Pride

Pride is like medical insurance: If you're healthy it's usually quite affordable, but if you have a pre-existing condition the premiums can get really out of hand.

The cure for Gender Identity Disorder, as it's called, is hormones and surgery. In most parts of Canada, those treatments are not covered by public health insurance. For most trans people that means putting up with crappy jobs, crappy homes, and a crappy life in general in order to save money for surgery. When you haven't got enough money to meet your biological needs, you realize that pride is a luxury. You make compromises and deals with yourself. The list of things you "wouldn't do" or "wouldn't put up with" gets shorter and shorter.

We're not the only group of people in that situation: Poor people always are, as are people in the US who need expensive medical treatment for any condition (personally I don't know how they do it). It's disconcerting to realize that, in some of the world's richest nations, dignity slips so easily between so many peoples' fingers.

Trans people are still unique though because we're the only group of people - in free countries anyway - who need someone else's approval to get what we need to survive. When the course of your entire life is in the hands of a psychiatrist, they become like your god. It's your own personal Jesus - but not quite in the way they meant it in the song. If you had told me, five years ago, that my entire sense of self would be hanging on someone else's opinion of me, I would have said you were crazy. But here I am. My soul is being held as collateral so that someday I can afford to get some pride.