What would a FtM transman's, who was born in 1990, life be like? [closed]
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I am writing a story with a trans character (female to male) set in the 1990's. My main character's parents are supportive from the beginning, but did transpeople have access to hormone injections and the sort of resources they do today back then? If there were, his family would help him receive them. He let them know early in life, at the age of four, that he didn't feel like being girlish or dressing femininely, and he'd get so upset about it that they realized this was a real thing their kid was going through. In my story he's supposed to appear as passably a boy by age 14, that whenever someone learns he's trans, they're completely thrown. I imagine that if transphobia is bad still these days, it must've been worse back then, and it wasn't even that long ago. What kind of barriers and discrimination would this little family face?
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I don't recall hearing at all about Transgenders in the 90's, and I'm very much a live-and-let-live liberal on all sexual orientation issues.
I imagine the vast majority of people would just class this as homosexual behavior and discriminate on that basis, and the history of that struggle is reasonably searchable. Your 'dress like a boy' girl would just be seen as a butch female lesbian.
Then and now I had two female gay friends that lived together but closeted in public. They even told their landlord and neighbors they were just friends splitting the rent. It was still (in America) the kind of thing employers (and landlords) could discriminate against (I know at least two CEOs that explicitly did discriminate against homosexuals, male or female).
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If you go back a bit further you will find the controversial story of the tennis player and doctor Renee Richards. One aspect that made her attempt to play in the Women’s Open controversial was the belief that she would be stronger than the other contestants. It was not considered fair to the rest that she wanted to compete with women.
One question you must decide for your character - does he want the surgery or will the hormone treatment suffice and he will live his life as a male without it?
In the ‘70s hormone injections and assignment surgery were available but extremely rare.
The barriers that are more likely are those that anyone who is different would encounter.
The personality of your character could well determine how accepted he is, particularly in a time when there are many who vividly remember the Civil Rights movement. If your character is kind, he will have friends. If your character is more interested in making a point, perhaps his life would be more difficult.
1990 is not 1890 and - while prejudice exists in every time - the medical procedures existed. It was part of a protocol to have years of psychiatric treatment to ensure that the person desiring this reassignment truly wanted it, so finding a psychiatrist willing to see your protagonist could be one barrier.
Your character might not wish to undergo the psychiatric assessment that was believed necessary.
Another barrier that family might encounter is enrolling their son in school while all documents show him as other. Legal name changes are not something your average teenager is allowed to do, so his parents would have to do that for him.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38295. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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