Imagine It

You're a robust man in excess of six feet in height, and very manly.  Manly enough to have married, had children.  Manly enough to have joined the military.  In fact, your entire career has been within the military.  It's a family tradition.  Michael Hamelin's father was in the Canadian Forces.  Stationed for awhile in Germany where he met Michael's mother.  And Michael was born in Germany.

He returned to Canada with his parents when he was quite young.  "I know it was Canada because we had a basement.  I must have been about five years old.  I saw my mother's heels in the basement, and I put them on."  He describes being in Grade 4: "I spent the entire year studying the girls.  I was brought to a psychiatrist and saw him only once.  He dismissed me as girl-crazy.

"My parents were mad at me - they wanted me to do my work, but I was studying the girls full-time - not because I was girl-crazy but because I was crazy about being a girl."  And Michael grew up, and enlisted in the infantry and was transferred to CFB Petawawa.  He joined the Royal Canadian regiment.  "I was trained to kill, to jump off towers and out of helicopters."

Michael served with the military in Germany, in Cyprus, in Winnipeg, in Kingston and in North Bay.  And eventually, after three decades in the military he was given a medical discharge.  He was twice married, and also had a long-term relationship with another women.  His two children are now fully grown.  In 2007 Michael was diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder, and began taking female hormones.

Around this time he met a woman and married her.  He had informed her candidly about his cross-dressing and about taking hormones.  It was her impression that he didn't appear like an attractive woman, so he stopped taking hormones.  They were married for several years before the marriage ended.  And then he resumed taking female hormones, and informed his extended family that he planned on changing gender.

Michael is now Michelle.  And Michelle works at Kingston Penitentiary, at the age of 49, a blossoming woman with dark curly hair in female garb.  "I like the bling", she says.  "I'm enjoying myself for the first time in my life.  I think I look like a man dressed like a woman.  But I'm not a gay man, I'm in transition from male to female.

Her supervisors at the Kingston Pen are understanding and supportive, and so are her co-workers.  Michelle has applied for a legal name change.  She is having her facial hair removed by electrolysis.  She is anticipating a number of surgeries; one for facial feminization, another in the future for full-blown gender reassignment surgery.

"What I want to see is a world where those that come out as transgendered will not be humiliated.  That's my mission and I will keep talking about this topic for as long as it takes.  Gender is in the head, not in the genitals", she tells a reporter, writing a story on Michelle Hamelin.