3 Trans Stories

Three courageous ‘girls’ talk sexual ambiguity with Lin Sampson.

In 1991, Chrissy was a young soldier in the South African army. She looked like any other male soldier. Yet, in her mind, she was a girl. Now she is a sculpted, supermodel beauty, pale blonde, with long limbs and a graceful walk. She is 34 but looks 10 years younger. Her manner is cautious, but the story she tells is one of certainty.

“My earliest recollection was from when I was about three. I remember wanting to be a girl. I was a small, desperately lost little soul. When I was 12, I started stealing my mother’s menopause hormones. Just a couple of hours of my voice being lighter made me joyous.”

At school she was bullied, and life was such hell that it crossed her mind to try to perform a sex-change operation on herself.

“In those days I was suicidally confused. I knew I wasn’t gay. I knew I wasn’t a freak, but because there was so little information around, I didn’t know what I was. In 1998 I went to a psychologist. This is where I learnt about my true condition, and began the rocky road to transition.”

Before her lay many tumbles, but she knew that if she didn’t become a woman she would fall into fits of depression and she even believed she would die of misery. She says she only got through because of her sense of humour.

“I had my gender-change operation when I was 32, but I started living as a woman when I was 27. The reason I didn’t start sooner was because there wasn’t as much information available then,” explains Chrissy.

There was also the permanence of the action to be taken into account. She was about to embark on something that would irrevocably alter her external nature in a manner that would be difficult to reverse. “I kept thinking what am I going to look like at the end of the day? I was a very masculine guy, big male, 1.8m tall. I loved cars. I might look dreadful.”

But she took the plunge and faced up to prejudice. “I even had a death threat. I am still in the military, and I work in a unit where I am familiar to them. But if I go to another where the people used to know me as a man, they might treat me as a bit of a freak show. There was a ‘do’ a few months ago with guys I used to know 15 years ago and they made a few jokes. One of them told me they had taken a bet that I was wearing a pink G-string. I know how men think about women. I know the lack of respect they treat them with,” she says.

The operations were expensive but, with the help of friends and her mother, Chrissy had her first op, the orchidectomy, in 2004. “That was what you take your dog to the vet for — I literally got ‘fixed’.”

Castration was only the first step. The second operation was the SRS (Sex Reassignment Surgery), and then, finally, the labiaplasty. “But,” says Chrissy, “this was only the beginning. I then had to start living as a woman and I had to learn so many things.

“It is important to finesse your look and I did exhaustive research. I didn’t want to end up looking like a drag queen.”

She says that ever since she had the operation her life has been just as she always wanted it to be.

Monique is a striking man in the process of becoming a woman. She has a buoyancy and flourish of confidence that is both courageous and encouraging. It is this straight-talking, outgoing personality that has eased the transition process.

You just can’t help loving Monique for her raw honesty.

She has lived as a woman for two years but, as yet, has had no operations, although for a while she did take hormones, which she has now given up.

“Oestrogen,” she says, “allowed me to concentrate (and produced two very perky breasts) but it also made me edgy. I feel calmer now. ”

She works in photography and today is wearing a tasteful décolleté top and is secure enough to wear a trousersuit.

“The thing with most trannies is that they try to be too feminine, they go over the top.”

Monique looks like a woman, but when she gets up each morning and looks in the mirror, she sees a man. She pulls back the hair from her forehead to reveal the gentle rise of bones above the eyes and the M-shaped hairline that are male characteristics. She has learnt how to adopt female expressions, to talk and walk like one. “I can fool some people but I know some people read me.” She rubs her chin in the manner of a man and says “I need to shave twice a day.”

Once she had to learn to be blokish, sitting with her legs apart, downing a beer. Now the process is reversed.

Monique was brought up in Fish Hoek with three younger brothers. “They said, ‘We always thought of you as our older brother.’ Then one day I said, ‘I am not your older brother, I am your older sister.’ Today, if anyone criticises their ‘older sister’ they’ll know all about it.”

When Monique left school she became an electrician and started working on building sites. “I had started taking hormones and had grown breasts, but I also had a beard. It wasn’t long before people began whispering. Then my boss called me in and I told him the whole story. He was a very straight guy, a Christian and he just didn’t know what to make of it. He said, ‘You know, we just can’t have this on a building site. These guys just won’t take orders from you.’” However, she did stay on working for him and people just began accepting her, but she was still not dressing entirely as a woman.

