The Greatest Lie Part 14

For me, my hometown, L.A., is not the sexy, sweaty night clubs of West Hollywood nor the porn scene of the North Valley. Though I feel more at home there, that side of L.A. is not my home but rather the world into which my transsexual destiny exiled me.

Home is the leafy, moneyed boulevards and side streets of Brentwood and Bel Air, California. Beneath the swaying palms and in the sea-softened air of that enclave of privilege, I became a refugee from my birth gender, and like any other refugee, I escaped and changed my identity as thoroughly as I could.

Reborn as a beautiful and ambitious, if incomplete woman, I needed and desperately wanted to return home to confront and erase the last vestiges of my male origins. But the past is a like jealous and selfish ex-lover whose secrets can never become truly safe against future discovery: like deleted e-mail on a remote server, old secrets remain ineradicable and forever discoverable.

The loose ends of my male past were scattered all over Los Angeles and to live my life as a post-operative transsexual I needed to tie them up. I had done a legal name change through the courts, and possessed a purple-stamped Superior Court order decreeing that Alex Rios had become Alexandra Rivers. My driver's license now bore a smiling picture of me in a tank top, showing an enticing inch and a half of decolletage, a fetching smile and come-hither eyes. But the traffic ticket I had gotten one drug-addled night during my junior year could link Alexandra back to Alexander: my male past was a secret waiting to be disclosed if I ever had another accident or infraction.

Los Angeles was an expedient detour on our way from Minnesota to Thailand. My friend Tran and I were on our way to Thailand's Chiang Mai University to continue my research into the sexual practices of transgendered sex workers among the katoey of Thailand, but our real purpose there was to have our surgeon rectify our problematic vaginoplasties.

Our Thai surgeon, Dr.