This April, my boss sent me on a last-minute business trip to Australia. Fortunately my friend LeighAnn was also going there, and I was able to schedule a week of vacation time with her and her friend Claire in Sydney and Perth before beginning my work.
We spent several days of fun in Sydney, doing things like climbing onto the Sydney harbor bridge and spending an evening dancing with a group of Chinese tourists on a tour boat. On Friday, we flew to Perth so we could visit Alexandra Macmillan and her mother Renata.
LeighAnn had met Alex earlier, when Alex was in the United States for reassignment and facial feminization surgery. The two became good friends and kept in touch.
Alex picked us up at the Perth airport, and we went to stay with her and her mother for the weekend. As we traveled around Perth, seeing the sites, I came to learn much more about Alex’s story. She had just turned 22 a few weeks before. About a year and a half earlier, she had had her GRS in the United States. To pay for this, and the facial feminization, her mother took out a second mortgage on her house. Alex’s dad, divorced from her mother, made an arduous journey from Australia to Oregon, determined to stop the GRS from taking place. By the time he arrived, he decided to accept her and encouraged her to proceed.
The Macmillan house is decorated with stunning artworks and I looked about for the artists’ signatures. There weren’t any. My favorite was a painting of plants reflected in water on an autumn day. It turned out Alex painted them all and was studying to become an architect and a designer.
Alex loves to dance, and since I do as well, we both went out to a large casino in Perth with a dance club on Saturday PM. The music was mostly classic disco and house. After several hours of dancing and fending off the advances of several Australian men, we head home.
Sunday we take LeighAnn and Claire to the airport – I have a business meeting in Perth on Monday so I will stay over an extra day. This gives Alex and I more time to get to know each other. We talk about art, the internet, the transgender experience and the issues of coping with the depression that vexes many transgenders both before and for a time after GRS. I notice a hint of desperation in her manner, particularly on Monday morning before she drops me off at my business meeting. Clearly our visit was invigorating for her and she dreads her return to the relative isolation she experiences in Perth, with no real support network to fall back on. We discuss ways of coping – I encourage her to find friends online, and to become involved in some way with other people. We hug and say goodbye, and she drives off.
My meeting goes well, and so does my longer visit to Adelaide beginning later that day. I return to the USA, and after a week, head over to the Diva Las Vegas gathering at the end of April. My friend Lannie and I had a grand time partying and dancing there – and as is typical, I arrive back at my room at sunrise. I play back a message from LeighAnn informing me that Alex had committed suicide several days before, and that 20 hours after finding out, her mother had done the same.
I am stunned. Then the questions come. Why would an incredibly beautiful 22-year-old new woman with enormous talent and a supportive family end it all? Why did her mother, an intelligent and loving being, do the same? Did the ecstasy pill her friends gave her on her birthday make things much worse? Was there anything I could have done to recognize how dire the circumstances were and to have intervened in some way?
There is also anger. Why did she befriend me, form an emotional bond with me, and then dump me in this ugly way? Where was the support network to help Alex cope with the universal experience of post-operative depression?
Digging deeper, I learn troubling facts that bring on more questions and more anger. Why did the Australian health service make her wait several months after an earlier suicide attempt before giving her an appointment with a psychiatrist, scheduled for one month after she died? Since it turned out that Alex had GRS surgery without undergoing the "real life test", who were the idiots who let her fall through the cracks?
I think of her smile, her artwork, the variety of her personality that I glimpsed for so brief a time and the tears come back. I replay the scene of her dancing with me and feel her hugging me that time when I felt upset. Meeting her and her mother was the highlight of my trip and I will never see either of them again.
I started in the transgender community as a very active volunteer. Later, after my transition, I morphed into a party girl who teased those who courted me and danced the night away. Why not? The internet revolution and the transgender rights movement had solved all the problems we had, and I could kick back and enjoy life.
No, Jamie, the war is not over.