USA —
There's a perpetual dialogue in the transgender
community: What if you could take a pill and be perfect -
the girl you've always been, buried beneath unwanted body
hair and testosterone, the man trapped in a female body?
An instant, painless transformation.
What if it meant losing
your job, alienating your friends and family members?
Turning your back on the life you've always known? Would
you do it?
"That's the dilemma that
we all find," says Michelle Mara, who was born male but
identifies as a woman. "That's what tears us apart
mentally and makes us into wrecks and drives us to
suicide."
More than 50 years after
Christine Jorgensen <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Jorgensen>
fascinated the world by becoming one of the first to
successfully undergo sexual reassignment surgery,
questions about gender, sex and the nature of personal
identity are back in the public eye.
"Transamerica" star
Felicity Huffman won a Golden Globe this year for her
portrayal of the born-male Bree, who discovers a
long-lost son a week before the final surgery that will
make her physically female. The movie comes out on home
video May 23.
Members of the
transgendered community say "Transamerica" reflects the
confusion of being born in the wrong male or female body
- torn between who society expects them to be and who
they really are.
"It doesn't matter how
hard you try to be a man (or woman)," says Lorelei Simone
Monet of San Luis Obispo, Calif. "If you're not a man,
you don't fit ... You don't belong. And sometimes it gets
awfully hard trying to belong."
Growing up male in rural
Oregon, Monet remembers her mother's anger at discovering
her son playing dress-up with a neighbor girl. When the
young boy asked for a Raggedy Ann doll, he received
Raggedy Andy. Instead of a pink kitten toy, he got a blue
puppy.
"I knew there was
something wrong for wanting them," says Monet, now a
58-year-old woman who flaunts her femininity with magenta
nails and colorful skirts and blouses.
"I tried to be a boy, and
I wanted to be," she adds. "But I also knew that I didn't
know things other boys knew, and I didn't have an
interest in things that other boys did."
Monet struggled to make
friends, always feeling uncomfortable with other boys
fascinated by cars and sports. The youngster tried out
for football one year only to spend most of the season
warming the bench.
Then, in fifth grade,
Monet read a Sunday newspaper supplement about Christine
Jorgensen, who was making the interview rounds to discuss
her physical transformation from male to female. Concepts
like transsexualism and "gender dysphoria," as some
psychologists call it, had yet to enter the cultural
mainstream.
"I knew then that's what
I was," says Monet, who remembers hiding the article
under her mattress. "And then I worked very hard on not
being that."
Alcoholism became the way
Monet hid her transgendered identity through a year with
the U.S. Navy and more than a decade at male-dominated
high-tech companies in the Silicon Valley. She married a
woman and divorced six years later, constantly clouded by
depression and thoughts of suicide.
"Everyone was a man,
except me," Monet says. "I just pretended to be
one."
Finally, Monet says, she
knew "that guy" - her male persona - "had to die." She
had to sober up. She had to transform into a
woman.
Mara also spent years
repressing her desire to dress and act like a woman -
disguising her feminine side with sports and hunting
trips for wild pigs, bears and mountain lions.
Her first exposure to
Christine Jorgensen's story came at age 18 or 19. She was
a freshman at California Polytechnic State University
living with conservative parents who made it clear "this
was the kind of thing you buried," Mara says.
Around the same time, she
attended a human sexuality class that identified
transvestism - and transsexualism by proxy - as a mental
illness for which the most successful treatment was shock
therapy.
"I was terrified that
anyone would find out that I was as disgusting a creature
as this," Mara says. "I made the choice that I would
rather keep it buried and repressed and deny it, even to
myself."
If it went any further,
she adds, "I thought suicide was a lot easier, cleaner,
quicker, better for everybody involved."
Shocked by the
revelation, Mara dropped out of college and spent nearly
a decade working in a traditionally masculine job that
required hard physical labor in the harsh outdoors.
Around 1981, a friend introduced Mara to her future
wife.
"The first thing that
went through my mind was, 'Well, it's all been a mistake.
It was wrong. ... Just put it behind you and let it go.'"
Mara says.
Setting emotional
concerns aside, she re-devoted her life to living as a
man, a husband deeply in love with his wife. She fathered
two children, got a new job and moved the family into
their first home.
But after eight years of
marriage and family, the psychological torment returned.
She had recurring dreams about having a picnic with her
wife while dressed as a woman.
Distraught, she'd hide
behind their upscale house and cry "so hard I'd make
myself sick.
"You can't imagine what
it is to look in the mirror and have a severe case of
self-loathing," she says.
