Raluca Niculescu tinkers with the electric panel, perched high on a chair. She huffs and puffs, coughing strong enough to make the hallway rumble, then goes back to the mirror to take a keener look at her bleached locks on this cold January morning. She’s just finished blow-drying her hair and now gently caresses her tiny breasts, barely disguised by the soft nightgown. She checks her chin, until recently covered in thick hairs, and inspects the bulge that’s hidden by the delicate purple satin panties. “I can’t wait,” she says.

Raluca hasn’t slept a wink. She spent the night binge drinking Coca-Cola and has, since dawn, been stuffing things in the large trolley bag which has taken over the middle of her room: bottles of nail polish, moisturizers, lotions, new fishnet stockings, black blouses, lots of skirts, and a stack of cash for tomorrow’s surgery. She’s taken a month off work, received a bank loan, and has bought new bedroom furniture to ease her recovery. Two days from now, in far-away Bangkok, Raluca Niculescu will rid herself of the penis with which she has lived for more than 28 years and will finally become a woman.

* * *

Raluca was born in Bucharest to an authoritarian father and a mother with a structured belief system, both yearning for success. Her name was Bogdan Ion, a boy’s name, but she remembers her great-grandmother whom she lived with in her first few years of life almost never addressing him by that name; she called him “kitten” or “little bear.” Bogdan was a chubby boy, with blonde, curly hair, and a kind way of looking at people. His resemblance to a little girl always made salespeople in shoe stores offer him butterfly-print sneakers. He played with dolls and was easily frightened by insects. In kindergarten, he swapped clothes with girls because he liked to wear skirts. While his family would host visitors, he spread makeup all over his face and tried on high heels. He felt no different from his sister, three years younger than him, apart from that “thing” that dangled between his legs.

Bogdan moved from his great-grandmother’s place when he was five and began living with his grandparents. His mother and father were too occupied with running their businesses in various parts of the country, and they barely had any opportunity to see him. Bogdan yearned for affection and loved people. He tried making friends with children from his apartment block, with kids he’d meet in the park or while waiting in line at stores, during Communism. He enjoyed playing tag in a vast underground parking lot, but he often ended up playing games he wasn’t good at. He was a clumsy child that couldn’t run; he despised soccer, but adored playing volleyball with girls. With his family, he was less easy-going. He believed his sister was getting all the attention, and so he acted out, enjoyed screaming a lot, and misbehaved in order to gain attention. He only got along with his grandparents who gave him free reign, but still he yelled and slammed doors. He was hard to calm down, made a mess of his room, and rearranged the furniture.

Bogdan bought his first pair of panties in middle school. He hid them under a pillow so his grandmother wouldn’t find them and wore them on top of another, tighter pair, which smothered the lump tucked between his legs. The mirror was his worst enemy, and he barely looked at his body, not feeling it as his own. He’d grown taller, had chest hair, and his penis kept growing. “I felt so much hate when I looked at that thing.”

At school, he barely fit in and didn’t have friends. He skipped gym class because he didn’t want to undress in the boys’ locker room, with everyone watching. Kids picked on him because he was fat and clumsy, so he used his generous allowance to bribe them with food and juice. He killed time playing arcade games and would later get drunk as often as he could and faked being happy.

When he was seven years old, he snuck out one of his father’s porn videos in his backpack. Back home, at his grandparents’ house, he stuck the tape into their video cassette player and watched as naked men and women screamed with pleasure; none of them looked natural to him. Then a girl with a penis appeared on screen. She looked unlike his grandmother or sister, but somehow Bogdan felt she was normal. That was exactly how he’d seen himself in the mirror, hundreds of times.

* * *

In high school, Bogdan fell for his geography teacher. While showering, he touched himself and thought about him, but always leaving his penis aside. Bogdan had become a loner and increasingly aware that he didn’t want to be assigned to a gender that didn’t feel right. Thinking about the girl in the movie, he started looking for information online, in search of people like him, trawling through every obscure website or chat room with a pornographic name. That’s how he found the first boys who identified as girls, the first women who dreamed about becoming men, and the first people who felt one way, but looked another and who called themselves “transsexuals.” They were not cross-dressers, nor feminine men, nor women with a masculine figure, but people stuck in the mind of the other sex, in a wrong body, and whose physical appearance did not reflect their own identity projections. They felt trapped in their own flesh, unable to break free.

