"I have always felt rejected."
(I did this interview with Nathan Verhelst in July 2013. I gave the tip to Peter Verbruggen of Het Laatste Nieuws, who interviewed him himself the day before his death and wrote a piece about it for his newspaper. He also published the mother's harsh reaction the day after. Have a good trip, Nathan.)
He was born a girl and went through a childhood of incest and psychological humiliation. Nancy chose to become Nathan, but a gender operation failed late last year and the last hope broke. 44-year-old Nathan Verhelst applied for euthanasia and was approved. His life ended yesterday, we noted in advance his story. "I am not unstable, I know what I want and that is to die. Every second of the day I cry inside."
When we meet Nathan on a sweltering July day at his apartment in the center of Sint-Niklaas, a first prejudice can immediately be put in the closet. No boxes of ordered pizzas in a pile, no empty beer bottles, not even a speck of dust. But a tidy apartment with few frills, clean lines and order, a bathroom with the necessary toiletries. An apartment that can accommodate any wild plan, order to pop, silence before a storm. Only a slogan from Bond without a Name points to vulnerability, but here no one seems to be on the ropes.
Two hours later we understand that order better. She does not stand for calm and concentration before a hopscotch. She stands for control, for a rigid method of getting through very scared days. For two more months. Then it may finally stop. A Harley Davidson model in a glass display case no longer indicates a passion, at best a past occupation. "I had a motorcycle, yes, but I gave it away," Nathan says. "I can't pull myself up by anything anymore, my strength is gone. I can't experience anything beautiful anymore, in any small moment. Every second of the day I cry in the depths of my heart."
The ugly child
On December 9, 1968, Nancy Verhelst was born in Hamme as a premature baby weighing 1 kg 750 light and 31 cm tall. "Contact with my mother was immediately broken because I had to be put in the incubator. She said later to the nurse, 'I've never seen anything so ugly in my whole life,'" Nathan recounts bitterly. "How do I know that? She was telling that story to a scout leader one day when I was in the kitchen, I was ten at the time. I never forgot those words. My mother almost died herself at my birth, and I feel like she always resented that. She also would have liked a boy instead of a girl."
"My mother was always different towards my brothers than towards me; I was blamed for everything, no matter what I did. I could come home with flowers, but five minutes later we were having words," Nathan says. It feels to him like yesterday. "Every Wednesday I had to clean in the house. Then if a mat was crooked or I finished too soon, we had a fight. If there was too much junk in my room, she would throw it through the window into the courtyard. She didn't do that to my brothers."
"I was also used as a walking trash can. All that was left on the table after dinner, I had to work my way in. I became severely obese and was given the appropriate designations of 'pig,' 'bulldozer,' 'elephant,' 'ten-tonner.' 'Pig, come and eat!' 'Elephant, come down!' My father once said that we would have to start breaking out the gate if I got any fatter. Then I did respond, 'As long as I live here, you call me by name! If I'm a pig, you'll just have to put me in a coop in the yard!'"
Playing doctor
"Shortly before the age of twelve I then had my first incest with my one year and three years older brothers. It started with 'playing doctor' so to speak, but soon went much further and I didn't know what hit me. I was too young to realize what could and could not be done," Nathan recalls. "The first time was one night. My brother came up to me and said, 'you have to come with us to our oldest.' Because I was blamed for everything at home, I didn't dare say anything to my parents and I did exactly what my brothers told me to do. Otherwise they might say all kinds of bad things about me to mother and father. So I let them. They came on my body, they penetrated me, I had to suck them off and touch them everywhere, I had to touch myself and masturbate. You undergo that, it's like you're next to your body, like you're totally someone else. To avoid feeling the pain, you depersonalize. I felt like an object of use. The abuse continued until I left home at eighteen. The analysis doesn't come until many years later, when you start thinking and reading about it."
"It all happened very secretly. My brothers signaled with their finger for me to come upstairs. My youngest brother kept watch. He then got pocket money from my brothers for it," Nathan continued. "I felt disgusted. Your whole life seems to have been taken away from you. When you're young, at some point you think about a husband and children, but none of that was possible for me anymore. I never entered into a relationship with my own sense or experienced intimacy with a man. Did the incest cause me to fall for women or become transgender? I don't know. I never felt woman enough to be a woman. Although maybe the gender dysphoria was there before. I never liked wearing girl clothes, I was 'shaving' with soap and a potato knife, I was imitating my dad."
