The Daily Express, June 2 2006
Simon Edge from the Daily Express contacted us on Tuesday about doing a feature about Sharon and I, with a little less emphasis on the discrimination case. Personally, I welcomed the idea. The best story of all is the fact that I'm married to a very special and wonderful woman who has been willing to stick by my side through all of this insanity!
You can find the full text of Simon's story below. Additionally, if you would like to see a scanned file of the full article, you can download a PDF version here. Please note that the PDF file is 2.5M in size, and is far too big to download if you are using a dial-up connection.
I think Simon did an excellent job. In addition to our story as a couple, I think that I was also able to shed a little more light on the subject of gender dysphoria. It's my hope that the more information and understanding that we can share with the public, the more acceptance we can foster.
This story and associated photos © Copyright 2006 by Simon Edge for the Daily Express.
I started life as Josh but now I'm Jessica
By Simon Edge
The transsexual high-flier at the heart of a £500,000 discrimination case reveals how, with the support of a wife and loving family, he became a she.
Jessica Bussert doesn't look like a grandparent of three. At 41, the self-confessed geek and computer high-flyer looks more like a relaxed empty-nester than someone who with five grown-up children, but appearances can be deceptive – and in more ways than one. The twice-married Jessica is the biological parent of three of her five children, but she did not give birth to them. Instead, she fathered them.
Jessica – or Jess, as she prefers to be called – has suddenly become one of the country's most high-profile transsexuals, thanks to the £500,000 discrimination claim she is making against her former employer, Hitachi Data Systems. She claims the company demoted her after her sex change operation and then treated her so badly that she was on the verge of suicide for the first time in her life.
"I'm a little unique, a little different, but you know what? So what!" says Jess, sitting on the sofa alongside Sharon, the second wife who decided to stand by her spouse when Josh, as he was then known, confided that he had always felt as if he was a woman trapped in a man's body.
"On Mother's Day, Jess and I get two sets of cards," says Sharon. "In fact it gets a little heavy in the mum department if you include Jess's first wife. Our kids have three mums, and some of them have started calling us Mum One, Mum Two and Mum Three."
She laughs as she describes this, and it's clear that a strong sense of humour is an important tool in the Bussert household. Suffering from a condition that afflicts as few as one in 20,000 people, and which even fewer have the opportunity or determination to do anything about, Jess has known isolation, fear and pain on a level that most of us can barely imagine. It has now become part of Sharon's life too.
Growing up as a boy in the US state of Indiana, young Josh knew that something was badly wrong on the inside. He did not know he had a genetic condition now known as gender dysphoria, caused as a result of a hormonal imbalance in the mother's womb at a very early stage of pregnancy. He couldn't even look himself up in the library, because he didn't know what word to search for.
"When I was very young a friend's mother thought I was a girl, and inside I thought how nice it was they finally got it right," Jess recalls. "As I approached puberty the confusion mounted, and I prayed that I would wake up and this would somehow be fixed."
In the meantime, Josh overcompensated, emulating his most masculine classmates, as an actor might. As a result he was successful with girls – both Josh and Jess are exclusively attracted to women – and was married at 17 after his girlfriend got pregnant.
That marriage produced three children but broke up after four years. At around the same time, Josh became a strong Catholic and met Sharon, who is also from Indiana. They were married in 1990 and four years later they adopted two sisters, aged nine and 10, who had grown up on the streets of Haiti. Cross-racial adoptions are a rarity in Indiana, and the stares they got toughened the family up for the greater challenges that were still ahead.
Gradually, Josh started to confide in Sharon about the confusion raging inside, but the precise nature of the problem was still a mystery. "Eventually there was one evening I finally made the acceptance. I made this realisation and thought, 'I've got to share this', and I told Sharon I wanted to be a woman," says Jess.
Sharon chips in: "I remember thinking, 'Well I want a beach house on the Caribbean, but we can't always have what we want.'" She tells it as a joke, giving little clue of the traumas that must have been involved.
Jess's life-changing moment came four years ago when she realised that she could do something about her situation, and start "transitioning" – which is her preferred word for what most people call a sex change. Even then, she was adamant that she would only go ahead with Sharon's blessing.
