-
When Dad became Mum – Channel 9 – 60 minutes
When Dad Becomes Mum
Friday, August 21, 2009Reporter: JuJu Chang, Primetime
Producer: Naria HalliwellThe neighbours probably thought the Princes were just your average suburban family. Mum Renee, dad Ted and two young sons. Little did they know.
Even as a boy, Ted knew he was different. He had a secret. He loved wearing dresses and yearned to be a girl. Then, as a young man, he met Renee, they fell in love and were married.
For a while, everything was okay, but eventually Ted’s confusion and frustration got the better of him. And, in May last year, he had gender re-assignment surgery and became a woman called Chloe.
So now daddy is mummy and, as JuJu Chang reports, the Prince family has changed forever.
Moderator
Quote:Full transcript follows copied from http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=852709 for members reference.STORY –
JUJU CHANG: Oh my goodness, look at your muscles!
JUJU CHANG: In the year 2009, two women living together as a couple, raising their sons, may not be typical – but it’s not unheard of, even here in northern Ohio. And like all couples, Rene and Chloe Prince struggle with work, finances and raising their sons, Logan and Barry, ages 7.5 and 6. But this is not a typical story of two moms. Do you feel like you’ve been selfish in some of these choices that you’ve made?
CHLOE PRINCE: I carry the selfishness as guilt around constantly. I did what I had to do, and had I not done what I did, there would be a gravestone somewhere with my name on it.
JUJU CHANG: Chloe Prince is a male-to-female transsexual. Her gender reassignment surgery happened in May of 2008. For the past year, we followed Chloe and her family as that gigantic plunge into womanhood continues to leave ripple effects.
CHLOE PRINCE: When you decide to transition, everybody else transitions with you.
JUJU CHANG: Whether they want to or not?
CHLOE PRINCE: Whether they want to or not.
JUJU CHANG: It’s a transition that had been coming for more than 30 years.
CHLOE PRINCE: I was a happy little boy. I just had my Tonka trucks like every little boy out there.
JUJU CHANG: So you were boyish boy, it sounds like?
CHLOE PRINCE: Yeah, I was a boyish boy. I remember days sitting in classes, and it was torture. I would look at these girls with this long, beautiful hair. I couldn’t sort it out, whether, you know, I wanted to be that girl or be with that girl, and it was very hard.
JUJU CHANG: Ted felt completely alone, unaware of the millions of people who struggle with gender identity issues. By his late 20s, desperate to get his life on track, Ted got engaged to Rene, a redhead he’d had his eye on for years. So, you set out to get hitched?
CHLOE PRINCE: I did.
JUJU CHANG: And so you met Rene?
CHLOE PRINCE: I met Rene.
JUJU CHANG: And legitimately fell in love?
CHLOE PRINCE: Yep. I loved her. SONG: # Another day and you open your eyes #
CHLOE PRINCE: We dated for three weeks, and I proposed to her. The first question my Mom asked me was, “Did you tell her?” Because my Mom knew, I confided to my Mom that I had these feelings early on in my ’20s.
JUJU CHANG: Not only feelings, but a walk-in closet full of women’s clothing, in size extra large.
CHLOE PRINCE: I told Rene right before we got married. I opened up the closet and I said, “Everything in this room belongs to me.” And she says, “Oh. Oh.”
RENE PRINCE: And he told me he went to counselling and the counsellor said, “You’re fine”. And I just thought that was an aspect of him that I could live with, you know?
JUJU CHANG: So, you didn’t think…
RENE PRINCE: It wasn’t going to interfere with our life.
JUJU CHANG: And it wasn’t going to stop your romance, or your marriage?
RENE PRINCE: Right.
JUJU CHANG: Ted and Rene had a private wedding ceremony in the Poconos, and within months, Rene was expecting their first son. By the summer of 2003, life settles into a reliable rhythm. But a quick spin on his motorcycle was about to change everything.
CHLOE PRINCE: Got on my motorcycle, started down my street, and a bee went down the front of my shirt. And I told Rene, I’ve been stung by a bee. And she knew that that was serious because I’m highly allergic.
JUJU CHANG: A blood test at the hospital led to an endocrinologist, and a diagnosis that Ted says explained why he felt so different his entire life.
CHLOE PRINCE: And they sat me down, they said, “Are you aware of having Klinefelter’s syndrome?” And I says, “No, what is that?”
JUJU CHANG: It’s one of the most common chromosomal abnormalities in humans. Normally, a male is born XY and a female XX. But one out of every 500 boys is born XXY.
CHLOE PRINCE: This is why I tap dance like a little cat on the fence of the gender line, you know, why I can’t commit to either side. Appearance wise, I look like every other male, but on a DNA chromosomal scale, I was neither.