Soon, Bogdan found out that transsexualism is a medical condition, one categorized as a psychiatric disorder, but not really an illness. Its official name was “gender identity disorder” or “gender identity dysphoria,” and treating it was a long and expensive process, focusing on bringing the patient to the physical appearance which best represented him.

* * *

Bogdan Niculescu first attempted suicide in middle school, after having read countless stories of transsexuals abandoned by their families and friends, beaten in the streets or murdered for being different. He lowered himself down to his knees, plugged a pair of knitting needles in the electrical socket, and placed the opposite ends on each side of his penis. He wanted to tell his parents what he had found out about himself and how scared he was, but that same night, a gay couple had been caught by the police making out in a public place, and Bogdan had heard his mother and father talking about it, saying that they both should be hanged for going against God’s law. Bogdan hoped the flames would char his penis, so that no one would ever know he had once been a boy, that he would die as he should have been born, a girl. The electric current shook him slightly, the fuse blew, and the socket caught fire.

To everyone in high school, Bogdan was just a sneaky-looking boy whose feminine appearance had vanished with puberty. He was now tall and robust, with a crooked smile, not really interested in school, and obsessed with drinking Coca-Cola. He liked action movies and games, listened to Manowar, Rammstein, and Cradle of Filth, and was as gifted at sports as he had been as a child. He interrupted classes and, to avoid low grades at school, he chose to play the sentimental card with his teachers instead of surprising them by studying more. He laughed loud and wanted attention from everyone, so much so that his colleagues started to think that he tried too hard and considered him spoiled. When no one was around, he would cut himself in the school bathroom with X-Acto knives he’d find on the floor.

Bogdan usually hung out with his female colleagues and constantly nosed around to hear what they were talking about. He got along with them so well, that his male friends kept asking him how he always managed to catch their eye. No one ever heard him saying he was in love, and no one ever saw him get romantically involved with one of the girls. There were some rumors that he himself initiated that he visited prostitutes, but nobody believed him. His colleagues laughed about it because it wasn’t the first time that Bogdan lied, and fewer and fewer people were buying what he was saying. In the evenings, when he was home alone, Bogdan put on his grandmother’s high heels and fancy dresses and went for a walk on the street, around his building. He didn’t avoid people he knew or anyone who would stare at a chubby teenage boy who sank a pair of high heels in the asphalt and waved the folds of a dress from the 50s. Those were the moments when he felt most complete.

He had his first paid sex experience with a guy he met on mIRC, on the “Whores” channel, when he was 15. He never regretted it, nor is he ashamed of it. This was his only option at the time, because his parents didn’t give him money, and his grandparents didn’t have as much as he thought he needed. He posted an ad in the paper looking for work as a “young transsexual hooker” and slept with different men for almost two years, every week, at their place. He didn’t let anyone know what he was doing so that he wouldn’t go to jail. At school, he tried to hang himself, twice.

One day, when he couldn’t take it anymore, he confessed to his grandmother he felt he was different. They were not that close, although she’d always tried to control as much of his life as she could, so he wouldn’t end up on the wrong lane. He often called her a “tyrant” and used to tell his colleagues that if he didn’t receive good grades in school, his grandmother would confiscate his compact cassettes with “Satan’s music” and wouldn’t allow him to spend time playing on his computer or hang out with his rocker friends. That day, Bogdan prepared for the worst. He thought his grandmother wouldn’t take it well, and he kept asking himself whether to continue with his plan. He set the emergency number on speed dial and told her he wanted to become a woman. His grandmother’s reaction left him speechless: “I knew you were a girl ever since I first saw you.”

