change for the worse?

There was a moving interview on the radio yesterday evening. A nurse in her seventies was telling the story of her life.

For more than fifty years she lived according to her birth gender as male, feeling from early childhood that she was really a girl, but toughing it out through life as a soldier and a farmer, marrying and fathering two children.

At around 55 the marriage failed, and the interviewee decided there was still time to become a woman and enjoy a good life before the onset of old age, and was referred to a specialist for advice.

The advice of course was that such a transition should be made slowly, with two years initially just dressing as a woman, before any treatment could be started. And that that treatment would take another three years to complete.

This seemed out of the question for someone already in their mid fifties, keen to start a new life, and a private clinic was approached.

This surgeon had no scruples about scheduling surgery in a matter of weeks, and the woman she had always wanted to be stepped out into the world shortly afterwards.

She has found great companionship and pleasure in nursing, and has had at least one good relationship with a man, but she told us that none of her previous friends and family could accept her new life, and that everyone she used to know had turned away from her, including both her children.

Despite this, I felt sure she would be so relieved, so contented to be at last in her own body, that she would be prepared to discount the loss of such small-minded people from her past.

But the interview closed with the question I think maybe it always does: Knowing what you know now, do you think you made the right choice?

And this time the interviewee answered: No, I don't think I did.

Which just seems so heartbreakingly sad.