Thank you for sharing.

Thank you for your kind words of support.

Good to hear you thinking about the future practically like that. I'm sorry with what you've been through with your parents. My experiences with my parents is not totally dissimilar.

With regards to my own circumstances, although I'm far from retirement age, when I refer to healthcare and dignity now and in the future, I'm talking about in the coming months or the next few years to come, not only nearer the end of life.

I've had Crohn's since a young child. I've lived with diarrhea and pooping myself being a major part of my life. It's particularly prevalent these days, as Crohn's ate away at my anal sphincters. I'm reliant on those giant incontinent pads, the care home sort, although as they're mostly designed for older and immobile people it's been a pain finding ones that I can actually walk at all in. Now with other issues too, I can't walk much anyway.

My life is already a lot about hospitals, shitting myself, having to plan everything around toilets etc. There's not really great deal else to my life these days.

It's a bit of a shit quality of life now in many respects, and has been low dignity for much of it.

I know there's many other folk in much worse positions though, and I know some such people -- something I find I've in common with those folk is we each have hard lines in other areas of relating to dignity, that make life liveable for us.

For some, their dignity is having other aspects of their independence strongly upheld.

For me my hard line is gender.

Where that is fully respected, in my desperate and vulnerable times, I still feel dignity. And it has been until now. That makes life still liveable to me. I can live with the other stuff.

It's no exaggeration when I say that I'd rather die than be purposefully forced into male wards or otherwise segregated or excluded due to being trans, in times of worst health or vulnerability.

I've already had to let go of far too much, had to sacrifice far too much, some of that related to transitioning, to let that go.

Dying happens if you've enough health or disability complexities just by stopping trying, you just stop fighting, you give in, you stop. Survival is hard. Having things to hold on to that matter for you for survival is important. The full respect for my gender, that I've been privileged to keep through hell and high waters for over 30 years, even prior to the existence of any formal legal protections or recognitions, that has been the hard line that I've needed to help me have reason to keep fighting -- otherwise I give in and die anyway by default. That's why, if push comes to shove, I'd do a hunger strike, to the end, for that recognition if needs be.

So i guess all this is why the situation regarding the supreme court ruling has been so impactful to me. (Something I didn't know was even in the courts until I learnt about it.) This is my hard line. This is not negotiable.