Commentary: Chastity, 'Good luck, brother!'
updated 5:04 p.m. EDT, Fri June 12, 2009
By Jamison Green
Special to CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/06/12/chastity.bono/index.html?iref=newssearchJamison Green is an educator, adviser and advocate on transgender issues, and the author of "Becoming a Visible Man" (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004).
Jamison Green transitioned from female to male just before his 40th birthday.
Welcome, Chaz!
Before the word "transsexual" had been coined in English, an intrepid young person whose family belonged to the British nobility set out to transform herself from female to male. He received a medical school education, obtained hormones -- relatively new substances that were poorly understood at the time, and independently began living as a man in the early 1940s.
Eventually, he found a plastic surgeon to help him, and his physical changes were complete by 1949, but his family rejected him. The British tabloids hounded him. To escape publicity, he was forced to carve out a life for himself virtually alone. He became a Buddhist monk, and died in Tibet in 1962 at the age of 47.
