It was the day right after I had an ideal therapy appointment. I had finally gotten my letter from my therapist, and I was just waiting for the insurance company to respond; all the while having a pretty nice life. I carried around a new feeling of hope and sense of a positive future. This was only possible because of my naive assumption that the insurance company, which I (my mom) pay large sums of money to, was there to take care of me – to ensure I had a healthy life. But looking back, I ask myself why I thought this. I’ve seen the documentaries, I’ve read the news, and most importantly – I’ve worked in hospitals. I know how health insurance companies work.
I forgot that when it comes to insurance companies, you can’t think logically. And that’s what I was doing. I checked off all the boxes, carried all of the symptoms, met the requirements, and even had an MD sign a letter endorsing that. I had an illness. Insurance companies are there for illnesses. I had a diagnosis. A real diagnosis published in the DSM-V partly for this reason. To me, logically, it made sense. There was no way I couldn’t get approved.
Because everyone around me was so supportive, I started to believe that people had become more accepting and educated about being transgender. Especially healthcare industries who are solely there to decide who is “trans enough” to be given the ability to obtain the body. The willingness to undergo painful surgery isn’t enough, I guess.
The response had come in a “package”, my mother told me. “It’s like in college, rejections are always little envelopes, you’ll be fine” my manager said. “I got it,” I thought.
I can’t write much about the way I felt when I read the letter. Not because it’s too painful, but because I still don’t even know what it was. It almost felt like those words shut down my system. I went from on to off. I felt nothing and everything. My anger grew. I started placing blame. I lost any ounce of faith, of pride, in the country I live in. The future I was seeing turned into a future of painful binding and rejection and waiting.
But then came my tiny specs of light. Every “you have to appeal,” every “you can’t give up,” broke through more and more. The harder I pushed people away, the harder they pushed back. The fighting back eventually began. More on that later.
But even rejection letters come in big packages, and for the first time since I came out, I was unaccepted.