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"I remember she came home that evening in tears," Bolig says. "And the next day she got up and went to work again. ... No matter what kind of hit she took, she just kept trying."
Eventually the company didn't renew Sparks' lease after, at her count, four fender-benders in a year. She found work as a Census taker, and was beginning to think she'd never be employed up to her credentials again.
Gradually, Sparks was able to save enough for the next step in her transition. While women who take testosterone can lower their voices within months, no amount of estrogen will raise a biological man's voice. A surgeon stretched her vocal cords to raise the pitch of her voice a full octave, but the surgery didn't take. After about a year, her voice once again descended to its original range.
While Sparks had assumed that she would have to save up for sex reassignment surgery, she inherited $25,000 after her mother's death in 1999 — enough to afford the procedure in Thailand, where surgeons charged half the price of those in the United States. Cost wasn't the only obstacle. Sparks underwent another two angioplasties in April 2000, in her legs this time, and her doctor advised her against major surgery. Sparks wasn't deterred. "I wasn't about to give up now," she says.
In 2000, at 51 years old, Sparks boarded a plane to Bangkok with a suitcase full of traveler's checks and Bolig in tow for support.
In Phuket, before the nine-hour surgery, Sparks awoke in the early morning, walked into the bathroom, stripped off her clothes, and stared at herself one last time in the mirror. "I was saying goodbye to what I had been my whole life, my persona, the appendages ... and making peace with this new person."
After years of anxiety, Sparks finally felt calm.
After returning to San Francisco as a woman, Sparks charged into San Francisco politics, a world that was still waiting for its introduction to Ms. Sparks. She had already made her mark as an activist by coordinating a vigil in front of the Castro Theatre in 1999 for murdered transgender people, the first Transgender Day of Remembrance now held annually around the globe.
But her first major break in politics came when she was hired as a field coordinator for then-Supervisor Mark Leno's re-election campaign in 2000. His victory galvanized Sparks' political career. Leno and his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors later appointed her to a new city transgender task force. The group urged Leno to introduce an ordinance to provide medical coverage for transgender city employees' gender reassignment surgeries in 2001. The Board of Supervisors' approval of the measure pushed San Francisco to the forefront of the country's trans movement. Leno also urged Mayor Willie Brown to appoint Sparks as a human rights commissioner in 2001, upon which she pushed for transgender-sensitivity training for all police officers.
Yet serving on commissions or eventually as cochair of the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club didn't pay the bills. Sparks worked as a bank teller, and nabbed a seasonal gig packing sex toys at Good Vibrations during the 2001 Valentine's Day season. While there, she applied for a financial manager position. Upon seeing her business credentials, Good Vibrations' manager immediately hired Sparks to help expand the sex-positive cooperative into a profitable franchise.
Sparks overcame her reservations about putting a sex shop on her résumé and went to work slashing costs. Her ties to the neighborhood associations of upper Polk Street helped convince local businesses that the proposed store location would attract healthy retail traffic to the neighborhood, not trench-coated porn-shop habitués.
Sparks says Good Vibrations' sex-positive ethos helped her shed some of her own conservative attitudes and accept her changing sexuality. After her transition, "to my surprise, I started to be attracted to men." She began dating a male freelance journalist, a relationship that lasted five years. Sparks now says she is attracted to both sexes: "I don't know if that means I'm bisexual. I guess by pure definition, that's what that means, but I'm more attracted to the person, not to their sex."
Of course, the world outside Good Vibrations is still not so open-minded. In 2003, Mark Leno (who had since been elected to the state Assembly) presented Sparks with his district's Woman of the Year award. Tonight Show host Jay Leno couldn't resist using it as fodder in his late-night monologue: When Sparks accepted the award, Jay Leno riffed, "he said there was a part of him didn't want to accept it, but that's gone now." While transgender activists nationwide were outraged on her behalf, Sparks says no one bothered to call her to ask what she thought: "Quit taking yourself so damn seriously. Sure, I wasn't thrilled he was making a joke about me, but he's a comedian! He's on TV! ... What's the alternative? To be miserable? I sometimes may feel some embarrassment, but you know — life's too short."
There was no avoiding the scrutiny, especially since Sparks underwent the last steps of her transition while squarely in the public eye. In 2004, she was appointed by the Board of Supervisors to the police commission, the body charged with creating department protocols and disciplining officers. Despite her high-visibility position, Sparks says she was so self-conscious about her masculine features that she forced the SFPD to take down her photos at police stations.
Around that time, she completed the last step of her physical transformation: facial feminizing surgery. "After her gender surgery, the next important thing to her was to feminize her face so that people would not look at her and point, basically," Bolig says. "I think that in itself has helped bring some peace to her." Sparks shed her frumpy bob for sophisticated auburn layers, lost 30 pounds, and agreed to sit for a new photo at the Hall of Justice to be hung in every police station.
