My Story Part 123 – That Will Be $1300 Please

In the summer of 2004 I realized that it went a lot deeper than the clothes, that it was something that I felt deep inside me and I sought professional help. Or to put it another way, I went to the gatekeepers. You see for us to get hormones we have to see a therapist first to make sure we are not crazy so that they can then diagnose us with a mental disorder so that we can start on hormones.

I had been attending support groups since 2000, at first I was just going to the Connecticut Outreach Society meetings. Besides the meeting we went out to stores that would open up for us at night to have a meeting there and buy clothes or we would go out to dinner or see a play together.

I was slowly realizing that I could go out in public without anything bad happening to me; people just seemed to not care. I started overcoming my fears and realized that transition was doable. That was when I started going to the Twenty Club which is a support group for transsexual as opposed to COS which is for transgender people which included transsexuals and crossdressers.

At the meetings I listened, I think that for the first year all I did was listening to what others people who were transitioning were going through. Where the pitfalls were, what worked, what didn’t. At the same time I was going out more as Diana and building my confidence. I learned what therapists were good and those that were not. I learned what hormones and other pills that they were taking and what the dangers were in taking them.

I decided to go to the Gender Identity Clinic of New England. It was kind like one stop shopping. They had a psychologist, a psychiatrist and an endocrinologist all under one roof. My first appointment was with the psychologist and she had me take a number of tests such as the MMPI and an IQ test. When we got to the word association part, I started giggling… it was so Freudian. I was sitting in a big overstuffed chair saying “up” to her “down”, big, small… All she really needed was bead and a cigar.

Next they sent me to the endocrinologist to do a physical to see if I could do the hormones and then it was to the psychiatrist who spent 15 minutes with me just chatting.

After three months I went before the full board. I imagined them sitting on a raised benched with somber robes, passing judgment on me. Instead they we sitting in ordinary living room type chairs, I sat down and they said that they saw no reason why I couldn’t start hormones… by the way, that will be $1300 please. And that was that, I got my prescription and walked out.