hankyoreh

a South Korean documentary about transgender men who were born as women.

By Lee Jung-ae, staff reporter

“You're a real man now!"

Four days have passed since their cheering before the courthouse. Now, all 49-year-old "A" and 32-year-old "B" do is look at the calendar. As soon as they received their ruling on March 15, they sprinted to the district office to ask for their family registry listing to be changed. The process normally takes one week, they were told. Now, someone who wants to change his listing from "female" to "male" has to go to his neighborhood center and revise his resident registration form. Then he has to notify the district office before he can finally have his registration number changed so that the last seven digits begin with a 1 (signifying male) rather than a 2 (signifying female). That simple number change is what they have been waiting so long to do.

A screenshot from Boys Don’t Cry

A counts the days as he thinks about his wife. The two met in the mountains, and fell in love at first sight. He didn't want to lie to her, though. "I'm a female-to-male transsexual," he told her. "Are you okay with that?" She said she was. That was 23 years ago.

Never once in that time did she ask how he had gotten to be that way. To her, he was just a husband. The lawsuit was a way of filing a marriage notice. "I felt so bad for my wife," A said. "We've been living together like a married couple without a marriage registration. At least that way, I could pass away and she would still be an aunt to my nephews."

Her family still doesn't know that A is transgender. "Do we have to get married like that?" he asked, referring to the deception. "I actually wanted to run away from the wedding hall - I was worried someone might realize it. We never would have had a wedding if she hadn't pushed me into it."

For 23 years, A felt trepidacious whenever he met his family in-law. "We never went in one car to visit them," he recalled. "I was worried we might get pulled over and I'd have to show them my driver's license." A doesn't feel it necessary to tell them he is transgender, but he is happy to think that he might be able to relax a bit more with them.

a 1999 movie based on a true story starring Hilary Swank

B, who is still unmarried, felt giddy thinking of the moment when he will be able to present a resident registration card with a 1 at the front of the last digits. "I'm legally male now, so I have to get all these company documents changed," he said. "Some of the people there think I'm just a man, but the general affairs staff knows about my past. I wonder what their faces will be like when I go there and show them my card."

B is a contract worker at a public institution, and plans to look for another job once the contract expires. "I want to start over somewhere where they don't know that I was a woman. I had given myself five years to get my gender changed and find a new job, but with this ruling I think I can do it sooner," he said with a laugh.

It's been a long wait. Even the more understanding people would still ask them, "How did you get to be like that?" "I'm just a man," they would say in reply. The questions were embarrassing. "I've lived like this ever since I was a child," A said. "I had to have my hair cropped short and wear men's clothes, since that was the only way I felt like myself. Even when I hit puberty and my chest began to show, I thought, 'I'm a boy, it'll go away.' It may have been wishful thinking, but that's what I thought.

"And meanwhile, they kept on growing," he added sardonically.

But the dissonance gradually got to be more than he could take: if he was a man, why was he developing into a woman? "I wanted to cut my breasts off," B said. "It felt like I was carrying two plastic bags full of cockroaches around on my chest." He hated to look in the mirror. He bound his breasts with compression bandages and wore baggy clothing. Sometimes he tied them so tightly that he heard his lungs straining when he breathed, which was difficult to do in the first place. He began to slouch.

B recalled a day he will never forget, when he arrived in Japan as an exchange student, took off the bandages, and wore a compression shirt for the first time. "I can still recall that liberating feeling, that sense that I could ride a bike in the wind and my chest wouldn't show."

His monthly period was an experience of unspeakable horror. "I thought about ways of getting it over with quickly, and I ended up deliberately sticking my hand inside my vagina and scooping it out when I was taking a shower," he recalled. It was a masochistic way of confronting the femaleness of his body. He began cutting himself, mainly on the shoulders or wrists where the wounds would be covered by clothing or a watch, so that his parents wouldn't know. Once there was nowhere left that could be concealed, he began cutting on the insides of his fingers and his palm. He tried depression medication and counseling, but nothing worked.

It was in his last year of high school that B first began finding some solid ground.

"I visited a foreign website, and I found out for the first time that surgery was an option," he explained. "My heart skipped a beat. I thought, 'I can finally live.'" He also found a girlfriend, which helped him in battling his demons. "It was a comfort just to have even one person who saw me as a boy," he said. "She saw the pain I was going through and cried with me. It was thanks to her that I stopped cutting myself."

