Long Road To Acceptance For Man Who Became Woman

Then one day in 1997, he gathered his children near the family home in Kansas and delivered the news: He was going to transition into a she. It was something he had wanted for decades and could no longer suppress.

"I asked a lot of my kids," said the woman now known as Theresa Sparks. "I think our story tells you that family really is the one thing that truly sustains. The love between children and parents can get you through something even as difficult as this."

Getting through, though, came with unimagined pain and alienation. Sparks lost her home, her job, her life savings. She sold everything she had - from the cars to a Cartier watch - and teetered on the edge of homelessness. Her sons didn't speak to her for a decade. Her siblings think she is a freak.

Today, Sparks, who rebuilt her life in San Francisco, becoming a political force and the onetime head of the San Francisco Police Commission, is reunited with her kids.

Adam Sparks, who is 32 and the youngest of Sparks' three children, admits, "The first time you hug your dad and feel breasts, it's like, 'This is weird.' But once you start talking and you have a real conversation, you realize it's the same person. You realize it's not about the exterior, but what's inside. I felt really stupid that I hadn't had contact for so many years."

Karie Keeney, Sparks' 34-year-old daughter, was the first to accept her dad's decision, and worked for years to forge a reconciliation between her father and her two brothers, including Ryan Sparks, a Marine captain with the Bravo Company.

'Dad is Dad'

"When this first happened, I didn't know whether to celebrate Mother's Day or Father's Day," said Keeney, who lives in Kansas and has two young children. "But to me, and now to my brothers, there is no doubt: Dad is Dad. It's just that we happen to call Dad a she."

Growing up in Kansas in the '50s and '60s, Sparks did what was expected: played football, collected model cars and dated girls. He attended Kansas State University and studied engineering. After a stint in the Navy, he married and started a family.

"I was the alpha dad," Sparks said in an interview last week at a cafe near Civic Center. "I coached baseball and football, and we had season tickets to the games. We did all the dad stuff. I had what most people would say is the epitome of a perfect life."

"It was everything," she added, "but it was never right."

'Purge cycle'

When alone, Sparks relaxed by dressing in women's clothing. Then guilt would prompt her into another "purge cycle," where she would discard every item of women's clothing. She sought information in medical libraries, looking up "symptoms of a compulsive cross-dresser" and finding only categorizations of deviant sexual behavior. She turned to psychologists, including one who said, "I don't know anything about this, but we can learn together." Sparks said no thanks.

"I always felt I was in the wrong skin," she said, her French-manicured hands wrapped around a coffee cup.

"When my first marriage ended in 1980, I thought, 'I'll take care of these feelings and marry again,' " she chuckled. "We moved to California. I was building recycling plants. My background in mechanical engineering evolved into industrial and chemical engineering. I just felt I had to 'man up' and live with these feelings."

But the compulsion to cross-dress intensified after the failed second marriage. One therapist she talked to advocated "good results from lithium," a treatment Sparks considered crazy. Another therapist suggested aversion therapy through electroshock - which she agreed to for a short period.

"You do things like that when you feel a sense of hopelessness," she said. "It was degrading."

Around 1998, Sparks moved to San Francisco to look for a job and find skilled therapists and support groups. She had started hormone therapy, getting huge doses of estrogen, and was openly dressing as a woman. She sent out nearly 150 resumes - replete with an impressive job history, but under a name that was now female. She landed a few interviews but was never called back.

"I got a job as a cab driver but was soon called in and told, 'We love you, Theresa, but you are a terrible driver,' " Sparks said. "It was true. I was getting into accidents because I just wanted to talk all the time with the passengers."

'Me and the mirror'

In 2000, following her mother's death, Sparks took money she had inherited and went to Thailand. She was ready to physically become a woman. The night before the vaginoplasty, Sparks took off all of her clothes and stood before the bathroom mirror. "I stared at myself and asked, 'Is this what I want to do?' It was just me and the mirror, and I was at peace. It felt right. I went to bed that night and fell right asleep."

In the years that followed, Sparks made a name for herself in San Francisco, first as a member of the Human Rights Commission and then as the appointed head of the Police Commission. She is now a candidate for city supervisor, District Six.

Around 2008, Sparks visited her daughter in Kansas. Adam Sparks agreed to be there.

"I didn't watch my dad on YouTube until a couple of months before I was to meet him again," Adam Sparks said. "One night I decided to watch. It was amazing to me. He as she had become head of the San Francisco Police Commission."

The night they met around his sister's dinner table, Adam Sparks realized: "All of the hoopla around the transition was ridiculous. Dad and I started talking and it was like we didn't miss a beat. What's amazing to me is that my dad was very successful as a man, and he threw all of it to the wind. She built her life up again in an amazing way. Talk about hard work and determination."

Embracing Theresa

Karie Keeney is closer to her dad today than ever before. Her older brother, Ryan Sparks, now on his fifth tour of duty in Afghanistan, has also come to embrace Theresa.

"Things have changed some in Kansas, too," said Keeney. "When my dad is here, we walk through Country Club Plaza and people reach out to touch Theresa. My grandparents have watched her with pride on YouTube."

Keeney added, "My dad carries herself better as a woman than a man. It all kind of fits now. It's like, 'Oh, I get it.' "

For Sparks, standing up and smoothing her black knit sweater with gold buttons, her small earrings dangling, the message is to "move along the path until there is peace."

"This is my life," she said. "This is where it's taken me. I'm 61. I lived as a man for 48 years. I feel blessed. Now I see the world from both sides."

But in the final analysis, she said, "The most meaningful thing in my life is my family. My kids support me for who I am. And I say that knowing how difficult it was, and how counterintuitive and heart wrenching. They accept me as Dad."

E-mail Julian Guthrie at jguthrie@sfchronicle.com.