Make your mind up, man/woman/man!

[faceless]

A British tycoon and father of two has been a man and a woman ... and a man again ... and knows which sex he'd rather be

Businessman Sam Hashimi with his wife Trudi in 1990 before he became designer Samantha Kane

Charles Kane when he was the beautiful designer Samantha in Monaco in 2001

As he is today
By Helen Weathers

Property tycoon Charles Kane is, by any standards, a very successful man. He has a multi-million-pound property portfolio, a law degree, a £250,000, 52ft motor yacht, a top-of-the-range Mercedes and a wardrobe stuffed with designer suits And yet, he is far from happy. Despite all these attributes, which should act as a magnet to certain women, the one thing missing from his life is a lasting and fulfilling relationship.

In the past year not one of his few and far between romances has lasted longer than six weeks and more often than not they end rather abruptly after the first date. Either the woman suddenly stops returning his calls after discovering his secret or, if they don't care too much about hurting his feelings, dismiss him with a withering: "I want a real man." "There is nothing I want more than to fall in love and get married," says 48-year-old Charles. "It is like a knife to my heart every time I am rejected. I am a real man. I feel 100 per cent a man, but I am a sensitive, modern man. People can be so narrow-minded. All I want is to be accepted and loved for who I am."

The big secret stopping this from happening is a rather startling one. Charles is believed to be the only person in the UK to have undergone two sex change operations; the first to turn him into a woman and the second to turn him back into a man after he realised he'd made a horrible mistake. Then, in 2004, after seven years living as a woman, he decided he wanted to be a man after all. He is now in the unique position of knowing what it is like to be both a woman and a man, and he has reached the conclusion that it is much better being a man - even with the current disadvantages. "The trouble is, I would much rather be the man I was before all this," he says.

Charles blames his ghastly predicament on the UK's then top expert on transsexualism, gender psychiatrist Dr Russell Reid - now retired - who in 2007 was reprimanded by the General Medical Council for rushing patients into sex-change treatments. Dr Russell Reid was found guilty of serious misconduct by a GMC panel who rebuked him for his "lack of caution in initiating hormonal and surgical gender reassessment treatment in patients without more careful and thorough investigation and assessment".

Charles was one of those who complained and, while the hearing was ongoing, he was already in the process of changing back into a man. Having decided he was not a true transsexual, but had been 'confused' after the break-up of his 12-year marriage, Charles had his breast implants removed and underwent three operations at the NHS gender clinic at Charing Cross Hospital to reconstruct his male genitalia, using skin grafts from his stomach.
samantha

He has to take strong doses of testosterone daily - by applying a gel to his body, because he can't produce the male hormone naturally, and although he says his new genitals look normal, intimate relations with a woman can be achieved only by means of a concealed pump.

I meet Charles at his £2million property in Holland Park, West London, where he cuts a debonair figure in a double-breasted suit and tie. It has taken four years of hormone therapy to turn him into someone who does indeed pass as a man - but vestiges of Samantha still remain. Cosmetic surgery has left him with a very feminine nose, while £6,000 worth of veneers have given him a smile any Hollywood starlet would be proud to possess. His skin is likewise peachy smooth with just a hint of downy hair where stubble should be.
The constant sweeping of his hair out of his eyes with a delicate hand is also a very feminine gesture. You can see he certainly would have made a convincing woman.

But what is so fascinating is his unique take on what life was like as a woman compared with being a man. "At first it was very enjoyable being a woman, especially being a beautiful woman in business. People notice you and it is much easier to make your presence felt at a meeting. I was flattered by the attention. I became much more creative as a person, and less aggressive. Whereas, once as a man it had taken me seconds to make a decision, I would think things through much more carefully, weighing up all the options before deciding what to do.

"People completely underestimate the effect of male and female hormones. Speaking from my own experience, they affect every part of your life, physically and emotionally. And then there is the sex. As a man, sex was a very physical and more enjoyable experience, but as a woman it was much more dependent on my mood and emotions. As a man, I thought about sex every day, but as a woman if I hadn't had sex for a couple of months I wasn't really bothered. Sex as a woman isn't as good anyway. It is not as intense."

Although Charles was initially thrilled with his transformation into a woman - and a beautiful one at that - the novelty soon began to pale and he began to wonder if he was merely playing a part rather than feeling like a real woman. "The worst part about being a woman is being treated as a sex object. I became very irritated when men I was just not interested in kept coming up to me with the worst chat-up lines I'd ever heard," says Charles. Even though I was a woman physically, in many ways I felt I still had a male brain. I was still interested in the world, what was happening, current affairs, business and sport, but the women I mixed with didn't share that interest to the same degree.

