You came seven years ago from Pakistan to Germany. In your passport with the Name Ali stand. Today, her name is Lilith. The DW has accompanied her away from the man to the woman over several years.
The Morning before the big day is radiant and beautiful. The sun is shining just before nine o’clock from the cloudless sky. Lilith stands with her suitcase at the train station. Around her two little boys romp. She likes children, wants to have at some point a family.
Lilith is to eat on the way to the University hospital. In 24 hours you will be here on the operating table. For further abdominal surgery. Cosmetic Corrections. A few months ago by a seven-hour surgery, in which Doctors from Lilith’s shaped scrotum and Penis, a Vagina, your gender to align.
Lilith is wearing a blue summer dress and perfect makeup, she puts value on her Appearance. “I’m pretty psyched,” she says, as the train arrives. One hour does it take to travel from Cologne in the Ruhr area city of Essen. There is a long journey that started 33 years ago in Pakistan when Ali ends for you.
Trapped in the male body: this is a picture of Lilith is officially still Ali
The last night before the OP
For over three years, Deutsche Welle reports about Lilith and her story. At the first Meeting in the spring of 2016, she was physically still a man. You not be swallowed daily female hormones and testosterone blockers, looked significantly less feminine. And she called herself at the time, still Alia. With a simple A at the end she had made of her male first name Ali a female. Alia. But at some point you decided that you want to solve all of the Person Ali. Since then, she’s Lilith. “Lilith, the woman that was always there,” they said.
Lilith is an open person, she’s free with her Trans-identity. Only a few months ago, on the evening before the first big OP in February 2019, she wanted to talk to anyone. “I wanted to take a conscious farewell. It was like a Ritual for me. I said goodbye to my old body and Welcome to my new one.”
It was a happy goodbye, she recalls. These last few hours with Ali. “This will always be a part of my life. But Ali was not like a case, he was just the right Person.”
Watch the Video 00:18
2018: Lilith on your attitude to life
Trans-women in Pakistan: society, ostracized by
She couldn’t be Ali, the Lilith knew, even as a small child. The nature had simply made a mistake when they gave her this body, she says. A dangerous realization in their South Asian homeland. The Pakistani society is very conservative and Patriarchal. Pakistan is an Islamic Republic, many people are deeply religious. An environment in which issues such as homosexuality or Transgender are largely taboo.
Although TRANS-celebrate women on the wedding as a dance attractions booked. But that cannot obscure the fact that most of the Affected live a life on the margins of society. They are also repeatedly the victims of acts of violence up to and including murder. Like the people writes rights organization Human Rights Watch in their World Report in 2019, there was in the last year alone in the province of Khyber Pakhunkhwa on the Afghan border, almost 500 attacks on TRANS women. At least four were killed.
Even by their own families, many TRANS-violated women, the shame is. Lilith had great luck. Her two closest people, your mother and your sister, talked to her. In Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, you shared your life and your everyday life with the boy, the bear at home like girl clothes and want to wear makeup. The felt as a daughter and sister and not as a son and brother. And for all those on the Ali and its true I had to hide.
Arrived in the new life: Lilith enjoys her female body to the second OP
Restart in Europe
Since 2012, Lilith now lives in Germany. You came to study here. Because in Germany, so her dream at the time, would you can dress up your sexuality at last openly: be female, in everyday life as a woman on the street. The decision to have sex actually match, matured in the course of the next three years.
Lilith studied in Cologne and environmental Sciences, made two years ago, your Master’s degree. Meanwhile, she feels “at home here,” she says in fluent English on the train journey to eat. It took a few years, but now she had fully arrived.
The German nationality Lilith has not yet, the application wants to make in the coming year. At the Moment your residence permit is tied to your Job. Lilith works for the lesbian and gay Federation of Germany, and takes care of gay and transgender refugees.
