Of all the transitions that I needed to make when I moved from Hippie Liberal Arts College to The South, changing doctors is the one that I’ve delayed the longest. It’s hard to find a doctor you feel comfortable with. So, rather than try and find a trans friendly doctor down here, I spent the last eight or nine months in a long distance relationship with the wonderful queer and trans health center that I’d been involved with previously. We talk—I call and let them know I need a refill on my testosterone; they call it into the pharmacy. And when we can, we spend time together—just this past Christmas break, I visited them and we caught up in person.  They know me, they know trans people, and they’ve never mis-pronouned me or called me by the wrong name. We’re really quite happy together.

But my health clinic understands that we can’t be monogamous—it just wouldn’t work. We each fill a certain niche in the other’s life, but we have more niches than an English muffin has nooks and crannies, and it would be so sad for us to be denied those desires simply because we can’t fulfill them for one another. So when I fell ill with the cold from hell this past week, I knew that I had to find a new doctor, one who could provide me with relief in a way that my primary medical partner just couldn’t.

To be fair, I probably could have done a better job finding a trans friendly doctor down here. I made the mistake of, rather than asking queer or trans friends, taking the advice of one of my Mr. Masculinity friends , who directed me to a small town nearby where he said there was a clinic that was open 7 days a week to walk in patients. So I find myself talking to a receptionist with the heaviest southern accent around for miles, and she’s handing me a background form to fill out. First question? Sex. M or F.

Now, I don’t want to hate on the South. There are tons of incredibly accepting, active, allies, round these parts.  Unfortunately, there are also a lot of bigots and I had no idea if anyone in this town had ever met a trans person, let alone treated one.  Given the harassment that other trans folks suffer at the hands of medical professionals, harassment that stems as often from ignorance as from malice, I was a little hesitant to disclose. I thought twice about whether it was a good idea to write my life story in the margins of that form.

After all, I rationalized, I had come in for treatment of what was probably just a cold. Maybe an ear or sinus infection, maybe a new allergy, but almost certainly nothing that was affected by my sex at birth.  I felt fairly confident that the doctor wasn’t about to prescribe some radical medication that would affect male and female bodies dramatically differently. So I checked M for Male. I filled in information about every disease I’d ever had, every medication I’d taken in the past year, and my smoking, drinking and drug habits. And all that time, in the back of my head, I had the nagging feeling that I should tell them I was trans. Not because it was relevant today, but because it might be someday, and because my doctor probably knew better than me what was relevant to my treatment. So ten minutes later, after spending a good while with my eyes glued to the top right corner, I answered the gender question, fully, this time. Male. And in the margin: Transgender—FTM.  And I handed it in, terrified by what I’d just done.

The doctor didn’t say a word about it. He commented on my liver problems in the past, and how they affected his choice of different medication.  We chatted about my symptoms. But never once did my being trans come up. It’s possible, I suppose, that he didn’t see my remarks in the margins. But, especially given that notes in the margins are a little hard to miss, I prefer to believe that he saw it, understood it, and understood that it wasn’t relevant to that day’s conversation. He seemed like a nice guy, so I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt on this issue.

To be honest, there’s no really profound point to this story, except that I had a really positive experience in an entirely unexpected context. There are so many terrible stories about trans folks and medicine that it’s hard to remember sometimes that good things happen too. Doctors in small towns in the South sometimes get it right, or at least get it right enough. So I take that night as a reminder that things are changing.  Too slowly, and not always in the places that need it most—I get that. But they are changing in some places. And, just as I’ve mentioned in other columns, I feel good about the small things.  Eventually, I expect them to add up to bigger things, and I look forward to that day.