No one knows why some people feel trapped in the wrong body, or if there is anything that can be done to prevent such situations. There is still a worldwide debate between those who say transsexualism is something one is born with and those who believe it’s something determined by previous traumatic experiences in one’s childhood. But some psychiatrists say that there are visible signs of transsexualism in children starting with their very first years of life, when the child does not acknowledge which gender he or she belongs to. Studies show that even the brain structure of transsexuals is different from those of men and women. Parents don’t usually suspect that they might have a transsexual child, so they force them to adapt to what society considers normal. Those who feel there’s something wrong don’t know if they should let their children behave the way they desire, fearing they might have problems in school or with society. Families that have transsexual children usually move around, constantly looking for communities to embrace the fact that their child would one day undergo a major change.

* * *

In college, Bogdan started to attend different programs on touristic management and foreign languages just to avoid serving in the army (In Romania, men who go to college are allowed to skip military service). He was a member of a political party’s youth wing from which he later quit, spent years in an evangelical organization from which he was kicked out, and managed to graduate from a journalism program and get a job at The Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company in 2004. He started out as a reporter and went on to work as an IT guy, then as an audio technician for Radio3Net Florian Pitis.

Around the year 2000, his grandparents sold their apartment and bought Bogdan a studio. He lived and managed his finances alone because his family denied him support, saying he’d caused enough trouble in their lives. Bogdan took a loan, spent the money foolishly, and ended up drowning in debt, always complaining about his situation and how alone he felt. His former high school colleagues sometimes offered him small jobs to earn some money, but he was always late in delivering, very hard to reach and lacked motivation to work. Whenever he wanted to make money the easy way, he got involved with some “lovers” who helped him out, but he stopped doing that when he got a job at the radio station because he was tired of being just a “hole for others to fuck.”

At work, people called him “Goggly” because of his thick glasses that looked like a pair of goggles. Goggly was a fat guy who never refused to work extra hours. His colleagues took advantage of his goodwill, so he often landed the worst shifts. Many thought he didn’t like to talk, or that he wasn’t that clever, and all men swore they would never ask him to join them for a soccer game ever again.

Bogdan avoided women and tried to repress his desire to talk to them. When they cornered him, he tried to act cool, but ended up gossiping, exchanging opinions on jewelry and celebrity outfits. Many people believed he was gay. Truth was, he had his share of “manly” girlfriends whom he really cared about. One in Germany, when he was working in a hotel in Stuttgart, and one in Bucharest, a friend from college. He wasn’t always honest with them and didn’t confess he considered himself a woman because he was afraid he might end up hurting them. But he did send out signals about the roles he liked to play in relationships. He was the one who cooked, did the laundry, took care of the house, and secretly tried out their nail polish.

* * *

Bogdan met Mari in July of 2006. They spent one week chatting on a dating website. He said “hi,” and she answered. They exchanged phone numbers and pictures on Yahoo Messenger, and then they met by a fountain in the center of Bucharest. They strolled in the park nearby, discussed college, and after they parted ways, she sent him an SMS telling him she wanted to get to know him better. After three weeks, Bogdan bought Mari a ring, and on Christmas, at a family reunion in Braşov, he told his parents he was getting married.

Nobody understood their relationship. Mari was a simple, yet very jealous woman, and her behavior was not feminine. Bogdan took her everywhere, trusted her, and introduced her to his friends, work colleagues, and boss at the radio station as his future wife. Many were convinced that Mari was dating him because she was interested in the big fortune he would eventually inherit, especially Bogdan’s parents, who despised her “because she was incredibly ugly,” says Radu Cartianu, his parent’s godson.

Bogdan distanced himself from his family, but neither he, nor they allowed this to transpire. At parties, where there were friends invited, they all talked, laughed, and danced, but the rest of the time Mari and Bogdan sat separately from his parents. Other relatives could tell there was a wall between them and his family, and some blamed it on the fact that Bogdan had never reached the social status his parents wanted him to achieve: he didn’t have an important job, lived in a small studio, and always had trouble with money. When he fought with his family, Mari was the only one whom Bogdan allowed to witness his sorrow. She was the only one with whom he talked the way he felt like talking, even if sometimes that meant swearing or cursing, and looked the way he felt like looking, even if it meant putting on more weight or showering once a week. He knew she’d stand by him anyway because he believed she was a loyal person.

