Page 3 of 6
Sparks now had a lot more to lose if his other life were revealed. He and his wife had moved into an estate in affluent Rancho Santa Fe, with a kidney-shaped pool in the courtyard. As he found his gender identity more and more oppressive, he stockpiled his life with the trappings of a macho male. He bought a Harley, and outfitted a Chevy truck with a souped-up motor. He traded in his 30-year cigarette habit for cigars. His two sons moved out to live with him, so Sparks coached the youngest's baseball and football teams.
Juggling two lives strained his health. A doctor took Sparks' blood pressure at 200/100, and said if he didn't slow down, in two years he'd be dead or in a wheelchair. Sparks took stock. He was a 45-year-old man with a heart condition and on blood pressure meds. The opportunity for change was closing.
Life gave him one last push. In 1995, Greenfield was bought out by another company, and Sparks walked away with $1.25 million from the sale. With his youngest son about to graduate high school, both his jobs — CEO and alpha dad — were ending. "All of a sudden, I went from 150 mph to nothing, and that opened the floodgates," he recalls. "I could only think about the gender issues."
In 1996, Sparks told his wife he needed to move to San Francisco to search for a job, which technically was the truth. The other truth was that the Bay Area was home to a slew of gender therapists he'd found on the Web. It was time to get help.
Sparks wasn't about to trust the opinion of just one doctor. He started with two, who both diagnosed him with gender identity disorder, the clinical condition of people whose perceived and biological genders are at odds. "They said, 'Okay, so what do you want to do? It's not going to go away.'" Upon being asked whether he wanted to transition to be a woman, he instantly felt the weight from 45 years of denial start to lift at the thought.
A third therapist, Gianna Israel, who kept an office in Hayes Valley, warned Sparks that he would probably lose his career and be abandoned by almost everyone he knew if he got a sex change. Sparks shrugged it off. His family's love seemed secure, his job credentials impeccable. "I thought that couldn't possibly happen to me," Sparks says. "I went forward with abandon."
Sparks consulted books about the most popular baby names from 1949, selecting one that preserved her first initial, T. (Sparks asked for her male name not to be printed, just as she refuses to show photos of herself pre-transition: "I don't want people particularly who know me here to have that visual.") She started with estrogen treatments and testosterone blockers to soften her body, and visited three support groups of transwomen. The shame started to erode. "I realized these aren't all sex maniacs, porn stars, or freaks," she says. "They're people like me."
Yet it's one thing to declare yourself a woman; it's another to actually convince the world you are one. Israel pushed Sparks to take the major first step: to come to her appointment in women's clothes. Sparks was terrified to step outside of her Marina apartment — cross-dressing was always something she did in private. Still, wanting to meet the challenge, she put on a business skirt suit, dark hose, and heels — "typical Theresa," Sparks says — and headed to therapy. Accomplishing that, her homework for the next appointment was to ride the bus: "It's kind of like you get on a Muni bus at 5 o'clock naked." Many people would stare. Sparks figured the fully transitioned transwomen at Divas bar in the Tenderloin assumed she was simply a cross-dresser by her "awkward" forays into women's clothing, a $300 wig pulled over her still-short hair.
Sparks told her second wife, and after attempting to work it out for a couple of months — Sparks admits she didn't know if it would work, "I guess I would have liked it to" — they divorced. Back visiting in Kansas City in 1997, Sparks met her adult children in a park and explained why she now had longer hair and looked more androgynous after a year of hormone treatments, and told them the real reason behind the divorce from their mother years before. Everyone ended up in tears. Though Sparks' daughter stayed in contact, her sons' calls tapered off to none over the next weeks.
Sparks sent her siblings books on transgender issues; only a dog-eared Bible came in return. "One of my brothers actually said that ... he would hire a bum, wino, homeless person, or drug addict before he would hire a transgender person," Sparks says. "He said, 'You're going to starve, and I'm not going to help you.'"
Sparks applied for more than 100 jobs and was called in for five interviews, only to be told she wasn't qualified, or she was overqualified. Meanwhile, her expenses were increasing. She was paying for three weekly therapist appointments, electrolysis, and voice training, as well as building her wardrobe from scratch. Her post-divorce savings plummeted, and she went into debt. To offset the damage, she sold off the totems of her former life: Cartier watch, Armani tux, 1969 Mercedes convertible.
Sparks eventually couldn't make rent, and moved in with two friends from her single Southern California days who had moved to Sonoma County. Storti was shocked by the transformation: For Sparks "to get into Theresa, he wanted to totally change. So, basically, he killed [the male Sparks] to create Theresa. And quite frankly, it was like a slow death — like watching an old friend die."
Sparks also found a spot on the couch of DeSoto cab driver and then–taxi commissioner Jane Bolig, whom she'd met at a transgender social group, and took her up on the idea of becoming a driver. Sparks calls the job "transsexual boot camp," in which she could try out a new voice and persona with each new customer. Yet the effort left little attention for the road. Her first day on the job, Sparks rear-ended a car on Van Ness, and a woman stepped out of the car and berated her with transgender epithets. The scene attracted people from a nearby bar to join the chorus of "faggot," "pervert," "sir," and "mister."
