The Secret Anguish of Gender Limbo

Sally Zee has the kind of striking good looks that, as my daddy used to say, can make an Eskimo sweat. Tall and willowy with long blond hair and large blue eyes, she presents herself with a model’s grace and the husky voice of a French chanteuse. But don’t get yourself too worked up, mate. Sally Zee is a man.

I had to tell myself that several times as we talked in her small North Hollywood apartment. Here, as far as I was concerned, was a woman. And there, as far as she was concerned, was a woman. But, and I say it again, she’s a man.

This is more than a cross-dressing extrovert looking for a little attention. Already on a combination of drugs that are altering her appearance, Sally will journey in a few months to Portland, where surgery will complete the transition from male to female, and the woman screaming within her will, at last, emerge.

Sally Zee isn’t her real name, but she prefers that her identity remain secret. She’s a professional with a doctorate in computer science who has known for all of her 38 years that God had given her the wrong body. But like others in a similar situation, she played the game that her father and society demanded.

She married as a man, sired two sons and remained a husband and father for 12 years. But the anguish of delusion was too great, the emotional pain too severe.

“I had tried being a boy and man for 30 years,” she said, curled up in a corner of the couch, managing to appear both sad and appealing. “But I couldn’t face it anymore. It was either change or suicide.”

Iheard of Sally from a reader and asked if I could tell her story as a way of presenting those who endure a secret anguish. What we don’t understand, we tend to mock. Hatreds fester in the ignorance that separates us from those who, in a way, are the strangers among us.

The man I refer to as a woman, who thinks of herself as “totally woman,” falls into that category.

She knew in infancy, Sally says, that she was female. Her best friend was a girl, and Sally cried herself to sleep because she didn’t look like her. But her father, an ex-Navy helicopter pilot, wouldn’t tolerate a boy doing “girl things,” and Sally made the conscious decision to be a boy.

“I thought I could live that way,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I thought I had made a permanent choice. I got married and managed to live--no, to survive. But there was so much turmoil....”

She would dream over and over that she was a woman and awaken confused and disoriented. “When I dreamed, I would wake up almost instantly. I was in such denial. I ended up for years sleeping only two hours a night.”

In 1997, after 12 years of clinical depression, Sally decided that she wasn’t going to pretend anymore. Already separated from her wife, she filed for divorce. Then she had to tell her parents. Up until then, she had never discussed her torment. On the day she broke the news that she was going to have a sex-change operation, her father turned away and hasn’t spoken to her since. Her mother, who lives in Louisiana, accepted her daughter’s decision. They keep in touch through e-mail.

“My therapist kept trying to make me a man,” Sally says, gesturing at the futility. She wears tight jeans and a mauve sweater. Hormone treatments have created a small bust line.

“Then one afternoon, after a bad day, I walked in shoeless and crying and said, ‘You’ve got to find me a new therapist.’” He did.

It was an essential move on the road to sex-change surgery. A therapist’s referral is necessary for the operation. Once that was obtained, Sally began interviewing potential surgeons, deciding on one in Portland. The procedure, which can take as long as eight hours, is scheduled for July. It will all end up costing about $50,000.

The hard part was telling her two sons, ages 12 and 14, what she was planning. “They were shocked and disbelieving,” Sally says, uncomfortable with the memory. “I had them in therapy for a while. They’re normal, beautiful boys, and I wanted them to understand. Now they laugh and say, ‘Dad, you’re so weird.’”

At first hesitant, she feels comfortable now in her new role, including the use of women’s bathrooms. “Can you imagine,” she asks, laughing, “what the reaction would be if I walked into a men’s room looking like this?”

Contentment has been a long time coming for this bright and troubled man-woman, and it’s still not quite there. She thinks of her male genitalia as a strange appendage. She cries whenever she mentions her male name, the person she used to be.

One wonders at the travail of those living in gender limbo. Sally knows of many who are like her but can’t afford the surgery that would free them. I can’t imagine the anguish they must endure in silence. But I hope, with the help of Sally Zee, this sheds a little light on those strangers among us who must endure in silence the mistake that nature made at the beginning.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Send e-mail to al.martinez@latimes.com