One week after they started going out, Bogdan told Mari he wanted to become a woman. Mari laughed and then couldn’t stop crying. Later she remembered his sister telling her Bogdan used to wear stockings and women’s underwear around the house and that once every month he’d say he wanted to become a woman, but eventually got over it. Mari started to ask around about transsexualism, then searched the Internet and came across strange foreign articles about a miraculous chemical substance advertised to make transsexual people not want to change their sex anymore. “If I get you that substance, will you take it?” she asked him. Bogdan told her there is no such substance, that he was born this way, and that it was not his fault he was trapped in his body.

Bogdan and Mari’s relationship lasted four years. Gender identity has nothing to do with sexual orientation, therefore there are men who suffer from transsexualism who have relationships with women, but actually this makes them gay. In spite of that, Mari is convinced that Bogdan loved her just as a man loves his woman, not as a woman who loves another one. Even during their intimate interaction she felt she was in the presence of a man. Bogdan cared about Mari because he considered her a good friend, but their whole story, he says, was nothing more than his way of denying the rumors that he was gay and another way to adapt to what society believed was the proper conduct.

The year Bogdan met Mari, he also met the first transsexual people. It was at ACCEPT, the oldest NGO that supports the rights of the LGBT community in Romania, where he did volunteer work, such as driving people around and helping with various tasks. Here he started to go to counseling, because it wasn’t as expensive as it was in private clinics, and the psychologist was one of the few Romanian professionals who had had the chance to deal with these types of patients before. Mari accompanied him sometimes. Even his mother came along once. His family knew that he liked to fool around with women’s clothing and that he told people he was a woman, but no one really bothered to listen to him. When this started to occur more often, his mother tried to find out what was going on, but didn’t understand anything the psychologist explained. She left the room saying he’d better stay “gay” and not tell anyone whom he’s sleeping with. “Just keep looking like a man for the rest of the world,” she said.

Bogdan started taking estrogen pills in 2006. He took them regularly, with no medical prescription although he suffered from a vein inflammation that didn’t allow him to take hormones. He swallowed eight pills a day, four in the morning and four in the evening, just as he’d read on the Internet, and went to clinics for blood tests from time to time. Soon after, his testicles started to shrink, and his doctors told him he became infertile. He also lost his physical strength and his body hair, and his breasts started to grow.

In 2010, he began wearing women’s clothing at work, and he introduced himself to everyone as Raluca Alexandra. He liked the sound of those two names, especially Alexandra, the name he used to call himself when he was a child. His weight dropped from 145 kilograms to 72 in less than a year because of a special diet he made for himself. People chuckled at his change, and his male colleagues asked themselves if they’d seen any “tits” on him or if he really had fishnet stockings underneath his pants. His former high school colleagues started to check his Facebook profile just to amuse themselves by staring at his new pictures, and no one could believe that “the fat guy was turning into a chick.” On the streets, people insulted him and spit on him in the middle of the day.

He grew colder with Mari and became somewhat aggressive. “He said he didn’t want to see me, nor be with me,” she says. “He was trying to push me away, and we told the world we broke up because we didn’t get along anymore. This is what we told people so no one would find out about him.” Mari threw the engagement ring at him, then changed her mind and wanted to get back together. “I still loved him, and I didn’t give up the idea of being with him. And I tried everything.” She even attempted to have a lesbian relationship with him, but things didn’t work out.

On June 30, 2010, Bogdan received the official diagnosis of transsexualism, according to the Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People, released by The American Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. (Romania didn’t have national guidelines for treating transsexual people.) He was diagnosed by a psychiatrist from the “Alexandru Obregia” Clinic Hospital of Psychiatry in Bucharest, who worked with transsexuals before and was convinced that Bogdan didn’t suffer from any mental illness or physical condition that made him believe he belonged to the opposite gender or that made his desire temporary. Bogdan had seen a psychologist for four years, but his parents couldn’t find a way to accept that they were going to have another daughter. They cut him off and stopped talking about their son in public. Even now, Bogdan is still a taboo-topic people whisper about at family reunions.

