Chaz's changes

By Joey DiGuglielmo on May 19, 2011

http://www.washingtonblade.com/2011/05/19/chaz%E2%80%99s-changes/

Forget about gender identity, how he felt looking in the mirror all those years, navigating the thorny overlap of sexual orientation, the surgery and all that for a minute — for Chaz Bono, the sheer physiological aspects of being a woman wreaked decades of pain on him.

In the new memoir "Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man" (see review on page 48), Bono writes of "periods that were painful to the point of being debilitating" and regularly not being able to get out of bed. Menstrual pain, of course, is no picnic for anyone, but for Bono, there was precancerous cell growth on the cervix, endometrial cysts on the ovaries and, in his late 20s, a cyst in the uterus.