Date: 2011-04-26 00:56 Security: Public Mood: frightened xpost http://soph.livejournal.com/218838.html Tags: big posts, gender identity clinic, transgender issues Subject: Two weeks to go.

Only 2 weeks to go until my appointment with the Gender Identity Clinic.

You'd think this would be a good thing. Instead, I've been getting increasingly anxious and I've been crying at the possibilities of what might happen.

To explain why, I'll need to explain some things. To be able to get access to the GIC, you need to be referred by a psychiatrist - they don't accept self-referrals. Then, the PCT for the area you live in has to approve the funding based on that referral. After those two things are done, the actual appointment could take months to arrive. (Recall that even disregarding the first attempt at getting a referral which ended disastrously and took up half a year by itself, it's taken about nine months since my second, successful (as in, actually sent) referral to get to this appointment.)

Needless to say, I do *not* want to have to go through all this again - I've waited far too long already. But the trouble is, I started this whole process while I was in Reading, and it's the Berkshire PCT which approved the funding. In the nine months that have passed, however, I've had to go live back with my parents, so I'm no longer in Berkshire. I was hoping to be able to go back to Reading (or at least somewhere in Berkshire) as soon as I could, but I wouldn't be able to cope living on my own, and while I have two friends who may be able to live with me, one of them isn't certain about where exactly he'd want to live (and I haven't heard anything back from him yet), and although the other is ready and willing to live with me, neither of us are any good at the whole "organising ourselves" thing (by our own admissions), and I'm concerned that the whole thing would come collapsing down on top of us. I just don't feel I'd be able to live with that sort of constant stress. :/

(And now, of course, it's far too late to consider moving anyway; with two weeks to go, just moving will generate its own stress regardless of the circumstances, and what I need now is less stress, not more.)

Anyway, the point is, I've been crying about what I consider to be the most likely possibility - that I'd go to the GIC, they'd ask me to confirm where I live, I'd need to say to them that I've had to move outside of the PCT's area and have been living outside their area for about 8 months now, and they'd be left with no choice but to close my case and ask me to go through the whole process again. After all, I haven't been living in Berkshire for 8 months, so why should they be paying for me? And presumably any new PCTs won't fund it until I've seen a psychiatrist...

It's the stuff of nightmares. (I'm honestly surprised I haven't had nightmares about it yet, just thinking and crying about it in the daytime.) But there's more, because of course I don't even want to live here, which means that if I did do that and moved to Reading or somewhere else again...

...well, I think you can see where I'm going with this. I guarantee you that if the GIC has to close my case, I will break down in tears right there and then. (I'm almost at that point just thinking about it while typing this entry.) This is so not what I want.

But I can't lie about where I live; that would almost certainly carry much harsher consequences, because it would be seen as me stealing money from another county and would most likely lead to a jail sentence or something like that. So I can't do that.

This is not going to be fun. At all.

(This isn't what my previous post was about, by the way. That was regarding something else, which I'm not going to go into here.)