“You’re gonna have a tough time,” The GP told us. “She doesn’t like men.”
“Good thing I’m non-binary.” I said kind of emptily. Not expecting anyone to acknowledge it. GPs’ offices and gender nonsense don’t mix.
“Oh, so is she. Mention that.”
The patient looked tired and lost and distrustful. But I understand that when you go in to see your GP and get involuntarily sent to ED by ambulance under a psych treatment order, you’re gonna feel those things. But she had the ABCs and we maybe had some shared ground. That could be enough.
“Hey, I’m Sidney. My pronouns are they/them, and this is [partner], He/Him”. She responded with her name and that distrust maybe slipped away a bit. The tired was still there, though. “Thank you for telling me your name. What are your pronouns?”
On the way, we were talking about some shared emotions. Whether she wants to be listed as female on our patient records or something else. What it means to “play the gender game” in the medical field. We talked about coming out to parents, gendered language, and whether as non-binary we consider ourselves trans. We talked about a lot together. And in the end, we talked about her psych issues, her stressors, her support networks. We talked about self-care and The Fight and whether, really, at the end of all this gender bullshit there is a space for people like her and me.
She showed me trust, and ferocity, and laughter, and herself. And I asked her to take care for me, and she promised she would. I’m really, incredibly proud of her for doing that. I have enough experience with psych patients to know she’s probably lying but…even then I’m really glad she cared enough about herself to lie.
I asked if she wanted me to mention the gender stuff to the nurse at ED, and she didn’t. So we kept it our little secret and did a bedside handover that felt cold and clinical. I realised that so much of what this person had opened up about was wrapped up in being a lost enby in a difficult world, and that to leave that out left so much of her history untold. Her protective factors were trans groups and genderqueer friends. Her stressors were Spanish speaking parents who didn’t understand she didn’t want to be their nina or their nino, but was left without a third option.
Cutting that out of her story was like cutting out what her story actually was. Or maybe, as someone who gets he/him’d day after day and works with people who say stuff like “biological woman”, I was projecting: That working in the medical field makes me cut out so much of myself that I feel hollow some days. Maybe she’s gonna be fine with it, and my handover was okay, and I’m just turning my feelings into someone else’s feelings. It’s hard to tell. But I could tell that when she sat on that bed and wrapped herself in the blankets, she went back to being that tired, lost, distrustful “girl” that she’d been in the office.
I walked out to make up the stretcher with my partner. He’d been quiet the whole way, just listening to her and I. I had even said a few pointed things I wanted him to overhear about how my colleagues just don’t get it, and need to self-educate if they’re going to stay in the field. We stood across the stretcher from each other, and he finally met my eye in this really awkward way. His courage gathered, he said, “you’re non-binary? I thought you had a girlfriend though?”
So, yeah, she was right. We’ve got a long way to go. But there’ll always be a place for people like her and me, even if it’s just in the back of my ambulance.
Story shared by Sidney. A 30 year old queer non-binary first responder.