James Moriarty lives in Newfoundland and Labrador. He was diagnosed with stage 4 endometrial cancer in 2021.

Dysphoria can be a really really crippling thing to experience for a lot of trans people. And the fact that there are a lot of cancers that can develop in body parts that are often gendered it makes it very dysphoria-inducing to have to address those body parts sometimes … The ramifications of experiencing dysphoria especially for people that experience it very deeply it can be something that can take days out of their life in order to come back to square one where they were before they started experiencing dysphoria. 

When asked what could have been done differently James comments:

Something as simple as making sure that that staff knows you by your actual name without having to go to each individual staff member and go, “Hello, my name is James, my card says this but please call me James” to every single staff member. That’s exhausting. You couldn’t do it. You just live with them saying you the wrong name at a certain point because it’s too much. So there needs to be communication with the healthcare team across the board from the people at reception who check you in to the person at the chemo desk who checks you in or for radiation to the secretaries and the physicians to even the PCAs, they should all know who you are as opposed to what it says on your card if those two things are different. That’s just one small piece of it.

James describes his experience on the podcast “At the intersection of being trans and having gendered cancer” (Spotify link).  Selected text from the transcript is available here. 

You can also listen to James on CBC Newfoundland’s Morning Show.