EdgeBoston.com – by Kilian Melloy – EDGE Boston Contributor
Massachusetts native Rhiannon O?Donnabhain grew up in the South Shore as part of an Irish Catholic family, went to mass on Sundays, joined the Coast Guard, became a civil engineer, married, and raised three children–all as a man.
But in 1996, after a lifetime of dissonance between her outer appearance and her inner identity, O?Donnabhain received the answers she?d looked for throughout her life: she was professionally diagnosed with GID, or Gender Identity Disorder, a medially recognized condition in which a person experiences a deep-seated and consistent sensation that he or she is a person of a gender different than that of the body.
O?Donnabhain received a prescription for her complaint: gender reassignment, including several major surgeries.