Nathan mulls for a moment. "Now I understand some things, but it's all too late. My life is ruined. The feeling of rejection has dominated me my whole life."
Not heard
The brothers possibly imagined themselves untouchable and safe. Young Nancy never felt she could talk to her parents about this, and her fears were realized when she was eighteen. "In a heated argument with my mother, I exclaimed, 'You didn't know about my brothers either, did you?' My mother said: 'I suspected as much'. At that moment your world collapses. Why did she never intervene?", Nathan now wonders. He (she) wrote his (her) mother a six-page letter detailing what had happened to the brothers and explicitly asking the mother to change her attitude towards her daughter. The only response: "You can do whatever you want with that letter."
Nancy moved with earned pocket money from catering work at eighteen to a small house in Sint-Niklaas, without a boiler, running water or a flushing toilet. Her father didn't understand the sudden move and didn't speak to his daughter for three months. "I also wrote him a letter years later in which I told him everything, but his response was only: 'you do tell me that too late, now that I can do nothing about it'. Furthermore, he never took any action or reprimanded my mother or brothers," says Nathan. For his father, he can still feel leniency. "He ate eggs with bacon every day and then he wanted to share that with me, I remember. My mother was angry that I would listen to him and not to her. But maybe my father was happy to have a daughter?"
Nathan's father died in 2011, coincidentally half an hour after Nathan officially registered as a man at City Hall. "On his deathbed, I still told him I loved him, but I couldn't really feel that anymore. I had been dead for years by then."
Bumpy trail
Nancy fled into booze during her adolescent years. Started with beer, ended with whiskey. "Today I have that under control, but if I open a bottle, it has to be empty. Or I make a cocktail of drugs," Nathan says. Anything to avoid feeling down. "I'm also an emotional eater. Either I eat all day long, or I don't eat at all."
Nancy thought she could turn to a friend of the house during that anxious time. He regularly stood up for her in discussions. "But then it turned out that I had to satisfy him to do so. Years later I found out that this man had also abused my mother," Nathan puts the puzzle together.
So leaving home was the only option, but it wasn't going to be a success. Nancy found herself on a bumpy road of disappointments. In her small home a roommate stole her things, a relationship with a man broke down and later she lived with a woman who abused her presence. Or so it feels to Nathan today anyway. "I had a relationship with that woman, but she saw me as a means to get and keep her husband out permanently. She later admitted that herself. She had two daughters in the house and I slaved to take care of them with her."
How did Nathan or Nancy end up in these situations each time? Is there a pattern? "I allowed too many things to happen and for that I am responsible. Maybe it happened because I never used to be heard. I didn't learn to say 'no,' I wasn't allowed to and it didn't make sense. I still have a hard time doing that now."
Psychiatry
Nancy had a job in the employment of job seekers. In 2001, however, she had to admit herself to psychiatry for the first time. "My second oldest brother came over. 'Come to see if I'm dead yet? Then you'll have to wait a little longer!', I told him. My oldest brother asked if it was also 'partly his fault', because of 'the things that happened between us'. He did feel sorry at the time, he said. It doesn't really sink in anymore. "I've always looked up to my brother because I didn't feel comfortable in the female body. I've never been the girl I should have been. Either I wasn't wanted or I was abused. Still, I wanted to continue to help my brother, later when he had relationship problems, he would come and talk to me about it. I want to be the helping hand for many because I know what loss is and what being unhappy feels like."
In that surrender is at the same time Nathan's sadness. He tends to give a lot - from unmet needs? - and will never get as much back. "I'm someone who keeps his promises. I don't like people who say they will call and don't call. To others these may be futilities, to me they weigh lead. To me, ninety percent of people are hypocrites."
