Six hours later the bandages fell apart, and Ní Fhlannagáin was rushed to hospital. But the instructions for bandaging afterwards were written for cis men, whose genitals function very differently than trans women's after a year or two on HRT. If I want to go get my ears pierced, no one's going to say, 'oh, you can't do that, you need two letters from psychiatrists'."Īll of which helps explain how Ní Fhlannagáin convinced Willow to perform an orchiectomy on her – that is, remove her testicles – in a reclining chair, working from photocopied pages of a medical textbook, while her trans mom was sleeping off her night shift upstairs. "We're not going to ask for permission for something that we should be able to just do," says Ní Fhlannagáin, summarising their attitude. It was a scene that shaped a generation of North American trans women. Indeed, her own trans mother – a mentor role common among trans people, who are often estranged from their birth parents – died of a stroke at the age of 62 after years of sickness because she did not trust doctors.īy the turn of the millennium, though, Ní Fhlannagáin was running in punk anarchist circles, absorbing riot grrrl feminism and radical environmentalism and transgender separatism. My tit''ll be falling off, I'm not going to a f***ing doctor." "It has traumatised multiple generations of trans women. "The medical profession is just flat out abusive to us," says Ní Fhlannagáin. A jury awarded her mother $2.9m the city appealed, then settled for $1.75m. When ambulance staff realised she was trans, they jumped back, stopped treating her, and stood there mocking her while she bled to death. In 1995, a Black trans woman named Tyra Hunter was injured in a car accident in Washington DC. Nor were you safe with above-board medics. In 1999 Brown was jailed for murder after one of his patients – a man who was psychologically fixated on amputation, and whose healthy leg Brown agreed to remove – died of gangrene. "The quality of his results was generally considered unacceptable," writes Andrea James on her widely consulted Transgender Map website. This was the time of "Butcher Brown", alias John Ronald Brown, a San Francisco surgeon who specialised in trans women but was forced to set up shop in Mexico after his US medical licence was suspended.
Or if you weren't online, that friend of yours who went to Mexico and brought back a suitcase." "It was online pharmacies, because online pharmacies became a thing. "It was calling up the physician that got his licence taken away because he was prescribing one too many narcotics," she recalls. Hence, Ní Fhlannagáin says many trans people were forced into the care of "sketchy doctors" who often mistreated them. Yet before Barack Obama's flagship Affordable Healthcare Act in 2010, few US health insurers covered such treatments, and in the Nineties few clinics even offered them. Few countries had formal legal protections, and the world wide web had not yet given isolated trans people a lifeline to each other. For those who lived openly, or were outed against their will, tremendous discrimination was the norm. When Ní Fhlannagáin transitioned, around 1993-4, most cisgender (or non-trans) people were barely aware trans people existed and would never expect to see one in real life. You put people up on pedestals, they're gonna fail you. "It embarrasses me when people go 'oh my God, you're so cool'.
"I don't know, I always downplay this," she laughs now. She rarely talked about the clinic until 2020, when she first told her story in a Twitter thread and on the podcast Totally Trans. Today she lives in Connacht in the Republic of Ireland, still coding and spinning yarns, voice gritty from smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. She dropped out of university after a year and taught herself to code, riding the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s. "When I transitioned, I basically lost everything," she says. Ní Fhlannagáin grew up in a working-class Irish-American community in New Jersey, in an abusive household.
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