Born a man, but finally living life - as herself

A year and a half after Annalora nearly killed herself in her garage, Chastity Bono, now Chaz, announced that after years of heartache, he had decided to “honor his true identity” — to live life as a male.

Chaz's life story has pulled transgenderism from the margins into mainstream debate.

“Becoming Chaz,” a documentary of Bono's transition from a woman to a man, aired on the Oprah Winfrey Network this past May.

In August, Bono — son of the late Palm Springs mayor Sonny Bono and superstar entertainer Cher — was selected as one of 12 celebrity contestants to compete on “Dancing with the Stars,” an ABC show watched by millions.

OneMillionMoms.com, a conservative media watchdog group, and a Fox News columnist urged viewers to boycott the show, which premiers its 13th season on Monday.

Chaz also is on tour promoting his new book, “Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man.”

“I do think (the book) has opened up a dialogue,” Bono said during a recent interview with The Desert Sun.

He went public with his transition — not only to get the story out in his own words — but to help people understand what it means to be transgender.

“There's a dual nature of gender,” Bono said. “Physical and gender identity. To most people, those things are in alignment ... for transgender people, that's not the case.”

“My mom had a tough time at first and needed to take a break from me for a few months,” he said.

Like Cher, the country also is rethinking its relationship with its transgendered citizens.

In May, Brian Sandoval, Republican governor of Nevada, signed a law protecting transgender people from employment discrimination.

In early June, he signed two more bills extending discrimination protections for transgender people.

That made 15 states, including California, that have anti-discrimination policies, said Mara Keisling, founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

In June, the Veterans Health Administration issued a directive to its nearly 1,000 facilities to provide “respectful delivery of health care,” to transgender veterans.

The directive stated that trans vets are eligible to receive hormones, care before and after gender reassignment surgery and mental heath care associated with their transition.

“There's a lot going on right now and there's a lot of change for the better,” Keisling said. The trend is definitely going in our direction.”

Reassignment surgery

An estimated 0.3 percent of adults in the United States are transgender — nearly 700,000 people, according to an analysis of the Massachusetts Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey conducted in 2007 and 2009.

About 500 gender reassignment surgeries like Annalora's are performed each year in the United States — and about twice as many overseas, said Dr. Marci L. Bowers, who performed Annalora's surgery in Trinidad, Colo.

“A good number of people leave the country,” Bowers said. “The price is so good overseas — mainly Thailand.”

Bowers specializes in gynecology, pelvic and reconstructive surgery and is considered an innovator in the field of transsexual surgery. She was the first transsexual woman to perform the surgical procedure.

“There aren't very many surgeons in this country that do this work — maybe four or five,” she said. “It's an interesting little niche — and a busy niche — because there's not many providers.”

Another doctor of note who performs gender reassignment surgery is Dr. Christine McGinn at Papillon Gender Wellness Center in New Hope, Pa.

Dr. McGinn was U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Christopher McGinn, a flight surgeon who served on two NASA space missions. McGinn had surgery to become a woman in 2000.

To be considered a candidate for gender reassignment surgery, a person must have a psychological evaluation and be diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, published by the American Psychiatric Association.

They must have signed letters from a psychiatrist and another mental health care provider; must live as a woman — or man — for a year before surgery; and must make a commitment to undergo psychotherapy throughout the process, Dr. Shannon said.

“Not everyone wants genital surgery,” she said. “It's not uncommon for people to waver.”

Unwavering resolve

Miller didn't waver. She began living as a woman in November of 2009, two months after The Desert Sun began following the transition.

She selected her new name, with a nod to her adoptive mother, Alice, her biological, maternal grandmother, Annalora and her biological mother's middle name, Lenore.

Although she began dressing as a woman that fall, the physical transformation began earlier in 2009 when she began taking female hormones.

Around the same time, she started twice-a-week electrolysis treatments to remove hair on her face and genitals.

She had a surgical procedure — known as a “trachea shave” — that reduces the size of the Adam's apple by shaving the thyroid cartilage through an incision in the throat.

In order to get a feel for what size breasts would feel comfortable, her surgeon suggested she put baggies of uncooked rice in the cups of a sports bra.

“She said to start out with a pound of rice in each baggy and keep adding to it until you like the size,” Annalora said.

She had breast augmentation surgery in November 2009.

A month earlier, Riverside County Superior Court Judge John G. Evans sanctioned the new identity during a public hearing at the Larson Justice Center in Indio.

The judge's approval allowed Annalora to change her name and gender with the Social Security Administration and California Department of Motor Vehicles.

