KEY POINTS:
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 ever since 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.
Constable Lurajud told the Herald that the proposal, if implemented, 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 Constable 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. It dominated my life.
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.
Completely without forethought, one day she "blurted it out" to a close friend, and then to her wife.
"I just fell over and everything unravelled from there on. I was pretty much in a mess then. I was just tired. I was vulnerable."
Finally she sought psychological help and decided to change her body to match her female identity. Her marriage collapsed, but the police gave her paid stress leave for much of 2004 to begin the long process of changing.
"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.
"It was not a choice. It became a matter of survival. I needed to face up to who I was. It was a nightmare, but I did."
She spent $18,000 on laser treatment alone 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. Her 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."
Tom Hamilton spent his first 27 years as a girl called Katherine - but knew from the age of 3 that he was really a boy.
Mr Hamilton, a 33-year-old Waitakere community worker, has female genitalia but lived his pre-puberty years as a "tomboy".
"I saw myself as a man by things like copying what my brother did. That's what I saw in me - I knew I was a boy," he says.
That early utopia ended abruptly when he developed breasts and started menstruating at 11.
"It was soul-destroying," he says. "I became this angry young kid. I closed up completely. I played hockey. I did everything I could to be as masculine as possible."
By the time he went to university he was an active lesbian. But he believes the stress of still hiding his masculinity pushed him into quitting before finishing his photography degree.
"I couldn't hold jobs down because jobs were also huge gender minefields to me."
He moved to Melbourne and, with a friend, started drag-king cabaret evenings which are still running under the name "King Victoria". "The motivation was to get people who were trans to come to the event."
After a spell teaching English in Korea, he followed an American partner to Chicago and began performing every weekend.
At one stage he worked in the sex industry - like a disproportionate number of transgendered people, especially men who become women.
"If you are a young trans person, where do you see trans people? Some of these girls see their sisters on the streets and want to be with their sisters," he says.
"Perhaps there is something around how trans people understand sexuality. Maybe we have elements of extreme worthlessness around our sexuality, and elements of extreme understanding."
Finally, he "got the courage to transition" - he started hormone treatment.
Six years later, his back and limbs are hairy and he has grown a wispy beard and moustache. He looks and sounds convincingly masculine - in contrast to many men who become women but never lose their deep voices.
"Testosterone is much more powerful than oestrogen," he explains.
"The whole shape of your body changes. The fat in your legs moves up, I have my beer-belly, my bum is smaller. I had major cramping pains in the legs."
Three years ago he got his breasts chopped off in Thailand. He says he could have had it done here but it would have cost twice as much and the Thai surgeon specialises in creating new male chests, moving the nipple up and putting some of the original breast tissue back in male form.
Afterwards, he was "ecstatic". But he grieved as well for part of his body gone.
He would like a hysterectomy to remove his womb because he still gets stomach cramps and fears what the hormones might do in the long term.
But he sees no need for the ultimate step of replacing his vagina with a penis - a highly complex and rare procedure.
"Genitalia does not make you a man or a woman," he says.
"I have met many people who are not transgendered who have genitalia that does not match the clothing they wear.
"I strongly believe in breaking down those barriers around identity and gender markers and making the world a place where if you want to wear a dress to work, you can, and if you have breasts and a beard you can still swim in a pool in the bathers that you prefer to wear."
