XPost: can.politics, bc.politics, van.general   
   From: gregcarrsober@gmail.com   
      
   Province pays for sex change operation for Vancouver woman who felt   
   trapped in mans body   
      
   BY LORI CULBERT, VANCOUVER SUNAPRIL 19, 2014   
      
      
      
      
   For three decades, Tamara Loyer wrestled with the regular demons that   
   haunt so many in the Downtown Eastside: Sex work, drugs, violence, poor   
   health, poverty and homelessness.   
      
   All the while, an even bigger battle waged inside her; she was a woman   
   trapped in a man’s body, an imbalance that shaped her life from a young   
   boy growing up on a Quebec military reserve to a tormented transsexual   
   on Vancouver’s streets.   
      
   Stalked by real and perceived bigotry, she sought refuge in an anonymous   
   world where sex was sold to strangers and pain was numbed with dope.   
      
   Loyer’s goal to complete her physical transition to female was   
   unobtainable. She had no stability to pursue surgery and no home in   
   which to recover.   
      
   “It was always in the bottom of my soul that I wanted this to happen.   
   I’m 52, and it seemed fleeting at times,” she said in a recent series of   
   interviews.   
      
   “I needed to get off the street. But I was having a hard time finding   
   housing.”   
      
   That changed on a cold and rainy October night in 2011, when an outreach   
   worker plucked an injured and despondent Loyer out of an alley and took   
   her to the first social housing building in which she felt safe: one for   
   women only run by Atira Women’s Resource Society.   
      
      
   Although she looked female, she had the body parts of a man, which was   
   challenging at times in an old, modest SRO where residents shared bathrooms.   
      
      
      
   With support from her nurse practitioner and Atira staff, Loyer waded   
   into the quagmire of government paperwork and assessments to apply for   
   funding for a sex change operation.   
      
   Last month, she emerged from a Montreal gender reassignment hospital   
   with a body finally in sync with her brain: in place of a penis and   
   testicles is now a vagina and clitoris.   
      
   Loyer’s agony over her birth gender led her descent from a well-educated   
   computer programmer to a homeless person. She now hopes the surgery will   
   give her the confidence to find a home, a job, and a healthier lifestyle.   
      
   “My surgery was the end to an ambiguous gender. I couldn’t go forward   
   when I was both,” she said. “If not for surgery, I’d still be in an   
   alley doing nasty things. I didn’t believe I could get there. I wanted   
   to, but I didn’t believe it.”   
      
   Eight of 10 Canadian provinces now fund sex reassignment surgery, which   
   is performed in Canada only at a private Montreal hospital.   
      
   Dr. Maud Belanger, who operated on Loyer, said as more provinces have   
   started paying for the operation, the number of homeless patients has   
   increased.   
      
   “People who are transgender live (with) more rejection, have more   
   problems with drug abuse ... Patients will tell us, if you didn’t do   
   that surgery, they would probably kill themselves. We hear that at least   
   two to three times a week,” Belanger said in a telephone interview.   
      
   “When they get surgery they are more functioning in the society and can   
   get better jobs ... because they feel as they should have since they   
   were a kid.”   
      
   Loyer’s 30-year slide into homelessness is not uncommon for people   
   grappling with their sexual or gender identities, according to national   
   studies.   
      
   Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and transsexual young people make up   
   25 to 40 per cent of the national youth homeless population, even though   
   they comprise only five to 10 per cent of the general population, says a   
   report by York University professor Stephen Gaetz and other homelessness   
   researchers.   
      
   “Sexual minorities (are) over-represented in street youth populations, a   
   result of tension between the youth and his or her family, friends and   
   community,” says the report, The State of Homelessness in Canada 2013.   
      
   A second 2013 report penned by Gaetz, Youth Homelessness in Canada,   
   noted: “discrimination against transgender youth on the streets and in   
   the shelter system is rampant: transgender youth face more   
   discrimination than any other youth group.”   
      
   A sex change operation may help alleviate this imbalance, but it isn’t   
   easy to obtain for a marginalized person with no permanent address, no   
   regular access to phones or email, no disposable income and no support   
   network.   
      
   Nurse practitioner Jennifer Beaveridge, who has expertise in transgender   
   medicine, helped Loyer overcome some of these obstacles.   
      
   “When she moved into (housing) she really got settled, and had a   
   permanent address. I think her self esteem increased,” Beaveridge said.   
      
   “Everything started to really pull together for her, to start thinking   
   she was ready for this next step.”   
      
   Confused and alone   
      
   Loyer was born into a traditional French Canadian military family in   
   1961. Her father was in the air force. Her mother stayed home to raise   
   Loyer and younger sister Paige.   
      
   By age nine, she can remember not identifying with her genitals or her   
   male name.   
      
   It wasn’t that Loyer wanted to be a girl. She just never related to   
   being a boy — so becoming female was the only other option.   
      
   “You need to be able to be something, and female is better than male to me.”   
      
   There were few options to explore this taboo subject on a 1960s military   
   base. At age 14, Loyer ran away from home after a relationship-ending   
   fight with her father.   
      
   She lived on her own throughout troubled teen years, yet graduated from   
   high school and completed a three-year diploma in computer programming.   
      
   In 1984 she moved west to Vancouver where she assumed the name Tamara.   
      
   She pursued four more years of post-secondary education, in areas such   
   as accounting, nautical engineering and commercial design, but keeping   
   an office job was difficult, either because she faced discrimination at   
   work or feared she would.   
      
   Loyer treated the pain with drugs, eventually becoming a blur of high   
   heels, glittery jewelry and heavy makeup working the streets.   
      
   She tried relationships with both men and women, but was never what her   
   partners were looking for: a gay man or a kinky oddity.   
      
   Vancouver was emerging at the time as a supportive city to gay and   
   lesbians, but Loyer did not feel connected to that community.   
      
   “I don’t identify as being gay. Gay is about who you want to f**k and   
   gender is who I identify as when I look in the mirror.”   
      
   Society’s limited view of transsexuals, Loyer recalled, was of drag   
   queens in big wigs and poofy outfits — which seemed to her a parody of   
   the conflict brewing inside her.   
      
   By 1989, she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria — a crippling   
   unhappiness with one’s biological gender.   
      
   A supportive doctor prescribed her large doses of estrogen, which has   
   resulted in more feminine features: vastly reduced face, chest, arm and   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)