A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

It wasn’t until I stopped asking for my dignity that I was seen as “compliant.” It wasn’t until I stopped asking to be safe that I was seen as “improving.” It wasn’t until I stopped affirming my own humanity that they stopped feeding me Ativan to pacify me.

I need you to understand what it’s like to be stripped of your shoe laces, a shower door, and locked away with your own name stripped away, too. To wear three hospital gowns simultaneously to try to hide the chest you want to desperately claw away. You would want to die, too.

I did not get better. I pretended to so that I could go home, so that the anguish and dysphoria could at least be contained. Where it might be quieter. Where I did not have my blood drawn while I was asleep, waking up to find they’d taken even more from me. Always more.

It doesn’t matter if you understand why being misgendered is so acutely painful. How dehumanizing it is to have a flashlight in your face every 15 minutes at night, to have everyone insist you’re a woman even when you tell them, “This is what hurt me. This is the trauma I carry.”

You cannot tell me this is mental health care. To do harm to someone who is at their most powerless, most vulnerable, most fearful, raw, bruised place. To say “participation” is what determines “compliance,” but “compliance” is relinquishing who I am and retraumatizing myself.

“Be patient,” they said to me. If I roll over, the trans boy coming up behind me layers his hospital gowns, hoping they swallow him whole so that his body finally disappears, and throws his fists into his pillow until they give him a cup of pills to put him to sleep.

Or he plays the game like I eventually did, becoming the model patient, and goes on to roll the dice outside... and maybe he lives — or maybe he dies.

When I demand trans-informed care, you better fucking believe that when I say it’s life or death, I say it with the gravity it deserves. There was a future for this boy; it was dismantled the moment he stepped into their care. There are no excuses. There is too much at stake.