How not being punished gets one into jail

It goes something like this:

• Be born intersex.
• Get psychologically and physically tortured for years, suffer severe traumas.
• Try to commit suicide and fail.
• End up in the national Bible Belt and try to find a new doctor.
• Get refused by first doctor for being intersex.
• Get accepted, then receive hostile attitude at other doctor.
• Try to ask for help anyway, get the run-around.
• Have one's dissociative identity disorder (DSD) triggered at said doctor, suffer a blackout.
• Wake up in a cell, naked, bruised, battered and with an extremely sore knee, courtesy of the police.
• Suffer through countless court-cases, have charges of attempted murder and such dropped.
• Enjoy many months of revalidation, permanent nerve damage and bruised bones.
• Be found guilty of vandalism, but not get any punishment due to the circumstances of the event.
• Be still forced to pay thousands of Euros because the uninsured art work of a local artist got damaged.
• Face the threat of paying up or spending 39 days in jail.

But I'm not being punished is the claim. Today my lawyer communicated me the final verdict in this case back in the Netherlands, and despite the very act being illegal according to Dutch law, I still have to pay this artist for being too lazy and/or stupid to insure the works she put up on public display where any child could have tipped them over.

To me the impact of all this is largely psychological. There's the injustice of having to pay, sure, but to me this last ruling seems to also have cut the last thread of hope I had that maybe my country of birth would maybe not have been quite so bad. With that hope shattered, and nothing else tying me to the Netherlands after I pay up this punishment, it feels like a chapter will have been closed.

For all I care the entirety of the Netherlands can go slide into the North Sea. All that I harbour towards this country as an institution and symbol is negative. It's a haven of corruption, of intolerance and bigotry. That I got my first name and official gender changed there was almost pure luck, the latter only thanks to German doctors providing the details and performing the procedures Dutch doctors refused to perform or where they felt had to lie about the results.

I will start a crowdfunding thing for this amount I will have to pay later this week, just in case anyone feels like lightening my burden somewhat - both financially and psychologically - since it's still a considerable chunk out of my meagre savings. I have only been able to save up for the past two years, after all, courtesy of having been robbed clean of money and possessions in 2013.

My general mood at this point is still one of mostly shock, as well as bitterness and disappointment. It is the last vile act by a country which I once saw as my home and where I felt at home. After more than a decade that feeling of safety and belonging has been stripped away, until only the barren reality remained. I cannot and will not ever return to the Netherlands. It's a part of my past that is so hideous and so repugnant that it benefits no one to linger any period of time on it, let alone within its borders.

Only way forward from the lowest point is up, right?


Maya