dont cut my testicles 

The Kindest testicles Cut

One woman's journey through sexual reassignment surgery

The journey from male to female was a difficult one for Trista Taulu, Emporia senior, as it is for the other 40,000 transgendered people in the United States who have undergone sexual reassignment surgery.

By Mark Vierthaler Monday, December 4, 2006 found at kansan.com

Trista Taulu studies the feminine image she sees reflected in the mirror of her hotel room in Thailand, the hazel eyes and the waist-length hair. For most of her life, she felt like a woman. For three years, she’s lived as a woman, dressed as a woman, looked like a woman.

During this sleepless night four years ago, 9,000 miles from home, she still occupies the body of a man. But by the next afternoon, her penis and testicles will be gone, transformed through sexual reassignment surgery to a functional vagina.

For Taulu, 28, a KU senior from Emporia and one of the 40,000 transgendered people in the United States who have undergone sexual reassignment surgery, the journey from male to female featured difficult stops along the way: donning dresses as a boy in Gurnee, Ill.; fueling her mother’s ire by cross-dressing as a teenager in Emporia; being taunted and spit upon by high school classmates; suffering beatings in the barracks while serving the National Guard before being discharged after showing up for drill in a white dress; and at her lowest point, slashing her wrists in her apartment bathtub. Ironically, only two years after those cuts healed, she says a surgeon’s scalpel made the cuts that, for the first time, made her body match the woman inside.

1984

Trista is a six year old in Gurnee, Ill. She’s not Trista quite yet, but rather Tom. As a little boy, she continually sneaks across the street to play with a neighbor’s little girl. The two play dress up, each of them pretending to be fashion models and beauty queens. Gazing raptly at her own reflection, Trista marvels at how beautiful she is in dresses and costume jewelry. A shout from behind startles her. She turns to see her mother standing there, apoplectic with rage.

Trista is dragged home in tears, wondering what she was doing that was so wrong.

“As I child I wanted to do two things,” Trista says. “I either wanted to build circuit boards or be a showgirl.”

Trista’s grandmother saw nothing wrong with her grandson’s interest in women’s clothing and bought a dress for not-quite Trista. This behavior drove a wedge between Trista’s mother and her grandma.

Her uncle, John Thomas, remembered her then as a shy little boy with a shock of red hair who tended to get picked on at school.

“There are times you wonder if there was ever a defining moment in childhood,” Thomas said. “But she really was just an unassuming little kid.”

Still, what that little kid wondered was why she was built like a he.

“I remember I felt like I was a girl with a growth between my legs,” Trista said, “A really, really disgusting growth.”

Trista said she never experienced the stereotypical “trapped in a man’s body” feeling. Rather, she looked at her body and “just knew” something along the way had gone drastically wrong.

1994

Trista is a junior at Emporia High School. Little has changed from her conflicts as a child. In her mother’s mind, Trista is defying traditional Christian beliefs. She’s still dressing as a woman and it’s getting harder to hide from the public. By this point, quarrels within the family occur almost daily and rumors have begun to seep into the town that there’s something wrong with “that Taulu kid.” Classmates brand her as a freak.

By the time she was 14, Trista realized her female personality was innate, beyond her control. It wasn’t just the unending desire to look that way. She felt like a girl every step of the way. She hated her penis and loathed the fact that her body resembled a young man. She regarded herself as a modern-day Quasimodo whose ugly body contradicted her inner beautiful self.

A lean teenager, Trista walked the halls of Emporia High School, as she heard the whispers behind her back.

“They picked up on something,” she said. “It would have been suicide to be an admitted transgender. I kept to myself. I didn’t tell anyone. But still, it’s a small town and people talk.”

She recalls hearing a quick snort and a sudden splash of warm spittle on the back of her neck as she passes a group of boys. She reacts by becoming a 16-year-old hermit.

Trista is no stranger to the random elbow in the hallway at school or the quick kick in the back of her legs. But things are about to get worse.

One afternoon, she stays late at school in an effort to escape from the tempest in her personal life.

As she’s walking home, three boys from school see her and block her path. One screws up his face in disgust. The other two leer at her and shove her back as she attempts to get by.

