The Canadian Military: and you thought you knew everything

Sergeant Sylvia Durand, in leopard-skin jacket and long auburn hair, is an example of recent profound change in the Canadian Military: until recently she was Sergeant Sylvain Durand, a male communications specialist at the Department of National Defence in Ottawa. Her sex-change operation is significant enough in itself, but it has also become a historic event: the military was not just tolerant of the sex change, it actually paid the bill, at a Quebec clinic that draws clients from across North America! Durand's partner, Cynthia Cousens, is a former Toronto Police officer, Peter Cousens, who put in 28 years of service in Toronto's tough 14 division-- only to go to his retirement party dressed as a woman. Cousens had been a married man who loved his wife deeply and had 2 children, yet he felt compelled to deal with this deeply rooted thing within him. Durand and Cousens met while they were undergoing counseling and treatment prior to their sex change operations, and went on to form a relationship that defies easy classification. They are not, as Sergeant Durand explains, in a traditional lesbian relationship. Nor are they Gay. They are 2 transsexuals in transition who are very much in love. Both Durand and Cousens realized, at about age 5, that somehow they were not like other little boys. They grew up feeling that they were in the wrong bodies. The surgery, for Durand, was a miracle that left her feeling at peace with herself. Her "metamorphosis from he to she" is a shining example of Canadian open-mindedness. She is the only soldier in the world to undergo a sex-change operation while serving in the military. That her transformation was accepted by her colleagues, with no ridicule or discrimination, speaks volumes about the change that has occurred in Canadian society and its military.

ooooooh ya.