My First Visit, and What Came After

The first time I stepped into Persad Center I felt a little uncomfortable but not overly so. The office I went to was in a very questionable area of town (in Pittsburgh) but the inside didn't reflect that at all. The first thing they had asked me to do was what they called an "intake." I had to pay a one time fee of like $134 dollars to get evaluated and assigned to a therapist. They had me fill out a bunch of forms asking me all kinds of questions including both personal, medical, and questions about my family. After filling out the intake forms I was taken upstairs by an assistant to my therapist to be and she went over my intake forms with me in order to make sure everything I put on there was correct. She also filled out another form herself asking me questions as to why I was here and what I wanted to accomplish through therapy. Needless to say, I received a call after a couple days saying that I was accepted into the Transgendered Clinic there at Persad. I was also given the okay to schedule an appointment with my new therapist Judith Diperna.

It was well over a month's wait before I could get an appointment but it was well worth my "wasted time" in order to get into Judith's office. What can I say really...she was very kind to me from the start and we both clicked almost immediately. I remember my first appointment with her felt so short. It was ninety minutes long but it only seemed like ten minutes. My first visit with her lay down the frame work for every visit that I would have with her to follow which basically entailed me talking about myself and her nodding and occasionally asking me a few questions. I had to fulfill certain requirements to be diagnosed as a transexual and she made that well known to me from the get-go.

I drove every week to see Judith who's office was over an hour and a half away from where I lived. I remember having to pay two tolls, cross a state line, and drive through downtown Pittsburgh just to get there. It got tiring, believe me. And at one point I drove down on Tuesday nights for a group therapy session with other transexuals. At the time I did not like that at all, I was so scared to be in front of people for whatever reason.

After about two months of therapy I stopped going in September of '05 because I got involved with a guy that said I was fine the way I was and that it was perfectly okay for a man to be feminine. We had a short relationship needless to say and because I had stopped therapy I felt both betrayed and stupid for listening to him. Yeah, I'll agree that it it acceptable for men to act/be feminine, but the simple fact of the matter was I wasn't a feminine guy, I was a female and there was nothing nobody could tell me to think otherwise. I didn't recover from this until over a year and a half later in March of '07 when I finally decided to put my foot down and finish my therapy with Judith so I could become the beautiful person I knew I was.