The three have Trista surrounded and she’s pinballed back and forth. A quick jab to the nose, she hears a pop and a rivulet of blood streams down her face. An arching swing from a heavy book bag connects and she can feel something rupture in her lower back.

As she lies on the ground, the three continue to kick her ribs, each shot of pain punctuated with shouts of “Faggot.”

For 30 minutes, she lies in a pool of her own blood, squinting at the sun until a friend happened by and rushed her to the emergency room. She was released from the hospital several days later. By signing the release papers “Trista,” she took her first public step toward being a woman.

That same year, she finally learns she wasn’t quite so isolated when her mother signed up for Internet service for the home computer. For the first time, she was connected to a transgendered community.

“If you’re gay, lesbian, transgender or whatever in a small town, there’s nothing,” Trista said. “But I learned I wasn’t alone. There were other people just like me.”

After graduating from high school, Trista led a nomadic life, moving around Kansas until she eventually joined the National Guard and is stationed at Fort Riley.

1995

It’s basic training and Trista’s in close quarters with her fellow soldiers who don’t know what to make of Tom. Much like high school, it leaks out that she’s different. The assumption is that she’s gay.

One night during basic training, she said she was treated to a barrack’s “blanket party.” Her fellow soldiers surround her bunk and throw a blanket over her head. One by one, within the claustrophobic confines of the blanket, she felt soap bars wrapped in socks thud against her chest, legs and whatever she couldn’t defend. It was a scene straight out of the movie “Full Metal Jacket,” she recalled.

Four years later, she began what she called “self-detonation.” She was late for drill and showed up wearing a white dress. She was quickly ushered away from her troop and put on sick leave. Several weeks later, word came down from the top: she had been given an honorable discharge. It’s 1999 and her breakdown was beginning.

1999

One night not long after her discharge, she finds herself in the bathtub with her wrists slit. She still can’t remember what happened in the three days before that. She slowly bleeds out, reliving blurry memories of phone calls, arguments and disconnections. Through her tears she sees her roommate’s wife enter the bathroom.

“I honestly owe her my life,” Trista says. “If it weren’t for her I wouldn’t be standing here.”

2000

Trista began working at Detroit Diesel Works in Emporia and started saving money for her surgery. By 2002, she had close to $35,000 in her bank account specifically for her surgery.

Tensions at work were high whenever Trista attempted to be her true self. When her employer urged her to dress nicer for her job, she arrived in dresses. Her job was in constant jeopardy. Kansas has no laws protecting gays or transgenders. She wasn’t speaking with her family.

One night she and two friends spent nearly 24 hours surfing the web, drinking, researching transgenderism, sexual reassignment surgery and seeking answers for her psychological make-up. In the past, psychological tests her mother had her take revealed her to be a heterosexual woman.

David Holmes, KU professor of psychology, said many scientists believe that the main reason for transgenderism is exposure to cross-hormones while the fetus is in the womb. This can lead to male genitalia with the mental and chemical make-up of a female, or vice-versa.

Trista learned how the current surgeries work and how they’ve developed from crude castrations among ancient North American tribes to the advanced procedures used today. While the procedure in the 1950s meant psychological relief for the patient, it was at the sacrifice of a sex life. By completely removing the penis and testicles, doctors eliminated close to all of the genital tissue. The vagina produced by a skin-graft procedure meant no sensation.

She learned that the modern procedure requires patients to begin taking female hormones and living as a woman at least one year prior to the surgery.

With the help of her friends, she found the doctor she wanted to use. Everyone seemed to love his bedside manner. He was compassionate and friendly, people said. The problem: He works out of Phuket, Thailand.

She began her hormone treatments, contacted Dr. Sanguan Kunaporn and began to plan her trip.

2002

Using built-up sick and vacation days, Trista took her leave of work and boarded a plane to Phuket. She made an announcement to her family before her flight and Thomas, her uncle, said the family was split down the middle. But at least Trista’s mother was speaking with her again.

“Some of them called her an abomination to God,” Thomas recalled. “The rest of us were naturally uncomfortable. But we made an active decision to try and get over it and stand by her.”

