By Sean O’Malley
CAMH Senior Media Relations Specialist
Who am I?
That is a question that Myka Pascall-Thompson has been asking since childhood.
Girl? Boy? Man? Woman? None of the above?
The answer to that question has varied at different times for different reasons in Myka’s young life.
Even the answer provided during Myka’s first appointment at CAMH’s Gender Identity Clinic is different from the one Myka gave during a feature interview with me for the latest CAMH podcast.
“It’s hard for me to say what happened. It was more about what didn’t happen,” says Myka. “What didn’t happen was that I never fully identified with either gender. I was fulfilling a role that other people expected of me. That was a lot of my life – living it to make other people respect and accept me. It was just gradual. Stop playing by rules that other people wrote. Play by mine.”
Politically and culturally, public attitudes towards transgender issues are evolving at a rapid pace, especially in Canada, including major policy changes in recent years that give people like Myka more options to play by their own rules. When Myka first came to the Gender Identity Clinic three years ago and presented an Ontario health card, it had to indicate Myka’s gender as male or female. But starting in June of 2016, there was no longer a gender identification of any kind on Ontario health cards. Ontario driver’s licences now allow for the option of X instead of M of F. Federally, as of August 2017, that option became available for passports too. With so much societal change happening in such a short period of time, people like Myka now feel more emboldened to tell their stories of personal growth and change.
On a surface level, Myka and I could not be more different. But on a deeper level, I found the journey of self-exploration from childhood through the teenage years to young adulthood that Myka tells in the podcast to be universal in its own way. Whether we know which box to fill on our forms or not, who among us has not wondered who we really are during those formative years?
I hope you find our conversation as enlightening and thought-provoking as I did. To listen, click here.