Some Thing Like Me

Further to a previous post , from an E-mail by Christine Burns :

One story I CAN tell was the first to arrive, within a few minutes of publishing yesterday's article... A trans man wrote,

"... I found myself in a not dissimilar situation [to Claire] in January last year. I finally plucked up the courage to ask my GP for a smear test, and was told I would have to go to Charing Cross [GIC] and go through their checks before she'd do the test. I refused to go the Charing Cross for the unnecessary checks when all I required was a routine test and was then struck off. I've still not had that test!"

He adds,

"[This isn't the first problem I've had] ... The first GP I went to about my trans issues in 1998 was my family GP in Henley who I'd known for the best part of ten years. When I asked him if he'd help, he said, 'I can't possibly treat something like you. I'm a good Catholic!' "

Some thing like me. And he's a Good Catholic, hence by definition, a Good Christian.

Some people don't get it, do they? You know, 'Christ's Message'? Heck, they don't even get the "Hippocratic Oath".

I lived not far from Henley when I was young. It's not impossible that I went to school with this so-called doctor, that he could have been a member of one of the gangs that stoned me with broken bricks when I was 8. Unlikely, but not impossible.

When I read this, I was angry. Then I was depressed. Then I was scared, as such a thing could easily happen to me too. My GP warned me in a joking fashion who in the Clinic I could turn to (he's away for a week) if things turned nasty. Who could handle it - and who couldn't.

I still feel all of those things, but now I'm just overwhelmingly Determined. Enough is Enough, I have seen far too much of this now. As soon as my health is a little better, time to take up the fight again, for a passport, for human rights. I was content before to agitate for a transition from fourth class citizen to third. No longer. Enough people don't regard me as human at all, time to disabuse them of that notion. And third class is no longer enough.

Who's the guy in the picture? A film star. The star of the documentary film Southern Comfort :

SOUTHERN COMFORT is a 90-minute feature-length documentary about the life of Robert Eads, a 52-year-old female to male transsexual who lives in the back hills of Georgia. "A hillbilly and proud of it," he cuts a striking figure: sharp-tongued, bearded, tobacco pipe in hand. Robert passes so well as a male that the local Klu Klux Klan tried to recruit him to become a member.

Though his home is nestled among tranquil hills dotted with hay bales, Robert confronts a world as hostile to him as if he were an African American in the ante-bellum South. He was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, then turned away by more than two dozen doctors who feared that taking on a transgendered patient might harm their practice.

SOUTHERN COMFORT follows the final year of Robert Eads' life....

The film was made 6 years ago. It still happens today. And people like Robert die. People - Things - like me. Well I am not going to go gently into that Good Night, I am going to do a bit of Raging against the dying of the Light before it even starts to dim for me. I've had it easy. Time I did my duty and stood up for others.