(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.”
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