Published on 25 March 2025
by Alice Dive
Original: La Libre – Je m’appelle Georges. J’ai 74 ans, quatre enfants et bientôt neuf petits-enfants. Pourtant, j’ai été transgenre pendant quinze ans…”

“MY NAME IS GEORGES.
I AM 74 YEARS OLD, HAVE FOUR CHILDREN AND SOON NINE GRANDCHILDREN. YET I HAVE BEEN TRANSGENDER FOR FIFTEEN YEARS…”

In an exceptional testimony, Georges van der Straten Waillet, born in 1950 into a Catholic family, tells La Libre how he felt like a woman from the age of 12 to 26. He suffered from gender dysphoria and came out, but not without difficulty. He recounts the journey that led him to ‘reconcile’, as he puts it, his mind with his body.

My name is Georges. I am 74 years old, have four children, four stepchildren and eight grandchildren, soon to be nine. However, I was transgender for fifteen years, between the ages of 12 and 26. It was a painful and unforgettable experience during which I was obsessed with not letting my trans identity show through effeminate behaviour or spontaneous reactions that would have betrayed my homosexual tendencies. I hated myself and had a huge need for love and acceptance.

If I have chosen to talk about it today, in the columns of La Libre, it is because at my age, you have to ask yourself what you want to do before you die. Well, I want to share my story to tell young people who are suffering from gender dysphoria – that is, a heart-wrenching dissonance between how you feel and who you want to be – that there are several possible ways to deal with this suffering.

This is my story.

I was born in 1950 into a conservative, loving Catholic aristocratic family. I have two older sisters and a younger brother, which makes me the eldest of the boys. I grew up surrounded by women: there was my mother, the housekeeper, the maid, my mother’s sisters and sisters-in-law, all of whom were fulfilled women despite their traditional roles. My mother was radiant, full of love for children in general, and had a very positive outlook on life. This was quite the opposite of my father, who was a company director, worked like crazy and didn’t seem happy at all.

‘I was certain that I was going to become a woman, a mother.’

When I reached puberty, around the age of 12, my identity crisis began: I was certain that I was going to become a woman, a mother. I was in an internal struggle with this feeling of being a woman AND being attracted to men. Deep down, it was as if nature had decided that my body and my reflexes were female. I was afraid of being crushed at school. I controlled the way I spoke and behaved. To give you an idea, I saw myself as the Jews in Belgium in 1941, at risk of being exposed and having to wear the yellow star. I said to myself: ‘They mustn’t spot me. I can’t be exposed.’

Every year, between the ages of 12 and 18, around January, I would say to myself: ‘I’m giving myself until Christmas: either I become normal or I kill myself.’ Being normal? For me, that meant being like the men I saw around me, like all those fathers. Looking back, I think I was depressed from the age of 12 to 18 because I was constantly fighting with myself.

I never talked to my parents about it. In my family, we didn’t talk about money or sex. In any case, there were no words for it. The word ‘transgender’ didn’t exist, and I didn’t discover the word ‘homosexuality’ until I was 15. In the meantime, I thought I was a monster.

At the age of 18, since I hadn’t had the courage to kill myself, I decided to start therapy, in secret because my parents couldn’t know. I first came across a wonderful psychiatric nurse who restored my self-confidence and made me understand that I wasn’t a monster. Until then, I was like a donkey with knock-knees carrying a tonne on its back. I failed at everything: at school, at sports, I had no friends. But after that first year of therapy, I became my own ally. Everything changed, I came out of my depression… I’ll spare you the story of eight long years of supportive psychotherapy that helped me avoid falling back into depression but did nothing to change my sexual identity issue. In 1976, I was able to meet a deeply caring psychiatrist and sexologist who suggested, among other things, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). This difficult period allowed me to overcome my fear, my deep-seated complex and my abysmal shame about my gender identity and homosexual attraction. This experience was like being reborn.

Three possible ways to manage gender dysphoria

Today, it has been almost 50 years since this happened, and I have been able to have a loving relationship with women, get married, have children and grandchildren, and enjoy a free and fulfilling social and professional life. The term ‘gender dysphoria’ was completely unknown to me in the 1960s and 70s, when I was suffering from it and felt monstrous and ashamed. Since the 2000s, this term has become commonplace in the media, and I believe that all mental health professionals are aware of it and that some of them are trying to help affected adolescents by offering them the option of modifying their bodies through puberty blockers, hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery. There is heated controversy surrounding this practice on social media and in the Western media, accompanied by new taboos and condemnation, as if this would help the young people concerned and their parents.

As far as I am concerned, I have no advice to offer on this subject, only a personal story to share. What should you do when you suffer from gender dysphoria, as I myself realised one morning when I was about 15, during biology class? Accept it and seek psychological help throughout your life? Change your body through hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery, risking multiple medical complications and lifelong dependence on ‘cross-sex hormones’? Or change your mind with the help of a competent psychotherapist to reconcile your psychological identity with the biological identity of your sex?

The controversial option of changing your body to become trans

My experience seems to prove that this third and final option exists, which I call ‘reconciliation therapy’ between the mind and the body, between gender identity and sexual identity (not to be confused with ‘conversion therapy’, editor’s note). Yes, psychological identity is something flexible, and there are therapies that can change not only behaviour but also emotions and self-image. However, this path is not well known, even though it offers an alternative to the early prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Adolescence is a very delicate period when irreversible changes should be avoided.

However, in my personal case, if I had had the opportunity in 1967 to embark on the path of changing my body to become a trans woman, I would have rushed into it, EXCEPT IF… I had had access to an account of the third way, such as my present testimony. Then I would have hesitated and would have liked to have had therapeutic support to consider the three options, without excessive guilt, without hiding and without fear of the repercussions on my family, friends and social life. I could have counted on supportive therapy until I was 18 to avoid depression and suicidal thoughts, and to inform myself and then make an informed and final choice between the different possible paths for managing gender dysphoria. In the end, my life has not always been easy, but it has been happy because I knew how to ask for help at 18.