JUJU CHANG: With an actual medical diagnosis, Ted finally felt free to express his secret persona.
CHLOE PRINCE: I wanted to physically align my body, in appearance, with how I felt inside. I wanted to be authentically myself.
JUJU CHANG: Which was female?
CHLOE PRINCE: Which was female.
RENE PRINCE: When the Klinefelter’s kicked in, that was when he lost his strength to be a man.
CHLOE PRINCE: Well, Rene saw it on a daily basis. And each day it was another death for her, because it would be something like, I would start adding earrings, or I started adding a woman’s ring on my finger.
JUJU CHANG: That you would walk out the door with?
CHLOE PRINCE: Yeah, with… with men’s clothes still on.
JUJU CHANG: Four years after the bee sting, Ted officially changed his name to Chloe, and began living life full-time as a woman.
RENE PRINCE: I didn’t want to accept it, and begged, pleaded, cried, “Please don’t. Honour your mother and father.” And, “How can you do this?” And, “The kids need a dad,” and nothing I could say would change.
JUJU CHANG: Feeling as if he had no other choice, Ted, now Chloe, forged ahead. In May 2008, she flew to Thailand for their world-renowned sex change specialists. After 13 hours of surgery, her male brow bone was shaved down and her penis was refashioned to form a vagina. When you first got a real glimpse of yourself as a woman, what was that like?
CHLOE PRINCE: There was no hint of the man behind the woman. It was just the girl. And it was magic. The nightmare was over.
JUJU CHANG: And yet you’ve also described it as, opening a Pandora’s box?
CHLOE PRINCE: Yeah.
RENE PRINCE: You know, Chloe is completely a woman, and you would never, never, think anything other than that. But to me, I don’t see that. I still hear my husband, same voice. I still see the eyes, I still see the same eyes.
CHLOE PRINCE: I still see her through the same eyes that Ted did. She’s still the same gorgeous, you know, beautiful woman. So, she’s three feet away from me in bed, and I want to go over there, and I want to hug her, I want to kiss her, you know? And I can smell her. It’s tortuous. And when the lights are off, she says, “I can still hear Ted’s voice. “And I can even smell it’s still the same.” But she says, “I’m not a lesbian.”
JUJU CHANG: Are there ever moments in the quiet times, in the dark, where you forget for a second?
RENE PRINCE: Mm-mm.
JUJU CHANG: It’s always there?
RENE PRINCE: Mmmm. I warned him, “I can’t do that”. And I think that he thought that I was going to change, that it was going to change. Somehow, I would still feel like having sex, and I don’t.
JUJU CHANG: Where does the physical affection end? Where is the line?
CHLOE PRINCE: The physical affection ends with a hug. She still kisses me.
RENE PRINCE: Just not with, I’m not crazy about the lipstick.
CHLOE PRINCE: But there is no intimacy.
RENE PRINCE: Oh, I miss, I miss being able to go out on a date with my husband, and sit next to him and hug him and kiss him in public. I don’t feel comfortable doing that.
JUJU CHANG: Any woman watching this at home, any mom would be like, you get married, one of you is the mom, one of you is the dad. You’re holding up your end of the bargain.
RENE PRINCE: Yeah. It gets confusing. It’s not that I’m not, I’m not saying I’m not happy. I won’t say that. OK? That’s not a good thing to say. No, I’m fine.
JUJU CHANG: The constant conflict at home pushes Chloe to think about other options, including men.
CHLOE PRINCE: You know, holding doors for you, and they talk to you so gentle, and they look at you and there’s a sparkle in their eye, like, that people get around a pretty girl. And I just light up and I respond to that so well.
JUJU CHANG: Have you ever been hit on?
CHLOE PRINCE: A lot. I get hit on all the time. It sounds so, like, full of myself, but, yeah.
JUJU CHANG: Part of the appeal of men is that they make Chloe feel like a real woman, because at home… ..she still wears the pants.
CHLOE PRINCE: Rene will say, “Can you mow the lawn?” And she says to me, “That’s my husband’s job. “You’re my husband, you do that job.” I would probably put myself in, still, the position as being the husband in the house. I am the one that does all the heavy lifting. I’m the one that goes to work and climbs telephone poles for a living. And I’m the disciplinarian, you know, for the children.
JUJU CHANG: And who will teach them sports and who will teach them how to be a man?
CHLOE PRINCE: I will do that too. CHLOE PRINCE WITH HER BOYS: You know what you do to impress the babes when you’re walking by? You show your muscles like this. When you’re going by, you go like this, “Which way to the beach?”
JUJU CHANG: Did you always have two mommies?
LOGAN AND BARRY PRINCE: No. Well, she probably just, he just woke up as a girl. She. He just woke up as a girl? She. She.
