Long wait list has woman considering Thailand for gender reassignment surgery

By Cynthia Mulligan

Danica Rain was born a man but knew from an early age she was a woman; hiding who she really was was destroying her.

“It was killing me, it was killing me inside,” she says.

Danica grew up as Denie and was a firefighter and paramedic in Sudbury, a father to a beautiful daughter and engaged to her mother but she couldn’t keep up the lie. She was 33 years old, depressed and suicidal.

That’s when she moved to Toronto and transitioned to Danica. Six years ago she began hormone therapy, had breast implants and started to feel like herself.

Then she made the decision to go ahead with gender reassignment surgery, also known as gender confirmation surgery.

After waiting for more than a year for a doctor’s referral she came up against an even bigger hurdle. There are no surgeons that can do the surgery in Ontario. There is only one clinic in the entire country that offers the surgery, the Centre Metropolitain de Chirurgie in Montreal, which was recently targeted by a suspected arsonist.

“A surgical centre in Ontario would require physicians who are trained in the surgery to want to practice in Ontario,” Minister of Health and Long-Term care spokesperson, Joshua McLarnon said. “There are no surgeons currently performing external genital sex reassignment surgery in Ontario.”

Danica has been told the wait list for her to go to Montreal would be two years, a prospect that is difficult for her to bear.

“In the fiscal year 2015 and 2016, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care funded 158 sex reassignment surgeries at a cost of $3 million dollars,” said McLarnon, who added that in 2015, the ministry funded 10 gender reassignment surgeries in the U.S.

“Mentally it’s draining, I find it really hard because I’m always worried,” she said. “Transphobia is out there I guess you could say. I don’t even use public transit. I’m afraid, I feel uncomfortable when I’m around large groups of people. When I lived in Sudbury I endured a lot.”

The province recently introduced new regulations that allow Ontario residents to go out of province or out of country for gender reassignment surgery and Danica has started the process to go to Thailand. If approved by OHIP, she could be the first funded patient from this province to go there.

She believes the roughly $20,000 cost is comparable to going to Montreal or the US and she would pay for her flight and accommodations on her own. She has been told by a clinic in Thailand she could have the surgery as early as February.

McLarnon said as of now, the ministry has not approved applications for OHIP-insured gender reassignment surgery in Thailand.

But Danica said she is still hopeful.

“I think it’s going to finally make me feel normal,” she said. “When I look in the mirror I see myself, I don’t see this guy that I used to be.”

“Once I get the surgery done it’s the last piece of the puzzle – the last part of me that needs to be finished.”

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