Watch the Video 00:30
2016: Lilith talks about her mother
The money for the first flight to Germany, she got from her mother. The had sold for a piece of Land. In each Interview, Lilith spoke with much love and gratitude to your mother. But now, of all times, shortly before her second SURGERY to gender reassignment, with the sounds of a sad undertone.
Because the mother had never objected to her as a son-born child putting on makeup, and lived as a woman, I find it difficult to understand Lilith’s the final step: “the SURGERY is for my mom finally made it clear that she now has a daughter and no son. This is irreversible, and accept you in spite of everything, hard to come by.”
Lilith suffers, but she is also trying, in her mother’s place. “You can this discontent, hating the body I had, just do not understand.” As before, the two of them have daily contact. Also with her sister Lilith speaks often. I have no Problem with your body aligned. “For you, I’m just your sibling. No matter whether you brother or sister.”
Increase in the number of Gender reassignment in Germany
A day after the first major surgery posted Lilith at 19. February in Facebook: “I can’t describe this feeling. I just feel really like Lilith.” And then there is this very great moment. As you yourself can see that she is now a woman. “A Doctor has been held up to me a mirror, and I have joy, only to cry.” For Lilith the sex alignment means to have finally achieved what she always wanted. So she feels it.
February 2019: Lilith post from the hospital
The cost for gender reassignment wear the German health insurance companies. Each case will be examined. Lillith is one of a total of 45 TRANS-women, who were operated on in the first half of 2019 at the Essen University clinic. The demand increases, the clinic’s management of the DW. In 2014, 50 women were operated on in the past two years, there were already around 80.
Nationwide, more than 600 men in gender is subjected to in the past year, reassignment Operation, shall inform the Federal Ministry for family Affairs, the DW on request. Conversely, more than 1200 women were 2018 for the man to operate.
Physical and mental stress
There are patients with a rag after the Operation, continue with your identity. However, Lilith would do anything at any time as well. Also, if the whole procedure was on the way from man to woman: the daily hormones, the visits to the doctor who prescribed the psychiatric assessments, the bureaucratic Marathon with the insurance company, until the treatment was finally approved, the extreme pain It is after the first OP: “like hundreds of small needles that are everywhere and dancing to Techno music.”
Over weeks, Lilith was able to run neither properly nor sit. And not even pain free. To sleep was to think hardly. There was an inflammation in her new vagina, and you had to go back for a week in the hospital. “At some point, you’re just very weak, not only physically, but also emotionally.”
And then, there was something else: she had her new, female body always wanted – at the beginning, he still felt foreign. Not like a part of her. “I couldn’t even touch it. My brain was a total mess.”
The end of the search
Then, after about six weeks, I made on once click. “The brain is suddenly trying to the body parts to assign. The old parts have been, in a sense, installed all new.” In fact, the medical forms, sang in a gender, body OPS from man to woman, the so-called Neovagina from the inwardly inverted skin of the Penis and from the former the scrotum. The clitoris is formed from the glans, the lips of the foreskin.
Lilith’s body and soul are now one
In the case of Lilith, everything runs in the second, cosmetic SURGERY in eating according to Plan. She’s working long again and is back in your everyday life, and is a other than in the past. Lilith says it this way: “in the past, my soul and my body were separated. The soul has always tried to find the right body.”
A longing remains, however. Like Lilith would ever make it back to Pakistan. In the home. She misses her family, she says. The mountains of the Himalayas are missing, you want to hear their mother language Punjabi on the street and the food of their Childhood to taste. But as a TRANS woman, and as a self-confessed atheist, the Moment was far too dangerous: “A ‘lesser being’ as I have no opportunity to live in the Pakistani society.”
Nevertheless, you will soon meet her mother and sister, “on neutral ground, somewhere in the world, where men and women are of equal worth”. Where, exactly, the don’t want to say for security reasons. Your future in Germany: “But I feel neither as a German nor as a Pakistani,” says Lilith. But just as a human being. And as a woman.