When Rhona Stace walked through the ‘passengers only’ arch of Auckland’s International Airport, a hugging scrum of a family paused their farewells to stare and point.

Look at that lady. She’s famous, eh? Child at airport

Rhona is not a celebrity, she’s a policewoman that her two kids still call ‘Dad’. But she’s also a six-foot blonde in a miniskirt who was being followed by a cameraman.

Policewoman, Rhona Stace Policewoman, Rhona Stace

She’s chuffed to be seen as a lady. She’s more chuffed to be travelling with that discreet little ‘f’ for female on her passport for the first time in her 49 years. This transgender cop is off to Thailand to get her genitals aligned with the gender she feels she already is — and some breasts thrown in to boot.

“A lot of people have said I’m leaving New Zealand a man and returning as a woman, but it doesn’t feel that way to me,” she says. Instead, Rhona sees gender reassignment surgery (GRS) as the final hurdle before reaching her “point of comfort”, to get over a body-soul disconnect and on with everyday life.

That point is different for everyone suffering gender dysphoria — the distress of identifying as a sex different to that of one’s genitals. Some find it impossible to overcome, so suicide rates within trans communities are high around the world, even after genital realignment. Some can just don a frock and be done with it, as Rhona puts it.

I know I’ll never be a woman. There is currently no-one who can wave a magic wand and take away [my] having been a male for the majority of my life. Rhona

Before filling out her departure card, Rhona had a stiff drink at the airport’s Downunder Bar to steady quaking nerves. She’s nervous about the surgery, but also hates the thought of being without her kids and pets for three weeks.

So she practices a bit of last minute Thai to distract herself: she’s sure sawasdee is ‘hello’, but worries she’s mixed up the words for ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. Rhona already feels grateful to Thailand for the accessibility of its GRS and reckons “it’d be rude not to learn a bit of the lingo”.

While she could have joined our Ministry of Health waitlist for publicly funded surgery, she decided to go private in Thailand. Her savings allowed her to skip a decades long wait.