Gimme Tranny

(http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06277/727117-51.stm)

Dannylee Mitchell received the call on March 8, 2006. It came from Dr. Marci Bowers, telling her she was scheduled for sex reassignment surgery on April 25 in Trinidad, Colo.

“I was so excited, like going to Kennywood or Disneyland,” says Dannylee, 40, who was born in Washington, Pa. as Daniel. “Until the surgery, you feel like you’re living a lie.”

She flew out to Colorado on April 23 with the man she was seeing at the time. He’d lent her the $20,000 she needed for the surgery. Most insurance providers won’t cover sex reassignment surgery. She’d already spent another $25,000 on hair removal, hormones, a nose job and a tracheal shave, which reduces the size of the Adam’s apple.

Trinidad, a town of about 8,900 that’s 11/2 hours south of Colorado Springs, has been the epicenter of sex reassignment surgery in the United States for decades.

The late Dr. Stanley Biber revolutionized sex reassignment surgery, performing more than 3,000 surgeries during his career and putting Trinidad on the map as the “Sex Change Capital of the World.” When he retired in 2003, Dr. Bowers, one of his proteges, took over the practice. A gynecologic surgeon and a transgender female herself, Dr. Bowers has improved upon Dr. Biber’s surgical techniques and has performed more than 300 sex reassignment surgeries.

“There’s more and more demand, and I’m getting faster and faster,” says Dr. Bowers, who has reduced the time for male-to-female sex reassignment surgery to a little less than four hours. “It’s never really had a woman’s touch before, let alone a gynecologist’s touch.”

Dannylee arrived in Trinidad on a Sunday.

“Not much to do on a Sunday in Trinidad, Colo.,” she says.

She drove around a bit, saw the hospital where she’d be going the next day, then checked into the Trinidad Motor Inn.

The next day, after a big breakfast of pancakes and good coffee at the Daily Perk, she reported to Dr. Bowers’ office at 1 p.m. for a pre-surgical interview and preparation.

“And you try not to be too gooby because you’re excited,” she says.

After she was weighed and asked questions about her medical and personal history, she was taken to the hospital to check in. After that, she had to drink a salty, lemonade “bowel prep” solution. Then, it was back to the motel.

She reported to Mount San Rafael Hospital for surgery on Tuesday, April 25, at 11 a.m. and underwent the final surgical preparation, which included some shaving and more intestinal cleansing. The last two things she remembered were getting on the operating table and IVs going into her arm.

“You can feel it burning up your arm, then they put a mask over your face,” she says.

She emerged four hours later with a surgically constructed vagina fashioned from her former male sex organs.

Dr. Bowers “did it all in one operation, the reconstruction and the cosmetic at the same time,” she said a couple of days after her procedure. “She’s really good. She’s really a good surgeon.”

Dannylee spent most of her recovery with a bag of ice between her legs but needed sleeping pills more than pain medication in the aftermath.

“The surgery was like running the bases,” she said. “The hard part was over.”

The transgender life…

Like Dannylee, some people with gender dysphoria take hormones and undergo surgery.

She will continue on hormone therapy indefinitely and undergo regular blood tests to make sure her hormone levels are in check.

Others with gender dysphoria take hormones but eschew surgery. Some have “top” surgery, but not “bottom” surgery.

“The term transgender is a self-defining term,” says Tara Tieso, executive administrator of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (formerly the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association Inc.), an organization of 350 medical, legal, counseling and academic professionals that has set standards of care for people with gender disorders.

“There’s not a way to sort of identify everyone who would identify themselves as transgender or transsexual.”

There are 7,000 to 10,000 transgender people in Pennsylvania.

The International Foundation for Gender Education estimates that roughly 30,000 people in the United States have undergone sex reassignment surgery, says Denise LeClair, executive director of the Waltham, Mass.-based foundation.

There aren’t any hard statistics, but anecdotal evidence indicates that until recently, the majority of people who transitioned on the job lost their jobs within weeks of “coming out,” Ms. LeClair says.

Consequently, those struggling with their gender identity don’t make or take the decision to transition lightly.

“Who in their right mind in today’s society with this administration is going to say, ‘I’m married. I’m 45 years old. I have three kids and a mortgage. I’m 6′4″, used to be a Marine and I think I want to be a woman now’?” says Judith DiPerna, a clinical therapist and transgender specialist at the Persad Center in Bloomfield. “Nobody does that unless they have suffered a lifetime, and how they’ve managed to keep it under wraps is just incredible to me.”

