Activist Chaz Bono speaks about transition

Before transitioning from a woman to a man, transgender activist Chaz Bono said he had a choice: to live a lie or the life he was supposed to.

As part of Sexploration Week, Bono spoke Thursday night at the IU Auditorium.

Bono lost his partner to cancer before his 25th birthday and then lost his father.
Adding to this, the looming thought that he was transgender and the medical issues associated with it led to self-destructive behavior.

“I really kind of got to a point where I won’t say I was suicidal, but I would have been really happy if I got hit by a bus,” he said.

Bono said even as a child, he wished he was a boy. He play with boy’s toys, wore  boy’s clothes and had mostly boy friends.

When he was in second or third grade, his mother, singer Cher, wanted him to wear a skirt or dress to school at least once a week. One of his male friends asked him why he looked like a girl. Bono said he stopped wearing dresses that day.

“Everything skewed in a male direction,” he said. “My mom always had expectations of me as something completely different. She kind of got robbed of that.”

He said as a child he tried to stick to the rules as a means of trying to be a boy “in some less offensive way.”

“One of my really big issues throughout my whole life was that I was, ya know, a people pleaser,” he said. “I had lived kind of my whole life of trying to make everybody else okay before I could be OK.”

Bono said problems arose when he hit puberty. Not only were adults expecting him to act more like a woman, but he said his body “betrayed him.”

“I think that, ya know, if you talk to almost any transgender adult who had to go through puberty the wrong way, they’ll tell you that it’s really one of the most horrifying, frightening and terrible experiences,” he said.

Bono said there were “red flags” throughout the years that he should have realized meant something deeper, such as being the most comfortable portraying a male role in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and thinking about getting involved with politics until realizing he would be called “congresswoman.”

Bono officially began his journey from woman to man on March 8, 2009. He said the first time he put testosterone into his body, it felt right and natural.

“I remember having a sense of feeling that something that my body was desperately needing and craving my whole life finally got put into me,” he said. “It was like if you have scurvy and you finally got some vitamin C.”

Six months into his process, he had his breasts removed.

“That was kind of to me, at least, the final piece of the puzzle getting put into place,” he said.

As part of the process, Bono said he had to learn to put himself first.

“I had not only the right but really the responsibility to take care of my needs first and foremost,” he said. “This was my life and, as far as I know, my one and only life. I have a right to live it happily and to be who I want to be and do what I want to do.”