WARNING:  This post contains anger and resentment, and verbiage that may be misconstrued to be anti-same-sex marriage. I am not, so please do not attack me in the comments. I don’t like deleting other people’s words, but I will if I have to. Thanks for your understanding.

Okay, I almost just let this go by without posting anything anywhere—because we’re supposed to show our happy-faces at all times, right? But maybe someone else will feel a little less humiliated and dehumanized if I share, so here goes.

I jumped through a bunch of hoops to get the new health coverage for me & Kiddo activated asap so she could see a doctor. The plan that seemed to work best for us is a Kaiser plan, and if she’d never been a Kaiser patient before (or if the Oregon wasn’t at least a month behind on everything) she’d be the proud owner of an appointment to see the person who could become her new doctor. She has an existing condition and a new, painful deal going on—neither of which has anything to do with being trans. But, since Kaiser knew her under her old name, their management insisted to see proof of name change AND an operation before they’d allow her to make an appointment.

Supposedly, this will be cleared up as soon as Kaiser gets the records from the state of Oregon, but in the meantime, we spent a day trying to get a workaround—and she spent a day feeling almost completely dehumanized.

This is a good time to state that the Customer Service Rep she talked with did everything in his power to help her—and the whole time they struggled with the mindless bureaucracy he used her correct name and pronoun. He was very cool, and probably the only reason chocolate helped at all.

But I’ve paid for a month of health coverage that might be useless to my family. The cost of one month isn’t a lot to some, but it’s a lot to me—and the only reason I didn’t try to put the start date off to February is because my daughter needs to see a doctor!

Kaiser has this program, “Believe Me”, that says if you’ve signed up for coverage but all the paperwork isn’t complete you can still see a doctor as long as you sign a form guaranteeing you’ll pay once the coverage is sorted out. I’ll pay. I have paid. But we’re stuck waiting—and she’s stuck in pain and not able to sleep—because Kaiser wants to know details nobody has any business asking.

Nobody should have to tell a customer service person or their manager what stage of transition they’re in—that’s between a person and their doctor.

Nobody should have to spend even five minutes, let alone thirty, being made to feel sub-human because of who they are.

It’s hard enough for me to get her to the doctor, and now the people who were supposed to help me keep her healthy have screwed the pooch.

To anyone who’s experienced something similar—yourself or with a loved one—all I can say is hang in there. Eventually all 50 states will allow same-sex marriage and then we can move on to the things that benefit the whole community, like healthcare protections or consistent application of existing laws (I’m lookin’ at you hate crime legislation), and maybe even a baseline level of respect for everyone.