I am 60 years old, and a pre-operative male-to-female transsexual. I have been trying to get my srs (sex reassignment surgery) completed for the last four decades, but I had no support, and no money. When I was 12 years old, my mother had me sent to a state residential treatment center, thinking that my being female inside my soul was a sickness. I was there for 2½ years, and then they sent me to the state hospital, and I was there for another 3 years. While I was at both institutions, I was repeatedly raped, forced to perform other disguting sexual acts, and I was beaten by these same abusers, sometimes until I bled. I was able to survivie tho, even though these abuses left deep holes and scars in the my soul. I was finally able to leave the state hospital when I was 18 years old, because the superintendent didn't believe I should have been there in the first place. He actually called my mother and wrote to her every week of the 3 years I was there, asking her to take me back home, and she refused...but yet, when I was 18, she said to me when the children's court judge said I was free to go..."Well you might as well come home with me, you can't live on the streets." Go figure. This was the same woman who not only abandone me, but disowned me by signing away her parental rights 2 months after I was taken to the first institution. But I am still me, and I will always be this woman that is my soul. My motto is:

"If I have to be this girl in me, Then I have the right to be."

my claim to fame is my inner strength.