* * *

One day at work, the blue-haired Bogdan, with red nails and rainbow earrings, forgot to turn off the video camera while working in the radio studio. A woman online saw him and immediately called the newsroom to complain that Radio3Net was a respectable radio station and that it shouldn’t allow people looking like that to interact with the public. The editor-in-chief found out about the complaint and prohibited Bogdan from appearing in front of the audience until he solved his problems regarding his “whole look thing.”

Bogdan didn’t talk to anyone from the Radio Broadcasting Company about his reasons to go through such embarrassment daily, and very few people had the courage to ask him what was really going on, although they all witnessed an incredible metamorphosis. Some weren’t ready to get an answer or thought they wouldn’t find out anything they didn’t already know because he hadn’t been very talkative in the past anyway, while others just saw him as an eccentric who deserved to be ignored. “From the moment this whole metamorphosis began, I saw a completely serene person,” says Irina Baltă, one of Bogdan’s work colleagues at Radio3Net. “He heard so many unpleasant things and faced so much hostility with an extraordinary smile… He told me he was determined not to answer in the same way he was being treated and to understand those who didn’t understand him, because it was their right not to understand. He reached this level of wisdom after he was rejected by people, after he cried and after having tried to run away from everyone.”

Bogdan was never threatened with losing his job at Radio3Net, although usually transsexual people have many problems at work. Some are fired just because they start to dress differently. Some are excluded at work, and others don’t even get to have a job while they are still in transition. ACCEPT’s Executive Director, Irina Niţă, revealed she once met a transsexual who was legally a man, but looked like a woman, who wasn’t hired because the company for which he wanted to work didn’t want to risk having an employee who just seemed to be a woman. If her papers were to be checked, the company said, people would discover she was in fact a man. Other transsexuals wouldn’t want their employers to find out their biological sex because they haven’t decided to make their identity public yet. Many live in fear. “There are people who are employed, and they wouldn’t want their boss to find out they are transsexual,” Irina Niță says. “They leave their ID cards at home so they cannot show them even if they are asked. They live a nightmare, and they are afraid their colleagues might discover that they are not in fact who everyone believes they are.”

* * *

At the beginning of his transition, Bogdan had a very manly appearance. This is not the case of all transsexuals. Even without taking hormones, there are some who look like they belong to the gender they identify with. But Bogdan had a beard, thick hair, and women’s clothing that made him look like a cross-dresser with bad fashion taste. He admits he didn’t care much about himself or about the way he looked before. He ate until he felt like throwing up, wore anything he found laying around, and soap wasn’t his best friend. Raluca, on the other hand, experimented with her appearance because she knew nothing about what was right for her, or how a woman should look. She was curious and wanted to experiment with everything womanlike, which had been taken away from her in the past. She bleached and dyed her hair different colors and burned it while trying to get rid of a shade she didn’t like. She underwent electrolysis to get rid of the beard and tried numerous styles of clothing. She was a natural at trimming eyebrows and had no problem with wearing high heels, because she practiced ever since she was a little boy.

With time, Bogdan learned to match colors and dye his hair in natural shades. He took advice from his female co-workers and learned to mix and match his clothes to impress people with his choices. He was extremely happy when he got it right and fooled people on the streets into believing he was in fact a woman. “Once, I was driving the ACCEPT van and cut off a car. The driver insulted me. I was just a man with locks at that time. And the driver cursed me: ‘You fucking bitch. Go to hell, you stupid cunt!’ I felt so good. He cursed me as if I were a woman.”