The night before surgery, Trista’s wired. She can’t sleep. All she can do is pace around her hotel room waiting for morning. She’s alone in a foreign country, but this is something she says she has to do alone.

The next morning, she’s sitting in the crowded waiting room of Kunaporn’s clinic in downtown Phuket. She trades stories and nervous jokes with other patients. It is a rare opportunity to be with people who are going through the same thing she is. She’s so enthusiastic about the procedure that when they bring her into the prep room she asks the nurses to do the surgery without anesthetic. They politely deny her request.

“I still remember her personality even though I cannot recall her face,” Kunaporn says from his clinic in Thailand. “She was quite a fireball.”

They put her under around 10 a.m. Kunaporn begins by making an incision along Trista’s scrotum, removing the testicles and severing the spermatic cords. The base of her penis is sliced upwards along the bottom side of the shaft. Kunaporn fashions a vaginal canal and clitoris from the remaining skin and genital tissue from her penis and scrotum.

Halfway through the surgery, Trista was awakened. Although the anesthetic was still working and she could not feel below her waist, she got to witness part of her surgery as she requested. With a curious eye she regarded the methodical recession of tissue into her abdominal cavity. A urethra opening was created before her very eyes and the vaginal cavity was formed with a stent. She drifted back off into the fog of semi-consciousness as breast implants were placed in her chest.

Only four hours later, she was fully conscious and eating lunch, despite the doctor’s suggestion that she wait a few hours. Two days later, she was released from the hospital. Trista couldn’t quite place the feeling she had right then. All she knew was that despite soreness from the surgery, it was the best she’d felt since she was little. The plane back to the United States had a brand new person coming home — a woman.

2002 – Present

When she returned, Trista was called into the administrator’s office at work and told she was being let go. No reason was given and when she attempted to pursue legal action, her attorney informed her that Kansas law doesn’t provide any recourse.

She enrolled at the University of Kansas as an economics major in 2003, quickly excelled at her major and began to teach herself Spanish and Greek. She will graduate in May 2007.

She speaks to her mother several times a month. Although it’s still a tense relationship, Trista says it’s nice to be able to speak with her mother.

“We meet, we scream, we cry, we hug,” Trista says, laughing. “Then we repeat.”

Since her surgery, she’s spoken with her father only three times in four years. These three phone calls are milestones nonetheless, she says.

“I’m proud of him that he’s gotten to the point he can speak with me again,” Trista says. “My stepbrother tells me he still doesn’t refer to me by name, new or old.”

Emporia resident Tony Wagner, who has known Trista for 15 years, said Trista is now a completely different person from the on he remembers. In middle school, Wagner recalled she was a quiet but very easygoing boy. When she told him she was a transgender, he remembered with a chuckle that the announcement was cinematic.

The two went for a drive in the pouring rain. Between awkward pauses, Trista eventually choked out she was a woman in men’s clothing. An admittedly sheltered kid, Wagner said it took several weeks to come to terms with his friend’s announcement.

Fifteen years later, Wagner said the shy guy he knew in high school is now a firebrand redheaded woman. She’s outspoken, she’s sociable and she’s gained a confidence Warner had never seen in his old friend, he said.

“In some ways, I’m not surprised she’s been successful,” Wagner said. “From what Trista told me, a lot of transgenders ended their own lives for one reason or another. But there’s been some part of me that always told me she’d pull through.”

Despite her new life, Trista deals with the same day-to-day speed bumps as any other college student. She’s trying to keep up with homework while searching for a job after graduation. She juggles a personal life with homework. Each of the three relationships she’s had since her surgery have ended with the men becoming uncomfortable and leaving her.

“Every time it ends with them not being able to handle my past,” Trista said.

Still, she goes out, flirts and isn’t afraid to pursue men she may be interested in. She’s a woman and there’s nothing that will stop her from living like one.

“I don’t have to be apologetic about who I am,” Trista said. “I went through the whole self-pity thing and I’m past that. I come as I am and whatever people make of me, that’s their problem.’

Kansan staff writer Mark Vierthaler can be contacted at mvierthaler@kansan.com.

— Edited by Jacky Carter

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