KEY POINTS:
On September 9, 2005, Christchurch Police Constable Stephen Lurajud became Constable Sarah Lurajud. The date is etched in her mind.
For 45 years she had lived as a male. For 20 of those years she was married.
But even before she went to kindergarten, she knew she was a female trapped inside a male body.
Her story, as the only police officer in New Zealand history to undergo a sex change, is told in her own words for the first time in a report published by the Human Rights Commission today.
The report recommends rewriting the law to let people change the gender on their passports and birth certificates to the gender they identify with, regardless of their bodily features.
It also recommends amending the Human Rights Act to make it illegal to discriminate against gender identity in the same way as discrimination on grounds of race is illegal.
Ms Lurajud said that the proposal would "put the trans community on a level playing field with everybody else".
But the report lobs a hot election-year potato into the lap of the Labour Government, two years after ministers shelved a bill from transsexual MP Georgina Beyer to add "gender identity" to the list of illegal grounds for discrimination under the Human Rights Act.
Labour ally NZ First slammed the bill at the time as "gender-bending" legislation. MP Dail Jones said: "If you're born a male, you stay a male. If you're born a female, you stay a female.
"If you want to start fiddling around and changing your body, that's a decision you make and you must bear the consequences."
But Ms Lurajud, 49, said she did not choose to have "gender dysphoria" - a mismatch between her mind and body.
"I knew from a very early age," she said. "I didn't have a name for it, I didn't understand it, but I was female as far as what was between my ears was concerned.
"It caused me huge problems because a lot of our personality and how we interact with people starts with our sex, and for me I was really operating on a foundation that was all wrong. It was awful.
"I have always said I wouldn't have cared whether I'd been born male or female as long as I was put together right.
"I simply wasn't. The sex of my body didn't match the gender of my brain."
She had "a normal upbringing" with both parents and an older brother. But she didn't tell anybody what was going on in her mind.
"In the generation I grew up in, I saw no future unless I made the best of being a man," she said.
"I made a decision that I was going to hide. Everything I did, including joining the police, was about hiding. It was all-consuming. I presented myself in the most masculine way I could."
But at 45, she snapped.
"It caught up with me. It wore me down. It got to a point where I was dying inside and I needed to deal with it," she said.
One day she "blurted it out" to a close friend, and then to her wife.
She sought psychological help and decided to change her body to match her female identity.
Her marriage collapsed, but the police gave her stress leave for much of 2004 to get through her mental breakdown.
"The process is a really, really tough time. When you do it at my age, you tear your life down, basically, and have to start all over again," she said.
She spent $18,000 on laser treatment to remove hair from most of her body, and altogether counselling, hormone treatment, hair removal and surgery have cost her $70,000 to $80,000.
Apart from the time on stress leave, she has done it all while working as a frontline police officer, and she says colleagues, friends and family have been "really great".
The oestrogen has changed her mind as well as her body - "women have a tendency to have more highs and lows" - but she has got used to it.
"I've adjusted to all the things I haven't had to contend with for most of my life. It's a whole package - you don't get to pick and choose," she said. "It has allowed me to be normal. I am able to just be myself. I'm female."
CHANGING SEXES
* In Europe one in every 30,000 men and one in 100,000 women have sought sex change operations.
* 400 New Zealanders (0.01 per cent) show their gender as 'X' rather than male or female in their passports.
* 400 to 800 people belong to NZ transgender groups.
* 10 to 20 out of 8100 New Zealand prisoners are transgender.
* 159 out of 2307 NZ sex workers questioned in an Otago University survey last year were transgender.