In November 2010, Bogdan Niculescu sued the state, represented by the Local Council of the 1st District in Bucharest, to change his gender in his documents. The lawsuit was not public because Bogdan didn’t want to have to put up with people staring at him or with the annoying questions of tabloid reporters. He showed the judge every medical evaluation that he received from his psychiatrist, his psychologist, and the endocrinologist and wrote his full story on two pages. Based on his diagnosis, Bogdan asked to legally become a woman and receive an appropriate name. The only witness that testified for Bogdan was his boss, who wanted to be part in a lawsuit just for the sake of experimenting. He wanted to contribute to something that he never thought he would see again: a guy who worked for him becoming a woman right under his nose.

The lawsuit went fine, although Romanian legislation is not friendly with transsexual people. There’s only one law article and one note that lawyers base their cases on. To make sure they win the lawsuit, they usually present similar verdicts given by the European Court of Human Rights along with other verdicts in various Romanian lawsuits involving transsexuals. The judges are also confused. Everything is new, and the evidence that they require often puts the transsexual person in a difficult position. Courts demand medical examination of genital organs or legal expertise that takes years and forces transsexuals to go through the same process they’d already been through, this time under the supervision of the “Mina Minovici” National Institute of Legal Medicine (NILM). They must be examined while behaving in front of everyone according to the gender they feel they belong and also obtain another diagnosis from a NILM psychiatrist to prove that they have started to look like the opposite biological sex appropriate for social norms (a transsexual woman should already have breasts and no body hair). The lawsuit can take years, and usually the plaintiff (the transsexual citizen) appeals the judgment. There is no recipe for success, and winning is both a result of skillful lawyers and open-minded judges.

Bogdan’s lawsuit lasted seven months. His papers convinced the judge, who didn’t ask for more evidence that could have delayed the result. On August 20, 2011, Bogdan Ion Niculescu got the final verdict from the 1st District court and was allowed to change his sex and legally become a woman named Alexandra Raluca.

* * *

Raluca Niculescu leaves for Bangkok in an hour, but she’s still watching videos on YouTube. She finished packing, put her new ID card and passport in her bag, and, while making the last arrangements, she remembered a video she saw about a woman who didn’t know the difference between a valve and a vulva. She stares at the screen, rolls her eyes in discontent, and pouts. She’s on the verge of swearing. “I’m not even a biological woman, I don’t study civil engineering like these ladies, and even if 1,000 cameras were to be pointed at me, I would still know what a vulva is. Because I’m going to get mine soon.”

The world’s first sex reassignment surgery was performed in 1930, in the United States, when Dora-R became a woman. In Romania, it all happened in 1995, when Sorin Florin Raţiu became Sorina. Professor Ioan Lascăr, Chief of Plastic Surgery and Reconstructive Microsurgery Department at the Floreasca Emergency Clinic Hospital, successfully performed the difficult operation, but the way the patient dealt with his sex change shadowed the medical achievement. The man who became a woman was a poor orphan who was diagnosed with gender identity disorder from the Alba Iulia Hospital of Psychiatry without too much investigation. Sorina didn’t follow the post-operative indications, and her vagina eventually shrank. She had another surgery in Sibiu, where a different surgeon made her a vagina from a piece of her large intestine. Then she went to another surgeon because her new vagina detached. Sorina wasn’t taking her hormones, and she ended up pouring tar on her face to get rid of her beard.

It was later proved that the crucial requirement for initiating the sex change process hadn’t been fulfilled: Sorin’s psychiatric evaluation was sloppy; he was mentally challenged and wasn’t able to make such an important decision about his life. His case ran on every newspaper’s front page in the country. Journalists wrote about the drama of a 19-year-old mutilated by doctors who conducted experiments on his mind and body and by a medical system incapable of managing such a case.

Raluca is determined to move forward with her plan, although she knows the sex reassignment operation is highly risky. She knows the doctor will perform an incision in her perineum, shape a vagina out of her penile skin, and then make a clitoris out of the gland and labia out of her scrotum. She knows there’s a good chance it will all turn out badly if the surgeon is inexperienced, and, at the same time, no matter how experienced the surgeon is, they still don’t meet transsexual patients as often as patients with appendicitis. She also remembers that, when she was 7, she almost died because of appendicitis.

