My Learning Disabilities Don't Make Me Any Less Trans, Or Any Less Of A Man

Hello!

I hope you’re all keeping safe and well.  I came across your Tweet for pitches, so I thought this would be a good one to send your way.

PITCH: My learning disabilities don’t make me any less trans, or any less of a man

Alex is a 36-year-old transgender man with autism and learning disabilities.  He can neither read nor write, but as I talked through your callout, he was really eager to tell future readers about his transition into becoming the man he is.

He experienced severe difficulties receiving a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.  Even though he displayed “classic traits” of being gender diverse from a young age (demanding mum and dad call him Thomas after Thomas The Tank Engine, for instance!), and a lot of this was incorrectly coined directly with his autism.  In reality, he was a transgender boy.

Recognising dysphoria in school was tricky. Alex was never taught in school about transgender issues because, in their words at the time, LGBT issues were “too complicated” for him.  This meant he struggled unnecessarily with a dysphoria that he felt ill-equipped to understand.

Worse still, when he eventually came to understand that he was on the transgender spectrum, many care workers told him that he “didn’t have the capacity or ability” to understand what being transgender entails. It left him with a decade of battling with anorexia, self-harm, and talking to therapists who couldn’t quite pinpoint what was going on for him. In fact, it was only when Jeanette, one of his care workers, made Easy Read explanations about what it means to be transgender, that he finally felt comfortable and at ease with who he is.

Alex was 28 years old at the time.

Alex firmly believes there is a huge gap in transgender education, especially for those in SEN schools in the UK.  He has shown me literature from sex education in school, and he says people with learning disabilities are seldom taught about LGBT matters.  When they are, it is often “a single line in a book”.

Every transgender individual has to fight for their right to be who they are. Alex tells me he faced multiple hurdles – mainly because of his learning disabilities.  There were even times gender specialists queried if he had capacity to understand what it meant to transition into a gender that was truly his own. When he asked specialists for Easy Read documents, few had accessible information for him at hand.  This meant that, as a family, we had to create documents explaining:

1 – How to change his name by deed poll.
2 – How to get referrals for a Gender Identity Clinic.
3 – How to get prescriptions for hormones, like Tostran.
4 – What surgery he might want to pursue – and what he can expect if he gets surgery?

It took five years for Alex to fully go through the clinical transition into becoming a man, but it took 28 years before someone finally explained to him, why he felt the way he did.  Because he has learning disabilities, many told him that he could not possibly be a transgender man.  Alex strongly disagrees, and wants to share his experiences to teach people that his learning disability doesn’t make him “any less of a man”.

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About me
My name is April Ryan, and I am a freelance journalist operating in Liverpool. I have been engaged to Alex for seven years, and I have been working alongside him during his transition into the man he has always been. I am a cisgender, LGBT woman – but Alex is the important person here, so I will talk about him now.

Outside of his life as a transgender man with disabilities, he is an artist, an actor, and perhaps the world’s worst companion in the kitchen!  In fact, Alex is a fiercely intelligent man, who has known precisely who he is from a very young age. Creative to the bone, Alex has work published in a poetry anthology, and is a published author. He is a joy to be around, and he is an honour and pleasure to know.

We want to write a piece together, showing his story as a transgender man living with learning disabilities. Alex cannot write for himself, so I will be writing the story from him, exactly as he says it and from his own perspective, in his own words. We will do this by transcribing his account, and using the same words he used to describe his experience.  If it is possible for him to be paid for the story, but for us both to share a byline, we would be grateful.

Here is a link to my portfolio, with clippings: [Portfolio link]

Please do get in touch if you feel Alex’s story would interest you!