NOW: LUCAS, WITH KAREN
home aged 17 and meeting a transgender male at a party, however, did Lucas find what he calls ‘the key to the puzzle’.
‘He showed me there was another path.’ He knew it would be a terrible blow to his mother, who had been accepting of his sexuality, but could never have envisaged this.
‘I was terrified as the last thing I wanted to do was lose my mum — she’s absolutely everything to me. At the same time I had to do it, to tell her I was a man in a girl’s body and I knew she’d need time. At first she couldn’t even look at me.’
‘I cried,’ Karen remembers. ‘He asked me to help chose his new name from a list and I told him I couldn’t, I had chosen his name all those years ago.’
It would take many months from that first conversation for Karen and Lucas’s brothers, who are in their 30s, to adjust.
‘We all had to find our own ways of dealing with it, but it came down to the fact that we loved him and if this is what he needs to do to be happy, then we have to accept and support that. We have taken it one step at a time.’
One of those steps came 18 months ago when Lucas confided in Karen that he wanted to have his breasts removed.
‘He told me that they made him desperately unhappy and that he could not be himself while they were there,’ she says. ‘In some ways I had known this for a long time although it was still a shock to think about him undergoing surgery.’
While Lucas had been referred by his GP to an NHS Gender Identity clinic, he was facing a two-year wait for surgery. The realisation led him to London Transgender Surgery where, after counselling and assessments, he started on a course of testosterone prior to the surgery six months later.
Costing upwards of £10,000, it was funded by family and friends.
THE
documentary charts an emotional Karen as over the course of a few months Lucas’s voice deepens and he develops facial hair enabling him to shave for the first time.
‘Little by little Lauren is disappearing,’ she says through tears.
And never more so than the day in May last year when Lucas was due to undergo his breast surgery.
‘We were staying in a hotel and I remember waking up on the day of his surgery and looking over at him while he was sleeping and thinking that another part of Lauren was going,’ Karen recalls now.
‘I had to force my brain not to dwell on it as I had to be strong for him, but it was so hard.’
And equally so for Lucas. ‘Saying goodbye to Mum as I was walking into the theatre was the hardest thing I have had to do as I knew she was saying goodbye to Lauren for good,’ says Lucas.
‘I wrote her a card to read while I was in surgery telling her how proud I was of her. It’s amazing to have a mum who is so accepting — I knew there were people out there in the waiting room who were very alone.’
Nine months on, and Lucas — who is in a relationship with a woman — says that not only are there no regrets but he is happier than he has ever been.
The next step is to decide whether to undergo gender confirmation surgery, in which he has male genitalia constructed.
It is a complex affair and Lucas is in no rush. ‘I had already accepted myself but when I had breasts my issue was how other people saw me. Now I don’t worry about that. So for now I am fine.’
It is a reminder for Karen, however, that her son faces an ongoing battle. ‘It doesn’t end with surgery, he will face challenges throughout his life,’ she says. ‘Watching Lucas go through this makes it clear how strongly you have to feel. I’m proud of his courage.’
She will not, though, put that photograph of Lauren away.
‘Lucas always asks me to but I won’t,’ she says. ‘It’s my reminder of my little girl.’