Male-to-female sex reassignment surgery starts at about $15,000. The more expensive female-to-male surgery begins at about $30,000 to $40,000.

An emotional toll

Transitioning also exacts personal and emotional costs.

Dannylee’s father doesn’t want her calling the house. She gave her mother her phone number when she was in Colorado for the surgery, but her mother didn’t call.

“I called my mom on Mother’s Day, and she said she wanted us to get together,” Dannylee says.

She’s had no contact with her sister in more than two years. Two weeks ago, she spoke with her brother for the first time in more than 11/2 years and talked with her mother for the first time since Mother’s Day.

She doesn’t divulge such details to seek pity, but more matter-of-factly.

“That doesn’t hurt me or bother me or make me feel sad,” she says. “They’ve been there to the best of their ability.”

However, what is extremely painful is the fact that her decision to transition has left her estranged from her teenage daughter, whom she refuses to discuss.

“I don’t want to ruin that child’s life any more than I have to up to now,” she says.

She knows life can’t be easy for the daughter of a transgender female.

Growing up an effeminate boy in Washington, Pa., was no picnic, and transitioning from male to female in her hometown, where she routinely ran into people she’d known all her life, wasn’t easy, either.

After losing her job, she didn’t have steady work for a year and a half, filed bankruptcy, went on welfare for a time and drank too much.

“People in society weren’t very accepting of Danny,” says her friend Joan Hoop, who started out as her electrologist in Washington, Pa., and agreed to the interview only with Dannylee’s consent. “When I first met Danny, Danny was dressing as a woman and trying to match clothes and do the makeup and the hair and all the rest, and I saw Danny start out not being able to do the hair very well.”

She helped Dannylee finetune her look, making suggestions about hair, nails and clothes.

“I watched Danny go from just trying to present herself as a female to now looking like a polished, accomplished woman. It’s like watching a flower bloom.”

Mrs. Hoop, who got to know Dannylee during one of the lowest and most painful periods of her life, also grew to admire her strength of character and perseverance.

“When I met Danny, Danny was really down … had just gotten fired … and was very destitute, and I felt sorry for Danny,” she says. “Danny’s been through the worse and for Danny to come out of it like this, it’s amazing. Danny’s a survivor. Most people would have thrown in the towel.”

She last saw Dannylee in June over lunch.

“Danny looks great, very happy, probably prettier than most women I know, and I’m married,” Mrs. Hoop said with a little chuckle. “Danny’s features and the femininity is obviously something that Danny was born with.”

Dannylee Mitchell is an attractive woman.

She stands about 5-foot-6 in her stockinged feet.

At 127 pounds, she’s a perfect size 6 and cuts a trim and striking figure whether wearing a deep plum business suit or a pleated, herringbone-patterned miniskirt, revealing shapely legs.

Though, sometimes, she seems just a little unsteady and a tad clunky in heels, not unlike a teenage girl who is still getting used to them.

She routinely turns heads.

“Pretty,” a man passing by yelled out to her one day in June as she sat outside the Washington County courthouse posing for pictures with her cat-sized dog, Billie, a half Pomeranian-half Yorkie. She wore a sweater set and a long crepe skirt in a dusty olive green with roses along with her signature silver hoop earrings, gold bracelets and necklace.

“I got a ‘Pretty”, ” she smiled.

Altered states

Dannylee landed a job in the Collections Department of an area financial institution in November 2005 and enjoyed her work there, but felt she needed to change her life. So, she quit her job at the end of June and in July, ended a 11/2-year relationship with the man with whom she’d been living.

“Part of me thought I could make it work,” she said. “But he would be miserable in the end.”

So, without even telling her family, she left town and embarked upon a new life.

Today, she’s living in Colorado, working for an insurance company and waiting to see what happens with the lawsuit.

She’s been four-wheeling in the mountains near Denver, enjoying the thin air and the Spanish Peaks. She also has found love with another transgender woman who understands a lot of what she has been through. No hiding or explaining is necessary, Dannylee says. She feels safe, secure and can just be herself.

“Life’s normal. I can breathe,” she says. “It’s easier for me and I’m 100 percent.”

The search for a real identity could be a difficult road. Everyone goes through it ”while some may have been lost along the way” others find their ways to gain the freedom to be themselves.

