The woman she was always meant to be

At 56, Lee Snelson can confidently say that she is now the woman she was always meant to be.

Last month, the local cabinet-maker had her final gender reassignment surgery, completing her transition.

With her index finger, she flips her bangs from her forehead.

“I am projecting my real inner self to you now,” she says.

Her smile is wide and bright. There is true happiness in her voice. There is peace in her words.

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“It feels like I can just live my life and be me now,” she says. “I have this real sense of freedom, because I have transitioned. I have gone through the thing I was most frightened of growing up.”

As Lee explains, her journey started as a child in the early 70s, growing up in England.

From an early age, Lee says she knew she didn’t want to be a boy — she wanted to be a female, a wife, a mother.

Lee says those feelings were inside her, there is no other way to explain it other than to say, it was just there.

The cross-dressing started at the age of five and continued throughout her teens and into her twenties — Lee says before the cross-dressing was a sexual thing, it a was comfort.

She wore her mother’s clothing when her parents would leave the house.

Lee recalls her teens being the most formative years of her life, which included a move from England to the Okanagan in 1976.

She said she was trying to understand not only an new country and new surroundings, but a growing, undefined feeling inside.

The glam rock scene of the 1970s was a time when androgyny and individualism was celebrated.

All of a sudden there were flamboyant artists like David Bowie who were wearing makeup and flashy clothes; and to a teenaged Lee, it was new and exciting — It was everything she wanted to express but didn’t know how.

In the Okanagan in the late 70s and 80s topics like being transgender weren’t discussed, but being a flamboyant singer of a rock band meant you weren’t just talked about, you were celebrated.

“For all those years, I was desperately trying to be a guy, and, it worked. But, today, I am a lot more comfortable with who I am, back then I don’t think I ever really was,” she says.

When Lee is asked how the trans community is today versus how it was when she was younger, she says the community is where it has always been, “mainly underground.” — many trans people still keep to themselves.

“You can feel it. You can sense it inside,” Lee says of the looks and judgement from the public. “But, that is happening fewer and farther between now.”

For Lee, in every sense of the word, becoming a woman was a transition, not only for herself, but for those around her.

“I had always believed it to be a transition. I don’t think you can smash it into somebody’s face, and expect them to accept it, especially people who have known you for such a long time,” she says.

It has been eight years since she started her transition, four years since she began fully dressing in women’s clothing and three years since she had her first gender reassignment surgery. Yet Lee still finds, from time to time, she is correcting her coworkers or family when they use the wrong pronoun.

For the record, Lee says it is “she or her,” but she no longer lets it get to her.

“They are just going to have to accept me for who I am and what I am,” she says with a smirk.

Since she came out as transgender, there were some relationships that ended or became strained, but the one she hopes to repair the most is the one with her son.

In her late twenties, Lee married a woman who had a son. The couple raised the boy together from the age of four until he moved out at 19.

Lee was a dad.

Like so many couples, though, Lee and her wife drifted apart, eventually ending the marriage after nearly 15 years together.

In the wake of the separation, the undefined feelings Lee grew up with, that never fully went away, began to grow inside her.

She began cross-dressing again.

It was roughly a year after the marriage ended that Lee began her transition.

One of the most powerful and gratifying moments came early on.

After several specialists appointments, meeting with doctors, and a lifetime of not being able to explain or understand her feelings inside, Lee was given an answer — she was finally diagnosed with gender dysphoria: “the condition of feeling one’s emotional and psychological identity as male or female to be opposite to one’s biological sex.”

There was no longer any question, Lee was transgender.

“I walked out of the doctor’s office two feet off the ground,” she says. “It was like I could finally say ‘I told you so.'”

That was eight years ago.

Lee’s gender dysphoria still manifests from time to time and it still causes her pangs of anxiety.

Sometimes it is in how she sees her nose, some days it is how she sees her brow line.

“I’ve always said this is a transition,” she said.