My trip to the CAMH support group, Part 1

I got riled up about CAMH being proposed as the gatekeeper for SRS (sex reassignment surgery), which is being re-listed for coverage under Ontario's health care system.

I really don't like the CAMH Gender Identity Clinic! I think they hurt me, they wasted my time, and they made my family's journey harder. I think their views are hopelessly out-dated, and they're too conservative to change them. I'm surprised they still exist, actually. They're a relic from the days when Sexologists were in charge of providing care for trans people, as though we were insane sexual perverts. This model for care is hugely outdated and needlessly demeaning and demoralizing.

CAMH has upset me so much that I'm upset with them for getting me so upset! I think they tried to offer me some help, and normally I would be able to find some way to forgive anyone with good intentions. I don't expect very much of people, so it's hard to end up in my bad books.

But those fuckers at CAMH really hurt me. I spent 18 months in total crisis. It was hell for me, and for my almost-ex-wife, and my family. Several of those months could have been avoided had CAMH not entered the picture.

Their pathologizing, sexologizing modality dovetailed with my self-loathing and self-denial, and ratcheted up the unbearable tension inside me.

Instead of encouraging me to find the best way forward for myself, they encouraged me to concentrate on minimizing my transness. They diagnosed me with Gender Identity Disorder, acknowledged that I felt a severe degree of gender dysphoria, but encouraged me to view transition as a last resort that would almost certainly leave me lonely and marginally employable.

Dr. Dickie, the only physician at the CAMH Gender Clinic these days, is a part-time resource. His main job is to be head of General Sexology at CAMH, and he also has a professorship with U of T, I believe. He told me I was hopelessly in the grips of my screwed-up sexuality, and that I was a "shoo-in" because of my small hands and stature. This was before the letter that told me not to transition.

Facing huge losses in my personal life, and supported by no one, including my care giver, I fought my transition. I remember knowing the whole while, at some level, that I had to transition. That certainty never wavered. I threw everything I had at it, and it just sat there completely impervious. I resent and regret all the lies I told myself and others (my SO in particular) as I tried to hold each successive line in the sand on my ass-backward tumble from man to transsexual.

The result? I finally came to accept that I needed to transition, and my head started to clear. Had I started out in trans-positive care, I think that process could have been easier, and maybe less painful.

I think the negative influence they had on my life borders on malpractice. Care-givers who are up-to-date in their profession don't tell trans people to deny themselves as much as possible!

Where does they get off posing as experts, while disagreeing with all the rest of the experts in the world save a couple of whackos (e.g. Dr. Bailey at Northwestern)? This is like being a Global Climate Change skeptic, persisting in pretending that reality and an overwhelming opposing consensus hasn't put you out of business.

Dang! I've devoted all my time to ranting about my first time through that place. Tomorrow, I'll tell you about yesterday, when, even though I loaded up on weed and clonazepam in an attempt to calm myself a little, I went into that little meanly furnished meeting room at the Clarke building with both guns blazing.