Only six gender reassignment surgeries have been performed in Romania in 17 years: five by Dr. Lascăr from Floreasca hospital and one in 2011 at the Emergency Clinical Hospital for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and Burns by Dr. Cristian Nițescu. Many Romanian transsexuals have surgery abroad, because, in some cases, in order to legally change their sex, the judges ask them to bring medical evidence to prove they already had their desired genitalia. Surgeons in Romania do not operate unless the patient has a final legal verdict. Some transsexual people have surgery abroad because other countries are less expensive, and doctors there have more experience with this type of operation. In Ukraine, one in 30 to 50,000 people suffer from gender identity dysphoria, and the first sex reassignment operation there was performed in the late 80s, according to the online Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality. In Bulgaria, the first woman became a man in 1988, and, since then, 21 other people have undergone the same process. Poland has had at least 400 such operations, while Thailand, more to the East, is preferred by American patients – one clinic in Bangkok has been solely responsible for thousands of operations each year.

The day she saw Dr. Lascăr, Raluca came home shaking. She wanted to have surgery in Romania because she believed it was covered by her insurance (it isn’t). She’d already been to the Emergency Clinical Hospital for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and Burns and said the surgeon there asked for a bribe. She didn’t have enough for a surgery abroad, and working as a prostitute to make that kind of money would have taken way too long. The night before going to Floreasca, she was happy and told everyone she couldn’t wait to have her operation and to finally find inner peace. Back home, she was boiling with anger: “He scheduled me for the surgery in 2025, 13 years from now.”

There are very few transsexual patients who request to have their surgery at Floreasca, one of the 12 emergency hospitals in Bucharest, compared to the number of people with more serious conditions whom doctors have to take care of daily. Prioritizing sex reassignment surgeries is impossible in a system that’s not even used to spelling the diagnosis. But transsexuals are not like many other patients. They usually try desperate methods if their waiting time for the physical metamorphosis is too long. There are no studies that show precisely how many transsexual people attempt to commit suicide. It’s hard to even establish how many transsexuals live in Romania today because being transsexual means hiding from everyone. It is known that the psychological pressure among patients with gender identity dysphoria is high and that the percentage of those who try to take their lives because they despise their own body reaches dramatic levels in other countries. Research by the National Center for Transgender Equality, which involved 6,450 people, showed that, in 2010, four out of ten transgenders attempted suicide.

Raluca cried all day and not even Coca-Cola cheered her up. She kept repeating, “They made a fool of me” and said the nurses at Floreasca laughed at her, that nobody cared about her suffering, and that she didn’t care about life anymore. That same day, she wrote an email to a clinic in Thailand, where, one year before, a transsexual friend of hers had had her own surgery. The doctors told Raluca that they were ready to perform the operation on her as soon as she would have the money for the trip and the $15,000 for the surgery. In December, Raluca called her bank and asked for a substantial loan.

There are many who believe Raluca turned out very different from Bogdan and that this was overall a very good change. Raluca is more sociable and more open toward people. At the same time, many are convinced that she will regret everything she went through and that this whole transformation is nothing more than another story Bogdan invented to get everyone’s attention. Bogdan lived in his own world. He used to lie to get people to like him and not take him for a fool. Raluca is still inconsistent sometimes and full of contradictions. She exaggerates and likes to embellish the truth just to make everything more interesting. Like in the police station where she changed her legal documents after the lawsuit, when she told the clerk all about the “tiny surgery” she’d had although she hadn’t even contacted a surgeon yet. Or the times when she wants to borrow money and makes those willing to help her shed a tear for her situation. “When she lies, she tries to protect herself,” says her colleague, Irina Baltă. “She uses this little emotional… let’s call them tricks. She victimizes herself and acts more vulnerable than she really is just to gain the sympathy of others and their protection. Because it’s easier to fight with someone who fakes she’s happy, than with one who cries for help.”