"As a strong believer, I have always had an absolute faith in the hereafter," she says. "That was how I could tell Sharon that I would only go forward if she agreed. If she said no, maybe I wouldn't get the last 40 years of my life fixed, but I had an absolutely belief that in the hereafter things would be put right."
Fortunately, Sharon said yes. "There are certainly moments when I have felt that life is falling apart," she says. "But I never for a moment considered packing up and leaving. It's the same as if my spouse was hit by a bus and ended up in a wheelchair – you might wish it hadn't happened, but you wouldn't walk out on them. The rest of the world now sees me as a lesbian, which I don't really identify with, but if anyone has a problem with that, it's their problem. For me, love conquers all."
Jess began laser hair removal in 2003, and since then has had hormone treatment, breast implants and painful surgery to change the shape of her face. It has all cost £50,000 to date. She officially woke up as Jessica Diane Bussert in March last year, and must live as a woman for a full two years before being considered for the final, genital operation.
She says that even if people find her situation hard to understand, the huge lengths to which she has gone ought to show how serious her condition was. "The treatment is by no means pleasant," she says. "It involves everything from having red-hot needles put into every hair follicle on your face, which is excrucriating, to major surgeries. I literally had my face pulled off and my skull chiselled away in a 10-hour operation. Who would willingly go through that?
"Mention of the final operation is enough to send strong men cringing and crawling away with their legs tightly crossed, and it's no less terrifying for me. That should show how absolutely necessary it is that I am prepared to do it. This is not some little aberration. It is a genetic reality, like having diabetes or a cleft palate, and if a child had a cleft palate, nobody would have the gall to say it was just a cosmetic procedure."
Before the physical changes began, family and friends had to be told – a process that went better than they had dared to hope – and of course their children, are now aged between 19 and 23. It was a daunting prospect. "Even after you've told four of your children and it has gone fine, you are still terrified that the fifth one may freak out," says Sharon. In the event, all five accepted the transition with remarkable ease. Their youngest daughter had the most difficulty, because she felt she was losing her father, but now now she introduces Jess and Sharon as her mothers.
Unfortunately there was an unseen cloud on the horizon – which now threatens Jess's whole future.
She had decided that she would settle in London to begin her transition process. She organised a transfer with the employer who had headhunted her in Indiana, Hitachi Data Systems, and arrived in London in 2004 on an £88,000 salary. As she arranged her surgery, she notified the firm and provided extensive details of what the process would entail. She also explained that post-operative transsexuals tend to perform better at their jobs than before, since they are no longer distracted by their feeling of being trapped in the wrong body. She was comforted by Britain's tolerant new laws banning discrimination against transsexual employees.
Despite those laws, she says her supervisor made no secret of his discomfort. She says she was demoted while she was recovering from surgery, and claims she was reduced to organising travel, hotels and meals for people she had previously managed. She filed an internal grievance, which was unsuccessful, and says she was then given a devastating appraisal by the person she had complained against.
"I felt it was delivered in a spiteful, vindictive, hateful manner, and it was the straw that broke the camel's back. I was physically ill before I left the office, and then I went home and couldn't get out of bed for two days. My GP wrote me a 13-week sick note saying I was in a dangerously unhealthy environment."
Her pay was stopped in February, and she is now claiming £500,000 compensation, as well as a separate £2 million claim in the US. "For the first time in my life, after all that I have been through, Hitachi made me suicidal," she says. "I have never known such despair, and it is ironic that it happened after we moved to London, where we thought we would find more acceptance than at home."
While they await a court date, Jess is searching for a new job. Sharon is looking for a publisher for two novels and is also thinking of writing her own account of standing by her man as he became a woman. Their loss of income now threatens the completion of Jess's surgery, but she is trying to think positive.
"Whichever way things come out, we have made a lot of friends over here who care about us and accept us, and we still believe that Britain is a wonderful place," she says. "We won't be felled by what has happened. We have dealt with some tough issues in our lives, and we'll get through this one too.
"If we can also increase understanding of what people like me have to go through, that will be a good thing. Society would never vilify a person that needed to go on dialysis because of poor kidneys. I'm looking forward to the day when people can accept that what I have had to go through is my own dialysis.
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