Singapore Transsexual Transforms Self, Looks to Change Asian Culture

M-to-F transsexual businesswoman (and now author) Leona Lo has completed her personal transformation; now she's undertaking to transform Asian culture's views of transsexuals.

"Somewhere out there, not just in Singapore but throughout Asia, there are lots of young people who are suffering the way I suffered years ago," Lo told the French news service Agence France-Presse, according to a story posted Tuesday, September 11, by PinkNews.

Lo, born in Singapore but educated in the UK before returning to start a public relations company, added, "It's this entire culture of shame that gets under your skin."

Continued Lo, "It's not something that you can isolate and demolish because it is so much a part of our culture."

Lo joins several other Asian transsexuals in taking a publicly prominent stance recently, noted PinkNews, citing South Korea's Parinya Charoenphol, whose marriage to a rap star after her sex reassignment led to changes in the country's family registry laws.

Charoenphol's story has been made into a film by the title Beautiful Boxer.

The PinkNews article also cited Jin Xing, a dancer and choreographer who, as a man, had been a colonel in the Chinese Army.

For her part, Lo aims to bring changes to Asian culture as a whole by speaking and writing. For now, she is starting out with the aim of educating the corporate culture in Singapore, where she could not get a job because of her gender identity.

Said Lo, "Singapore may be a cosmopolitan city, but many things are still swept under the carpet."

Lo added that, "a lot of transsexual women face discrimination at work, and experience failure of relationships," a situation that Lo said results in "suicide [and] depression.

"They end up on the streets as prostitutes," Lo continued, saying that in the 1960s drag queens and transsexuals worked the streets of the city, most notoriously Bugis Street.

That ended with modernization and Singapore's emergence as a business capitol, when police acted to clean up the streets.

According to the PinkNews story, the result was that transsexuals were thrown into the same cultural and legal category as gays, transvestites, and prostitutes.

Those cultural perceptions linger, though Lo makes careful distinctions about transsexuals as a separate demographic.

Explained Lo, "I did not think I was gay. I just felt that I was a woman trapped in a man's body."

An epiphany came to her at age fifteen. Said Lo, "I discovered that book in the library and I said 'Oh my God! There are actually people like me!'"

Added Lo, "That changed my life and I discovered that I could go for the sex change operation."

That change had to wait a few years, however. Lo entered the military at age nineteen, as is required for able-bodied young men. The pressures and contradictions of the experience led to a suicide attempt.

Finally, in 1996, Lo attended university in the UK, where she was able to begin the first stages of her eventual transformation. The following year, she traveled to Bangkok for a two-week course of surgery. The discomfort of her surgically altered flesh took a back seat to the relief of having her body finally match her sense of gender, a feeling that Lo said was "wonderful" and "euphoric."

Lo has managed to convince a university to allow her to speak on the subject, and she's written an autobiography titled From Leonard to Leona: A Singapore Transsexual's Journey to Womanhood.

One point Lo wants to make to other transsexuals is that sex reassignment "is not a magic wand." Though the individual may attain a needed transformation, the larger world is slower, and more difficult, to change.

For Lo, the next step was her family. She told her parents about the procedure after it had been done. "By that time," Lo said, "they had already decided that they would rather have me as a woman than lose me as a child."

Lo says her personal journey is not yet complete. "I look forward to a fulfilling relationship with a loving man, getting married and adopting three children," she said.

Added Lo, "I've also reached a critical juncture where I'm more self-assured and finally able to lay to rest the painful aspects of my past and move confidently as a woman."