Both men count themselves blessed to have family members who have accepted them rather than trying to change them. When A came back from having his breasts removed, all his mother said was, "It must have hurt." She didn't try to talk him out of marrying his wife. Only once was there anything resembling an objection, when his uncle said, "Don't come to me later and ask me why I didn't try and stop you." B's family was disconcerted when he told them he was a man, but it didn't take them long to accept him as a son. Both A and B said they knew a lot of other transgender people who felt severely depressed and suffered financial hardship when their family members tried to force them to wear women's clothing, or beat them into living as women.

The rest of the world hasn't been quite as welcoming. Many people have been openly hostile. Presenting an ID card is a potentially life-threatening experience when the picture on the front looks so different.

Both men described transgender life as "a lot like being an illegal alien or illegal migrant worker."

"It's not just an inconvenience," B said. "You need a job to keep food on the table, but you don't get any farther than the interview. They always start by asking why you didn't go into the military. It's fraud to say that my registration number is wrong, but I would rather go hungry and starve to death than let the words 'I'm a woman' come out of my mouth. But if you keep hemming and hawing about it, it looks like you're hiding something. So obviously it's tough to make a good impression."

B added that he feels "very fortunate" to have a job now. "I was lucky to have an interviewer who didn't hold my being transgender against me," he said.

Another source of constant stress is anything that involves confirming their identity with their registration number, such as when they go to the bank. "Every time the bank calls me, they always say, 'Could you please put [your real name] on the line?'" said A. "I tell them it's me and they don't believe it. Of course they get suspicious because of all the identity theft that goes on. A few times they've told me I had to go to the bank so that they could verify my identity. At first, I just laughed it off, but it's happened every couple of years. Sometimes I've seen the bank's number come up and just wanted to throw the phone across the room. Lately, I've had one of my female friends who knows about my situation talk to them for me."

While they don’t usually talk about it, most of B’s colleagues at work seem to have caught on that he is a transgender. “One time I left my wallet on top of my desk when I went somewhere, and I heard that people had looked in it while I was gone,” he said. “I guess they must have wanted to see if the rumors were true.”

When B is at work, he doesn’t use the bathroom that is on the same floor as his office. “I started hearing that certain people felt uncomfortable with the idea that I was using the same bathroom as them,” he recalled.

When this kind of thing happens, the first thing that hits them is not a feeling of rage but of insecurity and fear. “The first thing I feel is afraid. I wonder how I’m going to be treated, whether I’ll be harassed. There are stories about what happens to you when it gets out that you’re transgender. Some people’s clothes are ripped off by people who want to see it for themselves. Others get beat up by people who think they’re disgusting,” B said. By now, he has gotten used to simply getting out of the way before something bad happens.

This is the reason that A gave up on the idea of getting a regular job so quickly. “I hated the way people would look me up and down after looking over my documents. I simply quit looking for jobs at companies that ask for documents,” he said. Today, A is self-employed. He has stopped talking to friends who remember him when from he was young and only meets people who simply know him as a man.

If an ID card can cause this much trouble, wouldn’t it be better to just do what the law says, to hurry up and get a sex change operation to change one’s gender? Both men sighed before they answered.

“There are several steps to getting a sex change. There’s psychological therapy, hormone injection, removal of breasts, womb, and other reproductive organs, and then the actual sex change operation. Even when you start getting hormone therapy, you start to look different from the picture on your ID, which makes it hard to get a job. You have to work your tail off for a couple years to save up the 5-10 million won you need to remove your breasts and womb. And even then, you need several more years to earn the 30 million won that the sex change operation costs. And all the time, time is ticking away,” B said.

A said it wasn’t only for financial reasons. “Even the hormonal injections alone start putting pressure on your liver. And who knows if you’ll make it through the surgery okay. There are so many complications like urethral stricture, inflammation, and dermal necrosis. Tons of people have to go in for two or three more operations and yet are still not able to live a normal life. The only reason people spend so much money and ruin their bodies to get the sex change operation is because the law requires it.”

“You don’t get an erection, and there isn’t any reproductive function. I don’t want to put up with all the side effects just to have a penis,” A said.

B said, “I want to save up some more money and go to the best hospital for surgery.”

For these two people, the ID card is an essential prerequisite for survival, while a sex organ is optional.

Thanks to the court’s decision, these two men were able to change their legal gender even without getting a sex change. However, that doesn’t mean they’re all smiles just yet. “Browsing online, I saw a lot of sarcastic comments asking whether this means that women with dicks are women too. It makes me worried that people who have changed their gender from male to female will suffer harm because of this judicial decision. I just wish that people would understand that for us the issue of sex change is not merely a question of sex organs, but a question of life and death,” B said.

B also emphasized the fact that this decision was made by lowest court. “That means that a higher court could appeal the decision, of course. Korea needs to hurry up and pass a law that makes it possible to change one’s legal gender without getting a sex change operation.”

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]