RE: Post-op says she a lesbian , my kind of girl !

Gender Bending
March 2005
Thai surgeons are renowned worldwide for turning men into women. Richard Ehrlich talks to a former soldier who has been reassigned to the ranks of womanhood After a former US Army corporal became a grandfather, he stopped secretly wearing women's clothes, flew to Bangkok for a sex change operation and emerged as a lesbian. “I heard about Bangkok from the Internet. My daughter found it for me,” Sherri Ann Higgins, 56, said in a recorded interview while recovering from surgery in a Bangkok hospital. “The price was reasonable. And what I liked about Bangkok is there was only a one-month waiting list, whereas in the US there is at least eight months to wait to have the change.” Thai doctors are experts at chopping off a male's sex organ and fashioning a vagina. ”It's not until they remove the bandages that you realise it's gone,” Ms. Higgins said, laughing in her modern hospital room. Some 170cm tall and 68 kilos svelte, Ms. Higgins said the operation was not painful and, after a prescription of hormones, she did not need silicone to create breasts. Her story – from birth as Robert James Higgins, a troubled Catholic childhood, marriage and parenting a daughter and becoming a grandfather – illustrates the plight of thousands of people worldwide who feel they were born in the body of the opposite gender. Successfully concealing his confusion, Higgins was drafted and served in the US Army from June 1968 to June 1970, including stints as a corporal and chief engineer in Okinawa. “Some people think it is strange that I was in the service and I'm [now] transgendered.” Unlike some men who lived as gays before becoming women, Ms. Higgins says she has always been aroused exclusively by women. Despite divorcing her wife in June over the sex-change issue, the couple still lives together in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. “The relationship is still the same,” she says. “I still change oil in the cars, and cut the grass and do the household chores. In fact, I even do the cooking now, because she works 12 hours sometimes and when she comes home, she's hungry, so I have a meal for her.”