Jennifer Edwards, formerly Edward Kozlowski, chairs the Oldsmar Code Enforcement Board. Now she's finally allowing her public identity to match what her mind has been telling her for a lifetime.
By MEGAN SCOTT
Published June 8, 2003
OLDSMAR - Jennifer Edwards sits on her living room couch, shuffling papers, fidgeting with a bracelet, checking and rechecking her watch.
It's Thursday afternoon, and Edwards is getting ready for her first public meeting since deciding that her life as a man was over. Born Edward Kozlowski, she now lives as Jennifer Edwards. Ed was the chairman of the Oldsmar Code Enforcement Board. Now Jennifer will run the meeting.
She wants to make a good impression. She worries how people will react. She's called most of her fellow board members to give them a headsup. One said, "Whatever you feel comfortable with."
But not everyone around town is so easygoing.
Oldsmar Mayor Jerry Beverland said if he had known Edwards was going to have a sex change, he probably wouldn't have supported her appointment.
He doesn't plan to take any action against her, but says her decision could affect her reappointment.
"We appointed Edward Kozlowski," he said. "When you appoint a man, then you end up with a woman, that's somewhat confusing. And I don't profess to understand that."
Edwards goes to the bedroom to check her reflection again. She pivots in front of the mirror. She flips her long blond hair behind her shoulders and goes to the bathroom to apply fresh lipstick.
She puts on the jacket to her Garfield & Marks black suit, then takes it off again and sits back on the couch.
"The public is going to laugh at me," she says. "I'm going to speak in the microphone, and then they're going to hear my deep voice."
Less than an hour later, she is at the door to the council chambers. She is about to take the hardest walk of her life.
"I said I can't go on anymore in this body'
Edwards' trip to City Hall last week was the latest step in a journey that started 47 years ago.
Growing up in Burlington County, N.J., Edwards knew she was different.
As a boy, Edwards played nurse, house, dressed in her mother's clothes. A few years later, on dates, she was transfixed by the sight of a girlfriend putting on makeup.
"Every time I looked at a woman I wanted to be a woman . . . to be what my mind says I am," she says.
She wondered, Am I gay? That didn't fit.
At 14, she ran away to New York and lived as a woman full time. Four years later, she decided to go west to college. She felt societal pressure to be a man.
So she went as a man.
She graduated from San Diego State University in 1977. She went on to marry twice. She has two stepdaughters from the first marriage. She works as a business computer applications architect, though she has been on disability leave since February because of a back injury from an old motorcycle accident.
But she couldn't suppress Jennifer Edwards. She "reached a point where I said I can't go on anymore in this body."
"You're a woman trapped in a man's body and you're screaming to get out," she said. "You want so bad to just belong. Imagine going through your whole life feeling like a freak."
Six months ago, Edwards decided she was going to live as a woman full time.
She started hormone therapy and went to counseling. She chose Jennifer, the name her mother, who had three sons, always said she would have given a daughter.
"Jennifer was very clear about who she was and what she wanted," said Pamela Epps, who is Edwards' psychologist and specializes in transgender issues. "This had been an issue for a long time that she had periodically kind of acted on. And she was at a time in her life, where she wasn't getting any younger. That she really felt like she was ready."
Since then, the estrogen and testosterone blockers have rounded her hips and softened her face and hands.
She weighs 140 pounds, down 60 from her days as Ed. At 5 feet 7, she wears size 8, sometimes 10. In a bra, she's an A-cup. She often peers down at her breasts to make sure they're still there.
But Edwards stresses this isn't about appearance.
"It's your being," she said. "It's to have your body match what your mind tells you what you have been all your life."
One of the requirements for the surgery is the patient first must live as a woman full time for at least 12 months and have letters of recommendation from a psychologist and psychiatrist.
"The procedure has to be thought of as an irreversible procedure," said Dr. Harold Reed, a Miami urologist with whom Edwards has talked about sex-change surgery. "Once you lop off someone's genitals, you can't put them back on again. There has to be no indecision, no ambivalence."
Edwards is sure.
She expects to spend up to $50,000 on the surgery, hormone therapy, electrolysis, hair extensions, clothes and makeup. She longs for the time after surgery when she can change the "M" on her driver's license to an "F."
Still, Edwards sometimes reaches to her back pocket for her wallet. She almost forgets her purse in Applebee's. She even starts signing "Edward Kozlowski" when she buys perfume from Tiffany & Co.
"It's an exciting, wonderful journey for me," she says. "If I walk by a mirror, I can't not look in it. I'm finally appearing to be what I've always wanted to be. I belong now. I fit."
Her decision was not a mutual one
As happy as Jennifer Edwards is, she's not in this alone. And her decision has broken the heart of the person closest to her - Leslie Sasso, whom she married in 1998.
For now, the couple still live together.
Sasso, 54, vacillates between anger and sadness. Part of her hopes it will go away. But it stares her dead in the face every day.
She's married to a woman.
Sasso knew her husband was a cross-dresser before she married him. But dressing like a woman isn't the same as wanting to be one.
It was November when Edward Kozlowski sat his wife down and told her that he wanted to be a woman.
There was nothing she could say.
"Couples make decisions together," Sasso said. But this was not a mutual decision.
She cries some days, is better on others. "She's not the man I married. I'm losing my husband."
Once Edwards has the operation, she will consider herself a lesbian.
She has always loved women. That won't change.
Meanwhile, Leslie and Jennifer have become more like girlfriends. They don't have sex. They don't hold hands. It's awkward for Leslie to call Jennifer dear or honey or love.
Sasso doesn't know if she's in this for the long haul.
She compares it to mourning for a lost loved one. When they talk on the phone, it feels comfortable because Jennifer still has a deep voice. But in person, it's different. Sometimes Sasso forgets. Sometimes she says Ed.
Yet, tough as it is, she still cares about Jennifer. That's why she agreed to talk for this story.
She heard some of the things being said around town. They make her angry. That's why she went to the Code Enforcement Board meeting last Thursday: to show her support.
A city resident for three years, Edwards wanted to get involved with Oldsmar politics, and she had some experience with code enforcement, so she decided to volunteer.
The City Council approved her appointment in 2001, and she joined the board as vice chairman, then became chairman.
Although she was living as a woman full time, once a month Edwards was a man at the Code Enforcement meetings. But over time, the changes became more and more obvious.
So recently she decided that Jennifer would take Ed's seat.
She called the city clerk and her colleagues on the board to let them know.
But the day of the meeting, she's still nervous.
At City Hall, she walks down the hallway, past old photos of past mayors and into the City Council chambers.
Her head's up. She doesn't swing her arms like a man.
She walks in a pair of dressy black shoes with 2-inch heels like she's worn them forever.
At the front of the room, she sits down at the dais.
Leslie Sasso and a few friends are in the audience. Her name plate has been changed from Edward Kozlowski to Jennifer Edwards.
The code enforcement officer is sick, so it's going to be a short meeting.
Ten minutes later, she bangs her gavel, lets out a sigh of relief and smiles. No one snickered, pointed or nudged each other. She made it. She got what she hoped for all along.