During sleepless nights,
she started searching on the Internet and found an online
group support group for hundreds of transgendered people
like herself.
"Here I was out there
making myself sick because I was the only one in the
world suffering from this and I didn't want to do this to
my wife," Mara says. She told her wife the truth two days
before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"We were sitting in bed
having coffee when the two towers got hit," Mara recalls.
"She told me, 'See, what's happening to you is not
terrible. This is terrible.'"
"Her love was so deep for
me that it was beyond gender," Mara says with a
smile.
Mara couldn't be more
fortunate to have a partner who accepts her transgendered
status, Doug Heumann says. He was a woman living with a
female partner when he first announced his desire to
transition into manhood.
"I knew I had to at least
face the fact that I was more than a lesbian," he says.
"What I did about that was still up for grabs."
For Heumann, who grew up
female in a devout Catholic family in suburban Illinois,
girlhood as Debra was a turbulent time. He fought
constantly with his parents about wearing dresses and
resisted getting a bra.
At the same time, Heumann
found himself drawn to other girls.
At age 18, he says, it
finally clicked. He wasn't merely a woman attracted to
other women, but a heterosexual man in a woman's
body.
"I didn't have the
courage to step out of my family's influence," the
53-year-old says. "I didn't have enough
self-belief."
Heumann turned to alcohol
to deal with the confusion, finally quitting as an
engineering student in Missouri. He moved to Los Angeles
to work for Lockheed Martin in 1983 and then to San Luis
Obispo for a Caltrans job in 1991, convinced "I was
moving to Nirvana and I'd be so accepted out
here."
Feelings came and went.
But when Heumann read "Stone Butch Blues" <Stone Butch
Blues. 1993, San Francisco: Firebrand Books. ISBN
1555838537 > in 1994, he knew he had to follow
novelist Leslie Feinberg's lead and transform physically
into a man.
A year later, he was in
Los Angeles meeting with other transgendered men seeking
to transition.
"They told us we were
going to lose most of our gay and lesbian friends and we
would, without a doubt, lose our partner," he recalls.
Heumann's partner worried
about how she would break the news to her children, her
co-workers, her family. She wondered if they'd have to
move to L.A. or San Francisco - or "go back into the
closet" entirely.
"When it got down to
three or four years of going back and forth like this, it
was like, 'When would I stop worrying about what other
people thought? When did I start basing my life on
this?'" Heumann says.
Transitioning - moving
beyond behavior and dress to take the physical attributes
of the opposite sex - was the next step.
"As you get older, the
more time you spend having this wrong body, the more you
want to get rid of it," Monet says.
The transformation is
harder for middle-aged people who grew up in a society
largely ignorant of transgendered issues, she
adds.
Under the standards
established by the Harry Benjamin International Gender
Dysphoria Association <http://www.hbigda.org/>,
people seeking to transition into male or female must
first undergo psychotherapy, take hormones for a year and
spend at least one year living like their chosen
gender.
Only then are they
eligible for breast surgery, castration, phalloplasty and
other procedures, which, like hormones, are rarely
covered by insurance policies. Full surgery can cost
$60,000 to $100,000, Mara says.
Some measures may come
too late. For instance, men with male pattern balding may
never be able to take full advantage of estrogen-induced
hair growth.
And there are health
risks - infection in the case of plastic surgery, liver
damage due to hormone use.
Those making the
transition from male to female have the added cost of
painful and pricey hair removal, which can take years to
complete.
"(Transition) would be a
wonderful goal if the price wasn't so high," says Mara,
in her late 50s.
It's not only the cost of
surgery and hormones that she's worried about, but also
her job, her friends, her family. Bullies would torment
her 15-year-old son if she publicly identified herself as
a transgendered woman, she says.
Still, little changes
reveal the slow transformation from the "hard-ass" drill
sergeant to the bangle-loving redhead with the easy laugh
- long, manicured fingernails; plucked
eyebrows.
"Do I feel whole? No. Do
I think about transitioning? Several times a day," Mara
says. "But is it an overpowering, overwhelming thing like
it was before, when I was completely denying myself to be
in touch with my feminine side? No."
Monet, with her modest
income may never be able to afford to make the full
physical transition to womanhood.
She says it's enough to
be "Lorelei 24-7," to go shopping for cute shoes and cry
at movies.
"I've been living my life
in such a dark place," Monet says. "I can walk down the
street as Lorelei in the daylight without hiding anymore.
... As hard as it is - and it is hard - it's worth
it."