She took a small flat and would spend most of her time lying around dressed as a woman. “I remember the first time I went out as a woman. My stomach was full of butterflies, and all I was doing was going to a shopping mall.

“Then I woke up one morning and thought, ‘Enough of this! From today I am going to be a woman — I am sick of living with the background noise of not being what I feel I am!’ I felt much of my true personality was left zipped up on the hard drive of my mind because it just didn’t match my face. At first, I couldn’t decide what to call myself. I needed something starting with an M. I hit on ‘Monique’.

“I put on a blue pantsuit and flat shoes and caught a bus to work. Some people did a sort of double take. Is that Michael?”

Although Monique has an outgoing, easy personality, which has helped, there have been times when she has felt very lonely. “As a man I was good- looking and girls would come on to me and I liked girls. Now I just don’t quite know where my sexuality lies. For the two years I have been living as a woman I have had no close sexual relationships. I am still sort of finding myself. I am not in a hurry for the operation. It will come when it comes, but for the moment I am just so happy being Monique. Part of me is still Michael. After all, I lived with him for 28 years. Some transexuals simply forget about their previous being, but I will always acknowledge Michael.”

Although Monique’s stance in life is composed of an unyielding willpower, beneath her larger-than-life presence one can detect wounds and scars that veil the hidden secrets, the fugitive escapades and demented dressing, the struggle to be accepted, the false bravado — but she lacks bitterness and self-pity. “I mean, after all,” she says, “a girl can only take so much.”

I was unable to find reliable statistics, but there are fewer transmales, males to females (M2F) than females to males (F2M).

I talked to Matt, 38 years old, who has been living as a man for nine years. He was born a female but always felt male. “I can remember — as early as three — saying my nightly prayers on my knees and praying that I would wake up as a boy the next morning.”

But it wasn’t until he was 30 that he had the courage to face it head-on. “I had a double mastectomy and that was the best thing that ever happened to me. The hormones are a bit trickier. I have a shot once a week, which is quite terrifying because I am afraid of needles. I was boyish most of my life. I refused to wear panties, my mom had to buy me underpants. I had to pretend that I was interested in girls’ things, just to have a circle of friends. The girls in my class called me ‘lesbian’ or ‘freak’.”

More operations lie ahead for Matt. He still has to have a hysterectomy and penis reconstruction, a trickier option. “Testosterone makes you sexually active,” he explains. “The problem with having the operation is that you can lose this unless it is performed by someone very good. The only surgeon who can do this and guarantee you an orgasm afterwards costs half a million rand.” For Matt, who is unemployed at the moment, this is a far-off dream.

His biggest problem is getting his ID document changed. Even opening a bank account is a mission. “I have been for six or seven interviews in the past month and everything goes well until I have to show my ID, then the wheels come off.” However, according to current law, people in gender transition can have ID books recognising their new gender.

“Right now I am probably the most normal I have ever been. I have a girl who has accepted me and my family has always been very supportive,” he says.

The whole transgender subject has been obscured by misapprehension, superstition and fear of the unknown. The difference between transvestites, drag queens and transgenders is muddy. It is possible to dress, behave and even think like a woman — as many transvestites do both in public and in private — without in fact being a transgender.

Tracy, 38, is a man who likes to dress as a woman, but has still not decided where s/he fits in on the gender spectrum. S/he has been wearing woman’s clothes alone at home, mostly as an erotic turn-on. “When I was growing up, I stole my sister’s clothes. She could never work out why they were missing until one day she caught me in her latest dress. Funny now, but just horrible then. I am deeply attracted to the female form. But I also want it as my own form. And then to complicate it further I also want to complement my female form with a male form — but I am not emotionally attracted to men.”

Transgenders need great courage and determination to withstand the pressures that are involved. Many find their condition distressing, but so inescapable, that they will do anything to follow their dream.

The good news is that we live in “Generation Gender” and the ambiguities are better tolerated. Sophisticated medical techniques now offer feminising facial surgery and trachea shaves to lower the voice. The bad news is that there is a proliferation of porn sites involving she-men.

“You won’t believe how many straight men come onto me,” says Chrissy. “It is every man’s dream”

And prejudice still stalks. Chrissy believes that this is because gender is something that people take for granted. “When they are presented with something like a transgender person, they simply don’t have a frame of reference.”

There is one fact that shines through the fog, and that is if you feel you are trapped in the wrong body, you will do anything — take out huge bonds, abandon a family, even take to crime — to remedy the situation.

As the transwoman in the movie Another Woman said after her operation: “I felt I had been delivered.”