The first thing I did when I contacted Planned Parenthood was ask lots of questions. They gave me the option of seeing someone for a consultation or talking to one of their Social Workers. I chose the later. I really wanted to talk to someone to understand what the whole process would entail and also to truly decided if this was for me. I knew I didn’t wanna become a “boy”, I wanted to just be me as usual. However, could that happen with taking masculinization hormones.
The Social Working and I talked about what I was uncomfortable with in regards to my body at this moment in time. We also talked about what would be the changes that I would go through and would those make me feel the same way that I was feeling when my body did during the time of my menstral cycle. The only changes that I was really worried about was my voice becoming deeper and getting facial hair.
The voice getting deeper was a worry of mine because I‘m a gamer and I talk over voice chat every other weekend. These people are used to me sounding feminine. However, they all know that I’m agender. I was just worried that people in this group that still struggle with using my pronoun because it isn’t the norm for them in their country would start using he/him pronouns. At this moment in time those people are using she/her pronouns. I didn‘t wanna confuse them more.
The other reason I was struggling with this is my family that lives in South Carolina would start hearing me sound more masculine over time. They still use the wrong pronoun with me even though I have tried to explain myself more than once, I didn’t want to start hearing deeper and deeper and my parents start feeling they where loosing their daughter. Even though in away they had already done this if you thing about it because the right word that they should use when referring to me was child.
The facial hair was just me. I was worried that when it started to appear it would make me feel the way my breast make me feel.
After the conversation with the Social Worker I went ahead and scheduled the appoint for the consultation. I also talked the Jennifer (my wife) about some of my concerns. I love the way that she helps me work through some of my anxiety of stuff.
In regard to the voice stuff Jenn made me realize it wasn’t about them it is about me not getting depressed each time stuff would happen and how long was I gonna have to wait for that stuff to stop happen before I became post menopausal. If regard to the hair she said we can remove that much easier than removing your breast. With her point of view I realized yes this is about my mental health and not about making others happy. Which is why I decided to definitely go through with the consultation at Planned Parenthood.
Meredith, thank you for laying out the process you experienced and how you gathered information and input, how you assessed it, how you figured out what works best for you at this point in your journey. I hope others read this. I hope it gets shared with other nonbinary folks as an example of how to take their own journey, questions to ask, trusted partners to process with, so they can find what is best for themselves.