Becoming a man
Nancy had been attending sessions with psychiatrists and a psychologist for years when, in 2009, she stumbled upon a poster in the waiting room about gender dysphoria: "Do you feel like a woman in a man's body or do you feel like a man in a woman's body? "When I discussed that with my psychologist, he said, 'you never actually came in here dressed as a woman.' And that's true. What really felt like transition for me, like 'not fitting in,' was when I had to put on women's clothes," Nathan says now.
After many conversations, it came to an appointment at the specialized gender dysphoria department of a hospital not named for privacy reasons. "When I came out of that conversation, I felt thirty kilograms lighter. If that wasn't it, I didn't know what was. I then chose at age forty to go for myself after all. Talks with a psychologist from the department showed that I still had a lot of anger in me and I had to get it out to prepare for the operation. Today it appears that I cannot let go of the past and that keeps me in a tight grip. As a child I said I would not live past forty. I was already tired of my life at sixteen."
In any case, the psychologist ruled that Nancy had gender dysphoria and could have surgery after hormone treatment. However, an initial meeting with the surgeon turned into a horror. "He snapped at me that I should put out my cigarette like hell! The consultation only lasted ten minutes, but the arrogance dripped off the man," says Nathan. "I then decided to have someone else operate on me. In retrospect, that may not have been the best option, but that person was more humane."
The entire operation failed. The first stage was to convert the female breasts into a male chest, but that was unsuccessful. The chest was not set properly, Nathan judged, the nipple courts were deformed, and there was still too much breast formation. In a second phase, there was the crucial surgery of penis construction or phalloplasty, on November 26, 2012. "The operation in itself was successful, but 36 hours later it turned out that I had a thrombosis. The drain from the penis was clogged and I developed rejection symptoms. The phallus had become huge, blue and black. They had to cut away a lot," says Nathan. "By taking skin away from my groin to my scrotum and using it as a graft, they tried to fix that, but the result is very ugly and misshapen and I have to wear a sanitary napkin to avoid having a permanent odor."
"The head surgeon told me that 'life was more than just a penis'. He had the nerve to say that. I replied, 'Life is that when the sun shines or a child smiles, you feel that in your heart. I am dead and you will never understand that."
The only way out
For Nathan, the sex change was not only connected to his whole person, it was also his last hope. "I decided then to put my euthanasia plans into action. But actually I had been dead for six years. In a conversation with my psychologist when I was in admissions in 2007, I once said that I felt like I was in a well with reaching hands at the top of that well, but that with each step I took up a ladder, that ladder sank deeper and I had just put myself down. Then I died, I understand that more and more now. In a period of 18 months I had also lost six people at that time, three of them by suicide and one by euthanasia. Before my surgery, I also half-jokingly said to a friend, "we'll make the christening sugar first and then the obituary. Lugubrious humor, but it actually expressed what I did want at the time."
Nathan stepped up to the Life End Information Forum (Leif) in Wemmel and had long conversations there. He finally got the three required approvals: from a psychiatrist, from a physician, and from an executive physician who wanted to perform the euthanasia. "For me, it ends here," Nathan says firmly. "People at first think you're looking for attention, they don't understand that you can do this when you're 'healthy.'"
The decision to euthanize Nathan and Nathan alone took. "I have ten more people in my life, five of whom I feel I don't have to buy my love. They are having a very hard time with it, but they can talk to me about it and now understand that there is no other way for me. On September 30 I will step out of life, in a dignified way. Not by suicide, not on a whim. I think it is important to say goodbye myself and also to give my friends that chance. They will be there that day."
His family has not informed Nathan; they only learned the news in recent days, after his death. "I wouldn't know why I should say goodbye to my brothers and my mother. They have never been there for me. Posthumously, they will get another letter from me."
Conversation
Toward the end of his life, Nathan still had a psychologist guide him. "She gives me time and space to dwell on my feelings, because most of the time I live a bit like a robot. I've learned over the years that you have to be tough and not show weakness. With her, I'm allowed to do that."
We ourselves keep our toughness clenched for a while. We say goodbye to Nathan in a cramped hall, we drift, it is difficult to leave. In the elevator the heaviness sinks into my shoes. It is as quiet as a mouse. Around the corner a newsstand with daily news. Sixth state reform. A new parliamentary year. The Red Devils almost in Rio.
