Mum's The Word

reprinted with permissiion from the March 22nd 2003 edition of New Idea magazine by Rachael Lloyd

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

Sixteen-year-old Chenji Riley battled to control her emotions when the father she'd always adored confessed that he wanted to have a sex-change. Tears tolled down Chenji's face as her father - a well-built secondary school teacher with a deep voice - held her hand and told her how he'd lived his live in torturous denials because he felt he should have been born a woman.

It's hard to explain just how scary it is to literally lay your life on the line to the people you love and risk losing them forever

"I wasn't aware that Dad had these feel­ings," says Chenji, now twenty-five, who has two younger brothers. "He was always a typical father, doing sports with us, taking us swimming and nagging us to do our homework"

"I was shocked when he told me how he felt and I cried. But I love Dad and I wanted him to be happy."

Chenji's father, who is reluctant to di­vulge his former name, is now Liz Riley, a woman in her late forties living in Sydney's outer suburbs.

Liz is a kind, gentle character who talks eloquently about what she went through in her quest to undergo gender transformation.

She is sharing her story in a bid to give some insight into the psyche of transgender people, and she can be seen on S.B.S. documentary, "Mum's the Word" on Tuesday, 1 April at 8:00pm.

"People make a lot of judgments about transgender people," Liz explains. "We live in a very sexist culture which is dominated by the notion of having kids, getting a mortgage and career, and any­thing outside of that is frowned upon.

"Transgender people are socially isolated and it's very difficult for us to integrate into the wider community."

Liz, who had electrolysis to get rid of her beard, and a full sex-change operation, says there is absolutely no way she would have put herself through the agony of the transgender process if she hadn't felt compelled to do so. Most of all, she was terrified of losing her children.

"It's hard to explain just how scary it is to literally lay your life on the line to the people you love and risk losing them forever," says Liz, who is divorced from Chenji's mother. "I was terrified of los­ing Chenji because we'd always had such a good relationship.

"As I explained my situation to her, I al­most felt detached from myself - like I was watching someone else talk to my daughter. It was a very traumatic thing to do, but I'd reached a point where I just couldn't go on lying to myself and to my family.

"Chenji and I cried a lot and hugged. Chenji handled it beautifully, although she must have felt overwhelmed.

"She said: "I don't know why anyone would want to be a man anyway!" Chenji says the hardest part was losing her father as she knew him.

"It really struck me when I was looking at a photo taken of me and Dad when I was eight," Chenji says. "I felt so sad and thought: "Oh. I'll never see that per­son again."

But it was tougher for Liz's sons to ad­just to losing their male role model.

During a counselling session, one of the boys burst into tears. He confessed that he'd started forgetting what his father was like prior to his sex-change.

"My brothers feel they have lost Dad. To them he's died," explains Chenji, who is four months pregnant with Liz's first grandchild.

"But Liz will always be my father. That's probably hard for her as a woman. Sometimes when I answer the phone, I'll automatically say "Hi Dad!" which probably makes her wince."

However, Chenji, a beauty therapist, doesn't hide her father's unconvention­ality from her friends.

All my friends know and it's not an issue," she says. "Sometimes I'll say to one of my clients in passing: "Oh, I've got to go and do Dad's nails tonight!"

Liz says she felt "different" from her peers almost from birth and secretly wore her mother's clothes when she was just eight.

"Cross-dressing is a very secretive activity," admits Liz, who now has a partner whom she met through the gay press. "I didn't know what my cross-dressing meant when I was a child, but I knew it wasn't acceptable to my parents so I hid it. It was only when I was fourteen and stumbled across the word "transvestite" that I realised I wasn't the only person in the world who was having these feeli­ngs."

Interestingly enough, Liz says she's always been attracted to women.

"I'm a hardcore lesbian!" she quips. She adds: "I did tell my ex-wife (Chenji's mother) that I cross-dressed before we got married. Her reaction was to assume, wrongly, that I was a gay man.

I went through the whole rigmarole of being marched off to psychiatrists. Of course they all reckoned after four sessions they'd cured me!"

When Liz started wearing women's clothes in public, she admits she looked pretty disastrous.

"It was all very haphazard," she smiles. "We [transsexuals] all do it badly at the beginning because we try too hard.

"Someone told me I had good legs once, so I wore miniskirts for a while. Then Chenji came to the rescue and gave me a makeover.

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