Still, many people are aware that the sex transition that took six years and cost more than $20,000, many tears and sleepless nights is the only change that Raluca and Bogdan consistently carried out together, with or without external help. Raluca is not ashamed of her past or present and just wants to be a “normal girl with a normal job” (although recently she flirted with the idea of working for a porn studio to earn some easy money). She believes she’ll soon find happiness in the arms of a man who’ll love her in spite of everything, but she doesn’t dismiss the idea of having a one-night stand with a woman to spice up her life. She lives in the same studio, which she is redecorating, but wants a house on the ground with a huge garden, children, a sweet life, and a new “Mom” who’d love her unconditionally.

There are no studies to show how many transsexuals regret going through such change in their lives. According to statements, the figures are very low because the majority of transsexual people enjoy the benefits of their transition. (It’s still a known fact that they don’t enjoy sharing too many intimate details.) Once the transition is completed, many don’t even want to take part in studies because they don’t consider themselves transsexuals anymore, but simply men and women. Today, doctors and activists carry a debate about the medical methods that could help these patients in earlier stages of their lives and about giving such diagnosis to the underage. There are also heated discussions about the consequences of hormonal treatment for child patients that would stop transsexual children from physically developing into someone they refuse to be. After the transition, many transsexuals abandon their previous negative thoughts and their satisfaction reaches higher levels if the transition is successfully completed. Still, there is no turning back once the surgery is performed, and a wrong step can destroy a life.

Raluca’s family hasn’t found a way to accept what happened to their son and struggle to make peace with the situation that changed their lives and plans. Her mother goes to church more often, because she hopes to find peace, while her father spends more time alone, sometimes drinking. Raluca’s family never talks about her, not even with their close friends. They both refused to take part in this story.

Raluca rarely mentions her parents and tries to forget all about the family she’s convinced forgot all about her since she was a child, living with her grandmother. “They never cared about me. I ran to the phone every time I heard it ring, hoping that mom or dad would call to hear my voice. I stood in front of the door hoping they will one day come and visit me. All my life I wished to be myself and to have a mother to feel complete. It hurts so much not to have a family, to feel you don’t belong to anyone.” To share her pain, she took part in a short documentary on the LGBT community in Romania in which she confesses she wants “to know how it feels like for a transsexual to not be considered ill or blamed just because they want to be him or herself. I want to know how it feels like to have a family.”

Transsexuality is featured in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, but gender identity disorder might be removed from the next edition of the manual, which means it will also be removed from the list of mental illnesses treated by psychiatrists. The treatment itself could be simplified, and it could involve only a psychologist. Efforts are made to integrate this phenomenon in the administration and medical system, but a poor country has bigger problems to worry about. In Romania, there are no dedicated clinics, and doctors fear the possibility of being accused of malpractice if they give such diagnosis. (Only in 2011 the National Commission of Psychiatry released its own diagnostic criteria for transsexualism and medical considerations for the surgery.) In the end, patients are those who suffer the most. Human rights associations, such as ACCEPT, help them reach out to appropriate doctors and assist them in seeking help.

Transsexualism has raised questions worldwide on whether and how gender should be used to characterize a person. Now experts try to find an answer to questions that seemed very easy to answer in the past. “I asked doctors to define men and women,” says ACCEPT’s Executive Director, Irina Niţă. “I was surprised to not get an answer. Biologically, everyone knows who is a man and who is a woman, but you just can’t establish the line between the two. Because women have many masculine features, and men have many feminine characteristics. So when there’s someone in between, things get very complicated.”

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Raluca Niculescu became a woman on January 13, 2012. She left the country with no friends or family and spent her days alone, in a hot hospital room with nurses and doctors. Her breath was heavy, and sweat kept dripping from her forehead. Her head was swollen, and she had bandages on her lower face and neck (she also had surgery to make her masculine jaw round), around her breasts (she got breast implants), and between her legs. She let out a shriek every time she tried to move her laptop so she could type better with her right hand, but overall she was O.K. She didn’t stop smiling, and her eyes glowed with excitement behind her golden-rimmed glasses. “I finally have my pussy,” she wrote me. “I’m finally happy.”

Photo credit: Cosmin Motei/Esquire Romania