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He is Lily now
By Kumudini Hettiarachchi
Appearances are deceptive. When you meet pretty Lily, the question that springs to mind is: A she or a he?
In 33-year-old Lily's situation it is a little bit of both because she needs more medication and surgery to complete the process of a full gender transformation.

Lily was born a boy and lived as a male for 29 years. He went to school, held a job, married and became a father to a baby girl.

Then life changed radically for him. Slowly and surely he felt dissatisfied with who he was. "I longed to be a woman. I was desperate and forlorn. There were severe bouts of depression," says Lily when we met her at her aunt's house in Nugegoda.

At that time, he was in Thailand, having been in that country on and off due to his father being employed there.

"When these feelings came I was living in a Buddhist temple in Songkla province, south Thailand participating in ceremonies and engaged in charity work," says Lily, who was friends with the chief monk of that temple. That was when he had a lot of time to think about what he wanted from life.

Lily's childhood had not been an easy one. An only son, he had seen his parents part company when he was around six, turning his world upside down. He stayed behind with his mother, enrolling in a school in the suburbs of Colombo, while his father went to Thailand to work in a company manufacturing baby products. Later his father returned and sent him to India to study. Shuttled back and forth, he was in Sri Lanka once again and left for Thailand when he was 19, finding work as a production and quality control manager in a company manufacturing baby products for the US market.

"I did not idle during this time. I studied while being employed and qualified to teach English as a foreign language. Then it was another three years in Sri Lanka," says Lily. By that time his mother had migrated to Australia.

Back in Thailand, when he was 28, came the feelings that changed Lily's life. He was suffering from gender dysphoria. The psychiatric treatment was followed by sex reassignment therapy. Medication came in the form of injections and tablets and pills taken orally. Gradually, the signs of femininity became discernible, with Lily developing a bust. "I don't experience what women do each month but I do feel the monthly blues," says Lily.

The picture in the mirror each morning also started changing. "My skin became softer. In sex reassignment surgery, I underwent a 3-4 hour operation for penile inversion converting the male reproductive organ to a female one," explains Lily.

In May 2004 Lily was back in Sri Lanka, this time with a resolve to stay in her motherland. Currently, Lily is working part-time at a restaurant, while getting an allowance from her mother. Her father has been dead for the past one and a half years.

Lily, who believes that she is the first Sri Lankan man to become a woman, says the road ahead is long and difficult and pleads for help to reach the other milestones. "I have to undergo more surgery to make my face more feminine, laser skin therapy to remove facial hair and also more medication for bust augmentation," says Lily, adding that she does not have any funds to fulfil her dream.

While attempting to undergo a complete sex change, Lily is content. "Though I will have to be on medication, hormone therapy for life, I wake up every day with a feeling of happiness. I look more and more like a woman. That's what I wanted."

And Lily's hope for the future - to marry and have a child of her own, by adopting a baby.

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