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2007/6/27/lifefocus/18129054&sec\

A transsexual takes readers through a sex change operation that opened up a whole new world for her.

FOR the longest time of my life, I was always afraid of being found out for who I really am. Back in the 1970s, the status quo of gays and transsexuals was somehow linked to the notion of mental instability, and that was how I started to think I had an abnormality while I was growing up.

During my developmental years, I tried to escape the identity crisis that was haunting me but I could not let go of the duality in my life – male in outward appearance but a female inside. The answers that I got from the adults were usually very vague or the conclusion was always the same. They told me it was only a phase that would eventually pass, and I believed them.

But as the years passed, I remained the same, so I resorted to praying as faithfully as I could always asking the same question: Why am I this way? Denial became part of my ritual as I tried to fit into society. I almost gave up on myself.

Then another avenue opened up for me when I took on the job of a lecturer in a private establishment. I was among young people who were searching for their identity – very much like what I was doing when I was their age.

It was at this time that I began to understand that everyone goes through a series of identity crisis in the process of growing up. The only problem is, once we find out who we are, would we be able to accept ourselves without discrimination?

So as I spent my days nurturing the young, they gave me the insight that enabled me to embrace my true nature without reservations. The battle within was the hardest to fight but the courage I found from the people around me, and the books I read, inspired me to be the best that I can be.

After struggling for a few more years and trying to block everything out, I finally came full circle and realized there was no running away from myself.

By 2002 I was tired of scampering around and beguiling myself with false pretensions. Once and for all I decided to take the first step to set my life straight with corrective surgery. I started by calling up the NGOs, hoping for guidance, but I hit another low point in my life when they said they couldn’t help me.

Fortunately, the internet helped me locate a hospital (aesthetic institute, as it is called) in a neighbouring country. After spending half my life in abnegation, I was now prepared to make a final commitment.

My previous sessions with a local psychiatrist and a gynaecologist helped me in acquiring proper documentation for the gender reassignment surgery. I did more research on the surgeon and wrote to his past patients to get a better understanding of what to expect. His reputation surpassed all others, and he was highly recommended and respected in the medical field.

When I arrived at his office, the surgeon gave me a little introduction to the procedure, complete with pictures. I felt weak at the knees just looking at the pictures, but he was brief and thorough. Technicalities aside, the surgery basically involves a penile skin inversion technique to create a labia major and minor, a clitoris and a neovagina. The entire surgery would take about three to four hours.

Breast augmentation could be done under two hours. The preferred implant is the silicone shell with either silicone gel or saline filling. Since I was not exactly in the pink of health, I opted to have both surgery in two sessions, with a six-month break in between.

The most amazing thing about the surgery was the efficiency and professionalism of it all. I woke up feeling as though it was a dream. The only certainty was the bandage between my legs. All the years of worry and fear were suddenly over in a matter of hours.

The only pain that bothered me after the surgery was the sharp electrical spasm that stung like an insect bite. Other than that, I had to sit sideways for a few months until the swelling went down.

What was more important was the aftercare of douching (cleaning with Betadine solution) and dilating (to maintain the depth and width with a dilator) to keep the vagina from scar contracture. This post-operative care can take from a few months to years, depending on the patient’s recovery rate.

My worst experience of the surgery was the swollen stump at the opening of the shortened urethra that prevented me from passing urine. I was kept on the urinary catheter for a longer period than usual.

In the two weeks that I spent at the hospital, I met some wonderful people who were going through similar reconstructive surgery. Everyone of us shared the unspoken joy we had been bottling inside. For once in my life, I felt like I was not alone.

Although my second surgery was less complicated and took a shorter time, my arms ached terribly due to the incisions under the armpits.

My one-week stay this time wasn’t sufficient for me to recover. I took another two weeks to get back on my feet.

During the six-month break between the two surgeries, I took the time to confide in my family and friends about what I had gone through. This was also to prepare them for the transformation which I was anticipating.

In truth, I couldn’t say that I was much of a man to begin with because emotionally I had never felt that way about myself. It would be misleading to claim my physicality for the sake of categorization.

Every parent is afraid of what his children might turn out to be. But if children are not given a chance to be who they really are, they may have a hard and bitter life ahead.

Ironically, just as I found my true identity, the law in Malaysia refuses to accept it. So for what it’s worth, with or without legal recognition, I am still glad that I have become the woman that I am.