A transsexual dentist who was registered male at birth told the High Court yesterday she "tried to conform until I collapsed" before having major sex change surgery. She spoke of living in "a kind of secret world" from childhood and having a "feeling of feminity".
Ms Lydia Annice Foy (54) was giving evidence on the second day of her action challenging the authorities' refusal to alter her birth certificate to record her as female. The respondents are the Chief Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths and the State.
Ms Foy, with an address in Athy, Co Kildare, is a male to female transsexual. Her birth certificate records her sex as male and her name as Donal Mark Foy. She married in 1977 and has two daughters. The marriage ended in the early 1990s after which she underwent gender reassignment surgery. Asked by her counsel, Mr Bill Shipsey SC, about her earliest recollections about her condition, Ms Foy said she remembered being "very different" but it was difficult to talk about it at the time. She was conscious of what she wore from a very early age and had "a feeling of femininity".
She had "a kind of secret world very early on" with lots of dreams and escapism. "I wanted to be what I was in my dreams. I wanted to be feminine."
At the time of her First Communion, she felt traumatised. She did not feel she fitted in anywhere and she burst into tears. She was in a trance and had memory loss from then.
Mr L.J. Gooren, professor of transsexology at the gender clinic in the Free University Hospital, Amsterdam, said they had about 150 patients a year who had problems with their status.
Medicine had taken a long time to explain the situation. The brain underwent sex differentiation - male or female. It was now seen in the case of transsexualism that the brain had not followed the adult "markers" (of gender).
Prof Gooren said transsexualism was not a Western fad. The condition was "one of the errors of becoming man or woman". It was not a lifestyle or choice, but a medical condition. The hearing continues today.