Calkins: Transgender golfer is women's world long-drive champ

[Butterfly]

Calkins: Transgender golfer is women's world long-drive champ
PE.com
10:39 PM PST on Wednesday, December 31, 2008
By MATT CALKINS
The Press-Enterprise


http://www.pe.com/sports/golf/stories/PE_Sports_Local_S_calkins_01.4310002.html


PALM SPRINGS - The gun was loaded. The note was written. The table was set for the Riverside man to end his 50-year life.

All that stopped him from going through with it was his desire for Lana to live.

Lana, by the way, was not a family member. She wasn't a friend or colleague, either. In fact, Lana didn't even have so much as a birth certificate.

But after a legal name change, a year of therapy and a sex-change operation, Lana Lawless is now as healthy, vivacious and ... alive as a woman can be.

"Once I started the process, I felt free," said Lawless, a 55-year-old post-op transgender who won't reveal her former identity because "that person no longer exists."