need another 200 hours of getting a hot needle jammed into my face over and over again. After a two-year break that I had to take from this delightful process so that I didn’t bankrupt myself, I finally just started electrolysis again at a cost of 85 per hour. So, you know, that’s about seventeen THOUSAND dollars I have to come up with right there, and that’s not counting the money that I spent on the 200+ hours that I already endured.

On top of this, many male-to-female trans peeps require some kind of facial surgery in order to live in the role that they feel they belong. These surgeries, at their most basic, can run anywhere from 10 to 30,000 dollars. And sex reassignment surgery (which is the “big” surgery that most people think about) costs in and around 20 grand. This cost is even higher for female-to-male trans folks (I’ve read in the $50,000 range), and they would have the added cost of removing their breasts, which also carries quite the price tag (I’ve seen this vary from anywhere between $7,000 to $20,000).

The money needed to deal with this condition that I was born with, and a condition that has wreaked tremendous havoc on my life, easily floats somewhere around $100,000… all of which I would have to pay for myself with absolutely NO help from health insurance.

ALL I want out of life at this point, is to get through this. To get through the whole process of transitioning and be done with it, so I can stop thinking about it and just live my life for once. That’s it. Just PLEASE get this monkey off of my back. I’m INCREDIBLY tired of dealing with it and having my entire world on hold because of it. I’m almost 40, and until I get this sorted out it’s near impossible to build a relationship, or to feel truly secure in any career, or just to settle in and enjoy life. 40% of trans people attempt to KILL THEMSELVES. It’s not hard to see why when you have this much stacked against you.

Many health plans now cover mental health, and they allow so many visits to a therapist within a given year, so there is SOME value that these faceless corporations place on their clients’ mental well being. But I, and many, MANY other people, have this unrelenting mental agony, and the RECOMMENDED treatment for this is NOT covered by most of the health plans in this country. More and more people employed by LGBT-friendly companies are getting some of these costs covered, but there are still a staggering amount of people who are struggling to deal with all of the trans bullshit while trying to scrimp and save enough for one of these NECESSARY surgeries, AND, at the same time, trying to scrape together enough money for yet another hour of electrolysis, or for hormones, or for a host of other things.

As I said, ALL I want out of my life at this point is to get past this and be done with it and live my life. And, though it’s taken me a hella-long time to get my head in the right place to do this, I’m so, so, SO ready for it to happen. But while I do okay when it comes to making a living, I have nowhere NEAR enough money to complete this process, or even to take another big step towards that goal. If I did, my life would be AMAZINGLY better. I’m not saying all of my problems would be solved, but a really big problem would be, which would give me more patience and more mental energy to focus on any of the other issues that life hits us all with on a daily basis.

My point in writing this is to say that being trans and dealing with it is my MAJOR health issue. It’s what I desperately need treatment for, because it’s slowly destroying me. For the sake of thousands and thousands of people, trans-related procedures need to start being covered by health care providers. They NEED to be. If it was, my life, and the lives of SO many others, would drastically change for the better in an instant.

Let me repeat that…  

Thousands of lives would change for the better in. an. INSTANT.

And while these surgeries and the like may seem cosmetic, they are not. They are the RECOMMENDED treatment for someone in my position. I DREAM of having the cash to complete this process. If the treatment for my major health problem was covered by health insurance, however, I wouldn’t need the ungodly amount of money required, and I could address all of this and move on with my life in a mere couple years, rather than the glacier-like pace that I’ve been forced to take, which should get me to my goal, hopefully, by the time I’m 80. You know, if I can make it that far.

I hope you’re faring much better than me when it comes to your health care. If you’re not, I send you nothing but love and the hope that things improve for you as quickly as possible.     

*For additional reading click here.

The Retreat

As we all know, life can tend to get a little nuts. From time to time we all feel like we’re caught in the clutches of a raging shitstorm, getting battered and tossed about like we’re out to sea, riding through a hurricane in a dinghy.

It’s during these times, when you’re getting hit with blow after blow and you’re stumbling and reeling in every misguided direction, that you need to stop everything, slow it all down, and regroup.

When 2011 began, I was caught in such a maelstrom. I was being whipped and whooped by life, no matter which way I turned. In an effort that I thought would cultivate momentum and push me through the beating, I blindly plodded forward, making poor decision after poor decision and completely losing myself in the process. I was essentially a shattered shell of a person as last year began, and when something is shattered, you have two choices: either you throw it all out, OR you start the laborious process of piecing it all back together again. Since I didn’t really want to toss away my existence, I chose the latter route.

So, how do you start putting your life and your own self back together? Well, the very first thing you have to do is to get out of the storm. You have to retreat. You have to seek shelter. It’s impossible to build anything in the middle of a torrent.

For me this meant completely pulling back from social interactions and from people in general. Not that all of the people in my life were causing problems for me or anything like that, it was just that they all contributed to this din that was slowly crushing me. I had to remove myself from it and find center again. I had to find myself again, specifically the self that existed outside of all exterior influences. In short, I had to quiet all the noise so that I could better listen to the voice inside me that was growing more and more faint.

So, this past year I spent a whole hell of a lot of time alone. Not that I was secluded like a shut-in (side note: “Secluded Like a Shut-In” would be an excellent name for an album), but my social interactions were extremely limited. It was a lonely year, it was a sad year, and it was a very tough year to get through. By the end of it, however, I had quit smoking, I had lost weight, and I had saved a small but decent-sized amount of money. Most importantly, though, I had found my center again. I found the parts of me that were completely lost. I reestablished my identity on my own terms by figuring out who I was and who I wanted to be, and through that I regained my confidence.

I simply cannot stress enough how much confidence governs one’s life. As an example, I was on a trip once, cruising along on an empty mountain road, when I got hit with a mild panic attack that caused me to suddenly question my driving ability. Now I consider myself to be an above average driver, so it’s not like I had any doubts about this stuff before. It was just a rare occurrence that struck me one afternoon, and because of it, not surprisingly, I started to drive a little less straight, I had to pay a lot more attention, and the very simple act of rolling along this lonely, serene mountain road became a herculean task.

To get past this, I first had to stop these insane thoughts from coming at me. Then I had to simply trust myself again. I had to remind myself that I’ve spent two decades and hundreds of thousands of miles behind the wheel of a car. I had to know that I could do this and that it really was no big deal. Once I did that, once I trusted in myself, I didn’t have to think about the process of driving at all, and I just coasted along merrily.

The point to all of this, is that when you don’t trust yourself, everything gets 100 times more difficult, and when last year began I had absolutely zero trust in myself. So I retreated from everything, pulled away from most, and wound up regaining my edge, my mojo, or whatever other word you want to use for it. I began trusting not only in myself again, but also in who I am. By doing this, I rediscovered the following things about me.

Your smile is endearing.

You’re quick and you’re clever.

You can make people laugh.

You’re a delightful smart ass.

You can handle what life throws you.

You don’t care a smidge about what people who are unimportant to you think about you.

You can laugh at yourself and at the problems of day-to-day life.

You are able to understand deeply and love unconditionally.

You are a fountain of untapped potential.

You are worthy of any and all kinds of love.

And finally…

There is no one else exactly quite like you. Embrace it.

Yeah, 2011 was a BRUTAL year for me, but wow was it important. I think you can probably understand why.

I hope all is well in your world, that you know all of the many good things about you, and that you are feeling supremely confident. There really is no other way to live.