##On Transgender Consent
I’m 17, just about to turn 18, and I am sitting in a segregated clinic for treating transgender youths in Denmark. This segregated clinic still exists, and was also the clinic that treated paedophiles by chemically castrating them. This meant that I was sitting across from a poster that said “Are you a paedophile? If so, consider castration.” The entire department, the sexological clinic, stands as a grim monument of the effects that 19th century sexology and rigid moral logic has on modern transgender medical care. I sat there, thinking about how much of a sick depraved monster I was just for wanting tits.
This experience is a common experience for everyone who has come into contact with the sexological clinic seeking care for their gender dysphoria. Many of my friends have similar stories to mine, a child gets brought into a segregated clinic, made to feel like a pervert for being trans, and finally we are forced to prostrate ourselves in front of them for a modicum of respect and human decency.
The “replacement” service that has been set up, the Centre for Gender Identity, and the service I was eventually transferred to isn’t much better, they work under the same principles of many gender specialty clinics that came before; delay, deny, desist. They aren’t a service that exists to help trans people alleviate their dysphoria, the entire process is based on a principle that attempts to prevent as many transexual people from existing in society.
People are denied care for being autistic, psychotic, disabled, or just too AGP They’re also forced to jump through as many hoops as possible, from long waiting times for appointments to deliberate false flags for brain tumors all delaying transgender care for months, if not years. They also try to talk you out of care, convince you that you don’t really need medical intervention and that you are “valid” just the way you are. The entire modus operandi of these places are oriented around this awful and subhuman treatment of trans people.
If you do eventually get hormones through them or the sexological clinic they give you an abysmally small dosage of hormones, a dosage that they calculate based on peak levels. And the surgeries we are so graciously offered by our kind and benevolent doctors at the centre are just as abysmal. Rikke Holmgaard who we are told does every single transgender surgery in the country can only be described as a butcher, years ago there was a story run in the tabloid news about how much of a butcher she was with regards to phalloplasty, and her vaginoplasty results are just as dire. Regret rates in Denmark are incredibly high, not because of the fact that we receive srs, but rather because the quality of our srs is so horrible that people would rather suffer dysphoria than the debilitating butchery she performs under the guise of transgender healthcare.
I talk about all of this because it is the pure essence of the denial of transgender agency that exists within our current society, we are treated as though our choices surrounding our bodies are grotesque, terrifying, and sometimes even eldritch. There is no empathy for our position, our struggle to fight for a body we are comfortable in, we are not given the ability to consent to ourselves in life. But just as they attempt to deny us agencies over our own bodies, we fight back, we build up networks of community care to bridge the gaps left in society.
The existence of these networks allow us to consent to our bodies in much the same way one consents to a tattoo, or a piercing. We gain autonomy through our own spit and gumption, not relying on antiquated systems of coercion that aim to obliterate our very existence off the face of this planet. All it takes for me to consent to a body I am comfortable with nowadays is talking to a few people and if I have the money paying for some vials of a clear, slightly tinted liquid, that I then inject into my thigh every Thursday for the rest of my life.
I have also heard whispers of underground orchidectomy clinics, places where we can receive some of the surgical care we deserve. Places where trans women come together to share in the hard earned knowledge that allows us to live our best lives.
No longer does anyone have to go through that degrading humiliation ritual to become comfortable in their own skin. This feeling of comfort I find within myself is free to anyone who consents to it. The metamorphosis into a person is one that can be shared with anyone who desires it. We can consent to our own bodies now.