MY HEALTH EXPERIENCE/SARA-JANE CROMWELL:Sara-Jane was diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder
FOR THE first time in my life, I feel completely at home with myself physically. I’m 49 but I was only diagnosed with gender identity disorder (GID) in 2003. It’s a clinical condition but even trying to get a diagnosis was absolutely horrendous.
I went online and saw words such as “transgender” and “transsexual”. It wasn’t long before I was going into seedy places on the internet. But I knew that what I read wasn’t representative of me or of most of the people I know with the condition.
I went to see a clinical psychologist because I wanted an honest assessment of where I was coming from. I knew for certain that it wasn’t a sexual thing with me.
I told the psychologist that in my heart, I felt as if I was a woman. I had to go through several assessments and, at the end, he diagnosed me with GID and I also got a second opinion. The third confirmation of my condition was fantastic because it was used as the basis for my marriage annulment.
GID gets more pronounced as you get older. In my adult life, it just became completely intolerable. Despite my best efforts to hide my feminine traits, people noticed more and more that something wasn’t right. A lot of people assumed I was gay which I found horrendous.
I always knew I was growing up wrong. My family could testify to the fact that when I was very young, there was something very effeminate and girly about me.
Puberty was a very distinctive time for me because I had an expectation that I would start to grow the body of a girl. I expected to grow breasts and I actually thought that a certain part of my body would fall off, eventually. I just knew I had this thing that wasn’t supposed to be there.
When I discovered that girls were having periods, I used to wonder why I wasn’t getting them. I became increasingly distressed.
I survived six suicide attempts. There was another complication – I was abused physically and psychologically growing up so I was trying to cope with all that on top of feeling like a freak. It’s only recently that I started to get closure on the abuse and really started to believe in myself.
I started hormone treatment in 2004 through Loughlinstown Hospital. It wasn’t a big decision for me, but I had to go through a whole range of tests because there can be very serious medical complications. That’s one of the reasons I wrote my book, Wrong Body, Wrong Life. There’s a lot of people out there self-medicating with hormone tablets.
I went through all the proper procedures. I went on the lowest dosage of hormone tablets, but here’s the thing – within about six months, I was at the normal stage of female hormones. After a year and a half on tablets, I started to take injections, but I’ve had to stop because I can’t afford the medication at the moment. I was taking oestrogen and anti-androgen tablets which kill the testosterone. It didn’t take long to do that.
I’ve been doing a lot of awareness raising about GID over the past three years. That and the lack of money have stalled my progress. I should have had surgery at least three years ago, but I had to put it on hold. You really need to be in a good place to have that kind of surgery. For me, it’s the last step.
I’ve had physical changes. I have breasts and soft skin and my voice has always been soft. I have no Adam’s apple. In fact, I never had one.
Now that I’ve done my book, I have fulfilled my promise to myself and I’m going to start getting on with my life and start working my way towards surgery. I’ve had surgery described to me and I’ve seen it on television. It doesn’t hold any fear for me whatsoever.
I know it’s very painful but you get painkillers. You have to be physically very strong to undergo the surgery. I’m in great health at the moment and I’ll be checked out again before it happens. You need to be in a good place, mentally, as well.
I live a normal life like everyone else. When I started this journey, I was seriously overweight at size 26. I’m a size 12-14 now. Losing the weight had a lot to do with my mindset.
I won’t have periods as I’m beyond that age. I actually went through a process of grieving over that. As awful as periods can be, I never got a chance to have mine. It’s a huge loss to me. I’d love to have had children. That’s another loss. I had to let go of those things. I know other girls who’ve gone through the same as me and they’re still very angry and bitter. Even post-surgery, there’s a huge amount of anger out there. People do feel lost.
The whole thing has made me stronger. My psychiatric reports show that I have a completely clean bill of health in every respect. I was depressed, but not clinically depressed. People confuse clinical depression with life situation depression.
I’m discovering every day the kind of woman I am meant to be: tall, charming, elegant and intelligent. I just want to be a woman who loves life and to be able to cope with the normal stresses of everyday life.
At this stage of my life, I have no regrets. That’s a complete waste of energy. It’s far better to use my energy to create a new life for myself.
At about four years of age, I wondered why I was different and why it wasn’t okay for me to cry or to want to play with my sisters. I wondered why people were treating me as a boy. Now I have come full circle.
In conversation with Colette Sheridan
Wrong Body, Wrong Life is published by MetaCom Publishing (€ 14.99), with 20 per cent of the proceeds going to the charity organisation, Gender Identity Disorder Ireland (GIDI)
