3 - “You know what? I’m not agreeing”: older trans people’s experiences of navigating, building and refusing care

Summary

Introduction: writing about trans ageing

When writing about older trans people, there is a temptation to start with what a colleague once described to me as “the misery narrative”. I imagine my reader to be a busy social worker, or care home manager, or perhaps a student or academic in an allied discipline who has found a few free minutes in their day to briefly read up on older trans and gender diverse people. In the face of the pressures facing such readers, I feel the pressure to capture their attention and justify the use of their time. Implicitly, I seek to defend against the accusation that this is a very small population by using terms like ‘risk’ or ‘vulnerability’ to emphasise the disproportionate harms experienced by gender diverse populations. But I am also conscious of the limitations of this narrative. It tends to flatten different experiences into a monolithic account of vulnerability, and it tends to overlook the agency and resilience of older trans people in addressing the challenges they face. In this chapter, I seek to provide a more nuanced narrative, drawing on the accounts of older trans people in the UK to explore their experiences of navigating, challenging and, at times, rejecting services available to them.

This chapter therefore seeks to explore older trans people's experiences of care from a perspective that recognises both the challenges they face and their agency and abilities in navigating those challenges across diverse life courses. It draws upon interviews undertaken as part of my doctoral thesis in 2015 and 2016 exploring the experiences of LGBT people aged 60+ in the UK within primary care. Elements of this research have been published previously (Toze et al, 2020). This analysis focuses upon the 13 participants within that study who identified as trans or transgender. Nine of the participants were trans women, two were trans men, one was non- binary and one was a transvestite who lived fluidly as both male and female. Participants were aged 60–82, predominantly retired and all lived independently in the community.