Three years ago today I stopped living a lie.
Three years ago today I started becoming who I really am.
Three years ago today I started transitioning from male to female.

It was exciting to finally realize the cause of my misery. For decades I had seen therapists, psychiatrists, doctors; none of them ever even hinted at gender identity disorder. No one saw it, despite the fact it seems so obvious now looking back.

Once the initial excitement wore off it was replaced with fear. “Now what? How the hell am I gonna do this? Just get some female clothes and start going out? It can’t really be that simple, can it?”

“Oh my God how am I going to tell my family? And what will people think? Am I gonna have to live a life of constant public humiliation?” Those were the kind of thoughts that were constantly in my mind.

Despite all these fears it was only two weeks later that I bought female clothes for the first time and told my parents about my plans to transition. And only two weeks after that I went out in public for the first time; to go to my first therapy session.

A week after that everyone knew, both on and offline. And only a week after that, seven weeks after I started transition, I went full time. I was determined to make this happen. There was not a single doubt in my mind that I had to do this in order to survive. To finally be happy with myself.

Then came hell. Months of agony as I was put on the excruciatingly long waiting list at the hospital in order to be able to even start the first part of the entire process: diagnosis. Add in the fact that in the meantime I was also going through a messy divorce and my life was far from the bliss and happiness that I was aiming for.

Fifteen months had passed before I was finally able to start the diagnosis process. For people to tell me what I already knew. That I was born in the wrong body. This entire process took ten months to complete. And it wasn’t for another month until I was able to start hormone replacement therapy. Well over two years from when I first started transition.

I’ve been on hormones for almost ten months now and soon I’ll be put on yet another waiting list which will likely take another year. This time for surgery. Some call it sexual reassignment surgery (SRS), others call it gender confirming surgery (GCS), and there are many other acronyms for the exact same procedure but I just call it surgery. It is the only one I am truly planning on getting.

By the time I’ll be done with the entire process it will have been well over four years. Still I am not one that considers surgery to be the ‘be all end all’ of my transition. In fact, in my opinion I already completed my transition well over a year ago. I have already been living the life of a girl, of my new self, for all this time and surgery will not change how I view myself.

I have a wonderful boyfriend, accepting parents, good friends, life is pretty damn good right now and it only seems to be getting better and better each day. :)

Of course I am not there yet. First step is the diagnostic stage which normally takes about 6 sessions, all about a month apart. So yeah, add another half year of waiting before I will even be considered for hormone replacement therapy. So we’re looking at February at the earliest here for them to tell me what I have already known for all this time and label me with gender dysphoria. Bummer.

While I really do understand the need for the entire lengthy process as this is not something someone should go into lightly and it most certainly has a major impact on every aspect of your life and the people around you, I already made my choice last year. I am Julie. Period. There is no confusion, no wishing to ‘go back’ or thinking that I made a mistake. There is no doubt. None.

So to me, the waiting is sometimes grueling. I know I’ll get there, I know I should not even worry about that fact. Even my therapist reminds of that. I already transitioned. Most people who apply and get to this stage have never been out in public or even told anyone outside their immediate circle yet. Those are the things that they will work on with the people that reach this stage. The coming out part to family and work and such.

I did all that already. Everybody knows. I am living full time as me, Julie, and I even got rid of my ‘just in case’ bag of guy clothes months ago. Hell, its even hard to think of a time before my transition. It’s not just like that was a different person, it really was a different person; and I’m still changing more and more. When I first announced I was going to transition I said I would still be the same person. Oh how wrong I was. They say I can expect more changes once hormones start kicking into a full gear.

Anyway… To get back on track here. I met my assigned psychologist. She explained the procedure which I of course already knew so nothing new there. Other than that we just covered some basic stuff, did a quick rundown of my life and some of the things that were written down from my earlier visit way back in March. She’s really nice and easy to talk to.

You have probably noticed by now that each time I write about my visits to my therapist and such I don’t go very in depth about what was talked about. This is not because I don’t want to, it is because I was advised not to. Sadly, that is all I can say about it at this point in time. I will of course always speak my mind about the things that I can talk about.

After the talk was over I made three new follow up appointments, for October, November, and December, and also another one in November for a psychological test type thing. Having been nervous as all flipping hell over this thing I was glad it was over and also relieved that it went well.

See, over here in the Netherlands they are very strict when it comes to diagnosis and treatment of people who have gender dysphoria. Rightfully so of course, there are many people who claim or think they have gender dysphoria but it’s not uncommon that those feelings are misplaced or stemming from other issues. They may even just be a homosexual whose only way of dealing with it is portraying themselves as feminine (I’m attracted to men, so I must be a girl, right?). Of course I’m generalizing it a bit there, but that’s basically what they try to evaluate after your intake: How likely is the chance you do in fact have gender dysphoria?

Right now the waiting list has become so long they did early preliminary intakes. So essentially the waiting list still isn’t over. They did this to predetermine who should be on the waiting list at all; eliminating the odd cases I mentioned above. In effect shortening the waiting list for everyone else waiting for the diagnostic phase. This process will happen next month when the VUMC ‘gender team’ has their meeting and starts deciding who stays and who doesn’t.

After that I will still have to wait another 3 to 6 months before I can even start the diagnostic phase, which in itself will take a minimum of 6 months. So the earliest I can start my hormone treatment will be about a year from now. So that’s kind of a bummer but at least progress is being made. Besides, I have no doubts about me going successfully going through the diagnostic phase and such. All I got to do is wait and it will happen, I believe truly in this fact.

So today was an important day, that I was extremely nervous about, but it all went down without a hitch and I could further reaffirm that I really don’t have anything to worry about. I just need to be patient is all.

tl;dr version: Intake done, more months of waiting to be done, I will succeed.