As I sit in the waiting room at Dr. Fontana’s office before my consultation regarding gender confirmation surgery, this feels like the right moment to put together everything I have gone through so far and how I got to this morning. I’d like to share my feelings and thoughts, how I came to realize I am trans, as well as factual information about the entire process, the people, and the procedures—things that might no longer be relevant in just a few months.
This article contains descriptions of certain medical examinations and mentions needles, blood, and other topics that some readers might find uncomfortable.
On Dysphoria and Eggs
Trans people exist, and trans people know that something is wrong with them. That a mistake was made, that they were supposed to be born in a different body. At least, that’s what I thought—that’s how I understood what it meant to be transgender. Until 2022, it had never occurred to me that the thoughts I had been having for as long as I could remember were actually trying to tell me something I needed to address.
At the beginning of June 2022, still as deadname, I thought it would be an interesting challenge to see how long I could focus on referring to myself in the feminine gender. Just out of curiosity, just to see whether I would slip up after two sentences or three. Three. After three weeks, my therapist told me that I hadn’t mentioned a single panic attack in our last three sessions. I had no choice but to reflect on this and figure out what was happening. With all my heart, I did not want to be trans. I didn’t want it. I knew that admitting it to myself would mean facing a long, difficult, and painful journey. I was afraid of it. In my search, I came across the incredibly insightful Gender Dysphoria Bible (en) (archived PDF, March 2025 ). I kept thinking about it more and more. I kept going back through years and years of my own thoughts.
The more time I spent going through everything that had crossed my mind before, the harder it became to deny it to myself. Around late June and early July 2022, Amélie hatched from her egg (though at the time, she still thought she would use the feminine version of deadname). In hindsight, so many things started to make sense. Why I never really connected with my male classmates in high school, why I fell asleep every night wondering what it would be like to be a girl, how my life would be different, what that yearning for a “Jekyll-and-Hyde potion that would switch me to the opposite sex” really meant.
For all the years I lived as a boy, I never experienced dysphoria or distress about the body I was born in. It didn’t bother me. I never had the feeling that something was wrong, that a mistake had been made. Being a boy didn’t hurt me. I wasn’t truly happy and had to pretend that everything was fine, but I thought that was just how life worked. Because no one had ever told me that being a boy was something one wanted, I assumed that everyone would rather be a girl but simply wasn’t, and so they pretended to be content. I thought that was just normal, and that someone only counted as trans once they started having problems. And I didn’t have any. Simply wishing to be a girl didn’t seem like enough to me.
Alright, So What Now?
The moment a trans person admits to themselves that they are trans is often called hatching from the egg. But what now? What’s next? What should I do? I knew nothing about transitioning. I had no one to ask. I didn’t know where to start. So, out of all places, I began on an unnamed social media platform, where I stumbled upon a livestream by an amazing trans person. In the chat, I started talking to a girl who was in a similar position as me. She had recently hatched but had already figured out a little bit about what was happening and what steps to take. She recommended that I schedule my first visit with Doc. MUDr. Luděk Fiala at the Sexology Institute of the General University Hospital in Prague.
I had no other recommendations, I didn’t know anyone else, so after a few days of convincing myself, I picked up the phone and called. I got an appointment for October 31st, about two weeks from the call. This is also one of the reasons I recommend Dr. Fiala to other trans people starting their transition—everything with him has always moved very quickly and without long, unpleasant waiting times.
“What brings you here?” was the question he greeted me with. Even though I had rehearsed all kinds of scenarios in my head, this simple question caught me off guard. Shaky and nervous about the new situation, I managed to say that I felt like, and wanted to be, a girl. We went through some basic paperwork, which I won’t go into detail about (mainly because I don’t remember it). Two key things came from that visit. I was tasked with obtaining a psychological evaluation and getting a blood test. The second task was easier, especially since Dr. Fiala does the endocrinological examination himself, instead of referring patients to other doctors as sexologists usually do. The psychological evaluation had to be conducted by a clinical psychologist. I already knew that before he told me. But I had no idea what exactly to expect.
My First Unpleasant Experience
By the time I got to Professor Weiss, I had already heard a lot about him. I called for an appointment in mid-November 2022 and was scheduled for January 7th. However, the examination itself was an experience that took me some time to recover from.
In the first part, I was in the professor’s office, subjected to a variety of questions ranging from reasonable ones like “What gender do you identify with?” to unrelated ones like “Do you imagine sexual intercourse with a male or female partner?” to outright invasive and interrogatory ones like “During sex with your first partner, did you imagine yourself as a man or a woman, and in what position did you prefer to have sex?” Questions in the last category, in my opinion, were inappropriate, had nothing to do with the reason for my visit, and invaded not only my privacy but also the privacy of the woman in question, who had no involvement in the examination and no interest in it.
The second part consisted of a test supposedly designed to determine my intelligence. Again, I fail to see how relevant such a test is, but it was a bureaucratic hoop I had to jump through, so I completed it without overthinking the reasons. It included tasks like filling in missing parts of pictures and logic-based pattern questions (e.g., empty circle → full circle, empty square → ?). When I later described my overall impression of this experience to a friend, one of the words I used was “disgusting.”
The results were available two weeks later, and on January 23rd, I received my first prescription for Androcur and Estrofem from Dr. Fiala. So, from my initial phone call to the Sexology Institute in mid-October, a little over three months had passed.
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