“When the judge called ‘Larry Duane Miller?,' everybody in the courtroom turned around and looked,” Annalora said. “The court reporter looked up at me and smiled. The judge declared, that from now and forever, I shall be known as Allison Lenore Annalora.

“Amazingly, the people waiting in the court room clapped.”

High suicide risk

In his book, Chaz describes the mental anguish of “pretending to be something” he wasn't before his surgical transformation.

“I was waiting to die, I felt nothing,” he told a therapist.

Suicide attempts are epidemic among the transgendered.

In a survey of 6,450 transgender and gender non-conforming people, a “staggering” 41 percent had attempted suicide, according to a report released in October by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality.

In the general population, 1.6 percent had attempted suicide.

When Miller woke his partner to tell him he had almost committed suicide, “I was absolutely furious,” Brockman said. “I was shocked and upset ... It was a wake-up call.”

The couple took a long walk and talked late into the evening.

Miller had expressed his desire to become a woman on and off during their years together.

But until that night, Brockman didn't realize the emotional toll it was taking on his partner.

He said the suicide attempt made him stop thinking so much about his own happiness.

“I wanted to know what I was dealing with, so I started reading. We watched movies together, like ‘Transamerica' and ‘Normal'.”

Brockman, 61, was married and the father of two sons when he separated from his wife of 15 years in May of 1990.

He met Annalora — then Miller — a couple of months later.

“In essence, we've been together ever since,” he said.

Once Annalora began her transition, Brockman began dating gay men.

Annalora dates heterosexual men.

Brockman paid for all of her procedures. The trachea shave was $5,000. The breast augmentation was $5,500. The “gender correction surgery” was $22,000.

“We've been together 20 years and back in the beginning, she helped me,” he said.

Finding her voice

Annalora, a hair stylist and makeup artist at a large casino hotel spa resort, said she's felt out of place in her body for as long as she can remember — since she first became aware of the difference between the sexes, around age 4.

“When I was really little, people used to get really mad at me because I kept saying I was a girl,” she said. “I would pray every night before I went to sleep, ‘God please make me like the other little girls.' The next morning, I'd awake to be bitterly disappointed that He hadn't — but I still believed.”

Annalora was adopted — given up at birth — by her teenage, unmarried mother.

Her adoptive parents have died, but Annalora's aunt, Karen Roberts of Spanaway, Wash., remembers her from the time she was about 3 years old.

“She tended to hang out with girls,” Roberts said. “She started doing the hair thing — fixing peoples' hair for proms and school dances.”

About five years after Annalora was born, her mother gave birth to a boy, who also was given up for adoption.

Annalora learned she had a sibling after searching for and meeting her birth mother in the early 1990s.

She found Mark Harris in 1993 in Hansville, Wash.

“We just connected right away,” said Harris, of Tacoma, Wash. “It was a great reunion. We found out that we both sing a little bit.”

At an early age, Annalora found comfort in music, listening to records for hours in her bedroom.

She sang along with female vocalists, but her adoptive mother and father tried to get her to sing songs recorded by men.

“The closest they could get was the Beatles,” she said.

“I lived in a fantasy world, where I was a beautiful little blonde girl who sang like all the glamorous women in the movies and everybody admired me,” she said. “I lived in that world, every waking moment.”

At 10, while looking through magazines at a grocery store, Annalora spotted a Police Gazette with Christine Jorgensen on the cover.

Jorgensen was the first widely known person to have gender reassignment surgery.

“I realized I was not the only person in the world like this. It gave me hope. I was pretty hopeless at that point.”

At 14, she went to her adoptive parents with the articles and said, “I'm a woman trapped in a man's body.

“It didn't go well.”

Forty years later, Larry Miller walked on the stage for the final time at Hotel Zoso in Palm Springs.

His birth mother, Gail Lenore Phelps, was in the audience.

“It took some courage — lots and lots of courage — for him to finally make this transformation,” she said.

In April of 2010, Annalora was selected as a finalist in McCallum Theater Institute's Open Call, a valleywide talent competition — an award she never earned as a male singer.

“I liked him as a man. I love her as a woman,” said friend Shari Woodbridge.

Carol Kamenis, a professional entertainer who's known Miller — and now Annalora — for four years, said “Everything about her is all woman.”

“The way she walks. The way she talks. She's very flirty and sexy on stage. ... That sassiness — she had some of that with Larry — but it didn't fit.”

Last Tuesday, in a green satin dress and 5-inch heels, she stepped before a glittering silver backdrop at Azul in Palm Springs to sing before a packed audience.

“They don't even remember who I used to be,” Annalora said. “Larry never was real to me. It was a persona. I feel completely free now.”