One night, in May of 2007, Michel Leblanc was lying in bed with his wife watching CNN. Larry King was interviewing a transsexual – someone who had undergone a sex change.
Mr. Leblanc turned to his wife and said: “If you would die, that's what I would do – I would change gender.”
With those words, “a time bomb went off” in his head, plunging him into a profound depression. Mr. Leblanc, a former football player and successful Internet entrepreneur, had been hiding for 45 years that he had always felt like a woman.
He had long struggled with depression, but, over the next three months, went virtually sleepless, dropped 30 pounds and became suicidal.
A psychiatrist diagnosed him with sexual-identity disorder and recommended a sex change. It was liberating.
Michel Leblanc began the transition to Michelle Blanc.
But what would the impact be on her successful business as an Internet marketing consultant? Ms. Blanc turned to public-relations experts, who had one firm recommendation: “Shut up.”
But she decided otherwise, turning instead to what she knew best: the Web.
“My life had crumbled and I desperately needed to talk to other people like me.”
Online, I found a community and support.”Ms. Blanc opened a MySpace account and became friends with 235 other transsexuals. She started a blog, femme 2.0, and created an avatar on Second Life, a popular online community.
“It was a modern coming-out,” Ms. Blanc says with a laugh.
Ms. Blanc, who was married for 15 years, remains close with her spouse, who has been supportive.
The sex change involved not only hormone treatments and surgery (at a cost of $60,000), but a lot of therapy as well as psychological and psychiatric counselling.
But one of the things Ms. Blanc found the most useful was the self-therapy that came from talking about her transition in cyberspace.
Her blog and Twitter posts became enormously popular; the public was fascinated by details of the sex change and Ms. Blanc outlined the process in great detail. Her high profile also resulted in Quebec's becoming the first province to cover sex-change surgery for those with a diagnosis of sexual-identity disorder.
“Being out there on the Web really helped me cope,” she says. “But what makes me proudest is that I helped a lot of other people along the way.”