JUJU CHANG: She woke up as a girl. Do you know what happened?
LOGAN AND BARRY PRINCE: She had a girl inside her and so she went on a surgery to get it out.
JUJU CHANG: Really? Chloe had tried to explain to her children gently, but thoroughly, about her transition.
CHLOE PRINCE: Well, Momma Ne is your momma, and I am your daddy. But for the rest of my life, I will be living…
LOGAN AND BARRY PRINCE: As a girl.
CHLOE PRINCE: ..as a girl. And I will be fulfilling the role of being another mother. And you get the benefit of having two moms and a dad. Who gets that?
LOGAN AND BARRY PRINCE: Not very much people.
CHLOE PRINCE: Yeah.
LOGAN AND BARRY PRINCE: It feels like having two moms and zero dads.
JUJU CHANG: Even with the future of their marriage uncertain, Chloe insists on shedding her former self. She’s giving away all her men’s clothes. Renee, how do you feel packing away Ted’s clothes?
RENEE PRINCE: I’m a little sad, because it brings back memories of when, when… It’s just a sad thing to say goodbye.
CHLOE PRINCE: It’s unworkable. If I could write history, I would like Rene to have a husband. I don’t want to let her go, but I know I have to. I want to, but I don’t want to. There’s selfish parts of me that love seeing my children every day and love seeing her every day. And she’s not living the full life that she would like to, the life that she’s earned and deserved.
JUJU CHANG: Do you want to stay married to Chloe?
RENE PRINCE: I don’t want to get – no, I’m not planning that. I’m not planning that. So if she says, “Rene, I want a divorce,” and she goes through that, OK. And what am I going to do?
JUJU CHANG: Do you ever miss not having a daddy?
LOGAN AND BARRY PRINCE: No. Not that much, but we kind of do.
JUJU CHANG: You kind of do?
LOGAN AND BARRY PRINCE: Yeah.
JUJU CHANG: But mostly, they just want to see their parents happy, together. Does Momma Ne and Momma Chloe ever disagree on things?
LOGAN AND BARRY PRINCE: Sometimes.
JUJU CHANG: Yeah? Like what.
LOGAN AND BARRY PRINCE: She doesn’t like her changing into a girl.
JUJU CHANG: She doesn’t like her changing into a girl?
LOGAN AND BARRY PRINCE: Momma Ne. Yeah. We feel bad and we don’t want them to argue. Yeah, we just want them to, like, be happy. Be happy that they have each other.
JUJU CHANG: Even though so much has changed, much has stayed the same. And although they’re still struggling, they are not yet ready to give up on their marriage.
RENE PRINCE: What’s bigger is that I still love that person. I still love him, her.
JUJU CHANG: Oh, boy.
RENE PRINCE: I’m not trying to be funny.
JUJU CHANG: No, I know. That’s what’s so amazing. I know you’re not trying to be funny. I know that, that’s…
RENE PRINCE: It’s really hard.
JUJU CHANG: ..part of what you live with. What arguments have you made to yourself to stay in this marriage? Why stay?
RENE PRINCE: We’re a family, and what happened to him should not end that. I just feel like, that is not enough to make our family go away, to end our family.
JUJU CHANG: If you were to look into a crystal ball, which you don’t have, and see your life 10, 15 years from now, what would you think it would look like?
CHLOE PRINCE: How would I like it to be? Being able to be ourselves and just enjoying being ourselves, and really being happy about what we’ve accomplished and achieved, and being able to just…breathe. It’s all behind us now.
-
1 Reply
-
I’ve been offline for a few months and I didn’t get to see this on TV. I just read it all and oh my.. oh my… I feel so sorry for Renee. She didn’t sound happy about it at all. And the children. *sigh*
I know there are a lot of people in their situation, some get through it better than others and those that do the documentary’s don’t always get to decide exactly who is going to be on the show, and this is what the public see and understand of it no one can really control that. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed it but the majority of what you see on TV related to this topic is more negative rather than positive. Personally I know a lot of TG people out there who are happy with their lives! Go figure.Klinefelter’s syndrome is not an indication of transsexualism, just because your chromosomes are XXY doesn’t mean anything.
Hundreds of people have their chromosomes tested and live perfectly happy lives with different chromosomes to their born sex. The olympics began testing chromosomes decades ago and informed hundreds of people with ‘abnormalities’ who happily continued on with their lives with no changes.
It’s an inconclusive form of diagnoses, and again this is what the public see.. misinformation. Sure Chloe felt female and I’m not saying her decision was wrong, I’m focused on the show suggesting the ’cause’ of transsexualism, if that is the way they communicated it beyond text.
Gosh I love T.V. *cough*
S.x
