.bmp)
.bmp)
For most mothers, their daughter's 16th birthday is marked by such traditions as a party, preparing for a school dance, or maybe even allowing them to go on holiday with their friends for the first time.For Elizabeth Thornton, however, the year brought with it a rather different set of demands.First, she was asked by her daughter Sarah to refer to her as 'Alex'.More recently, she found herself shopping not for a glamorous evening gown, but for a breast restrictor designed to flatten and hide her daughter's breasts.Today, instead of looking forward to moments like her youngest daughter's wedding and the birth of her first child, Elizabeth is contemplating a series of operations that Sarah is determined to put herself through, including a double mastectomy and a hysterectomy. Now aged 17, Sarah is believed to be the youngest person in the country awaiting a female-to-male sex change operation. She has been living as a teenage boy for the past year, and has now been given the go-ahead by her GP and her psychiatrist for the £106,000 procedure.Sarah hopes to have the surgery within the next 12 months. This, she says, is the only way she can hope to live the rest of her life with any degree of sanity or happiness.Her decision has, however, been far from easy for her family. Sarah's elder sister, 21-year-old Vanessa, cannot accept what is happening, and both her parents are candid about their struggle to adapt to the reality that their little girl is desperate to become their son.'When, last November, Sarah told me that she wanted to have a sex change, I nearly choked on the cup of tea I was drinking,' says Elizabeth, 42, a PA who lives in Newcastle with her husband Vincent, an engineer, and their children. 'I honestly thought this was some sort of teenage fantasy, and neither my husband nor I took her seriously at all.'Then, two weeks later, the psychiatrist that Sarah has been seeing for some time, because she has been so depressed, phoned me on her behalf. 'She said that Sarah was distraught that my husband and I weren't listening to her, and that this was no joking matter. I can't even describe how I felt at that moment. I was devastated. Confused and terrified. 'I kept thinking what had I done wrong, and was this all my fault. I'd produced this child as a girl, and now she wanted to be a boy.'All I could think was if you're not happy, change your hair, change your dress sense or, at the most, consider cosmetic surgery. To change something as drastic as your sex - well, it was beyond what I or my husband could understand.'It just felt all wrong, and certainly not the sort of thing that I'd ever thought would happen to an ordinary family like ours.But at the same time, I couldn't imagine being in Sarah's position - of hating yourself every time you look in a mirror. As a mother, I wanted to protect and help my child, and I'd known for a long time that Sarah was desperately unhappy.
'Vincent and I had been struggling for years to understand what was at the root of Sarah's depression, but we had never considered she might actually feel that she was trapped in the wrong body.'She wasn't living her life; she merely existed. She didn't have a job and had very few friends. She was depressed and spent most of her day in bed. If the answer lay in supporting her as she changed sex, well that would be what I, as her mother, had to do.'Certainly, when Elizabeth first held her youngest daughter in her arms, this was not the future she had envisaged.'Vincent and I were overjoyed to have another little girl,' says Elizabeth. 'I remember looking at Sarah's tiny face and feeling full of the highest hopes for her.'It was such a magical moment, and all I wanted to do was protect her from the world and make sure she was happy.'
While a set of family photographs depict an ordinary looking little girl, with an angelic face and long, brown, flowing hair, Elizabeth noted from the outset that Sarah was a tomboy.'From a very young age, Sarah was a very different child to her elder sister,' says Elizabeth. 'She would much rather be outside playing with dinosaur toys or climbing trees than sharing Vanessa's dolls. If I put her in a dress, she used to pull it off and stamp on it.'I would have loved Sarah to wear nice dresses, as she was such a pretty child with lovely hair, but she refused point-blank.But in those days, I used to feel proud of the way she tumbled around, without a care in the world, and was just tomboyish.'But by the time she reached six, Elizabeth realised her daughter's desperation to be a boy set her apart from both her sister and the other girls at her school. She began to insist on being identified as a little boy, and asked her friends to call her 'Lee'.
To read more go to:
PS:this is beyond anything words can express....As in the days of Noah....