"In fact, I found being a woman rather shallow and limiting. So much depends on your appearance, at the expense of everything else. I wasn't interested in shopping. My female friends would spend hours shopping for clothes, trying on different outfits. But having been a man I knew exactly what would suit me and appeal to men. I could walk into a shop and be out again in five minutes with the right dress.

"Nor have I ever been interested in celebrity magazines or the things that interest other women, but when I tried to talk to men about blokey things they didn't take me seriously. Also, because I'd once been a man, I knew exactly how they thought and responded to women, so there were no surprises and no mystery for me. It all became rather boring.

"Something else I found difficult to cope with were the moods and depression which I believe were caused by taking the female hormone oestrogen. As a man, I was never depressed. If something bothered me, I would simply shrug it off and move on. As a woman, I felt as if I was on a rollercoaster of emotion. A disagreement with a boyfriend or friend would affect my mood for days."

The story of how a successful businessman and family man came to embark on this transsexual odyssey is as bizarre as it is remarkable. Having studied engineering after he left school, he met and married his blonde wife, Trudi, and they had two children, a daughter now aged 23, and a son aged 22. An ambitious alpha male, Sam (original name) landed a job heading the investment arm of a Saudi-owned company and launched an unsuccessful takeover bid for Sheffield United FC. He made millions developing property.

"Trudi was in my eyes the perfect woman, she was the love of my life, but I was a typical man who concentrated too much on my work and not enough on my family. I thought that if I gave her a nice house and she had plenty of money to spend at Harrods, she'd be happy, but she wasn't," says Charles who also admits he had a couple of affairs during his marriage. When she left me for another man, I was absolutely devastated and our split became acrimonious.

"I was prevented from seeing my children, which destroyed me. I'd been hugely successful building up a property portfolio, but at the time of our divorce the economy plunged and I lost a lot of money in the recession. I felt diminished as a man."

Charles now believes he suffered a complete mental breakdown, during which he started to question everything, including his sexuality. As a teenager he'd had a crush on another boy and in his confusion he started going to gay and transvestite clubs, during which he came into contact with transsexuals. "I went through a bit of a wild phase, experimenting. I'd always felt my sexuality was very fluid, even though I'd never been attracted to men when I was married to Trudi," says Charles, whose marriage collapsed in 1995.

"I met people at these transsexual clubs who'd kept saying how fantastic it was to be a woman, how great the sex was, how happy they were, and I started to wonder if I should become a transsexual, too. But I can see now that I wasn't really transsexual. A true transsexual is someone who is so determined to be a woman that they don't care if they look like an 18st trucker in drag. I just wanted be the perfect woman. I was acting out a fantasy."

It was through these transsexual clubs that Charles heard about Dr Russell Reid, and duly made an appointment in 1997. "It was all so quick," says Charles. "We spoke about my fantasies of being a woman and he diagnosed gender dysphoria and gave me female hormones. I was brought up to trust doctors and being in a severely depressed and confused state I accepted the diagnosis without question."

Gender realignment guidelines, which are not legally binding, say patients should have been living in their gender role for at least three months before being prescribed hormones and should have at least 12 months of that treatment before surgery. Charles had his sex-change operation just six months after his first appointment with Dr Reid, and the day after a failed court battle to gain access to his children, who were then aged 12 and 13.

Didn't he have doubts about such a drastic course of action?

"You have to understand I was on my own," says Charles. "I had lost my wife and my family. I had no one to talk to, no one to tell me I might be making a mistake.
"I believe that all my actions stemmed from the acute psychological distress of not being able to see my children."

At the time, though, Charles was thrilled with his transformation into a woman. Re-inventing herself as an interior designer, Samantha Kane became a huge success in her own right, mixing with the jet set, with whom she sipped champagne in the best hotels and bars in Cannes and Monte Carlo.

Samantha became more depressed, but the main catalyst for her decision to live as a man again was ostensibly the collapse of her engagement to a wealthy British landowner, who was aware of her sex-change operation. "Initially, he wasn't bothered that I'd once been a man, but the longer we were together, the more he mentioned it," says Charles. "He'd say things like 'so and so doesn't think like that because she's a real woman'. I realised I'd never be fully accepted as a woman."

But he reveals the real reason for undergoing such traumatic surgery to become a man again was the hope that it might reconcile him with his estranged children, who he hasn't seen for 13 years.

"I really hoped, more than anything, that if I turned myself back into a man they might agree to see me again," says Charles. "After the operation, I put out feelers through extended family to see if they'd meet me, but I received a message back saying they'd rather leave things as they were. That was a terrible blow. So nothing has really turned out the way I hoped. Sometimes, it can be a very lonely existence. I thought going back to being a man would be the end of the story, but it's not. Becoming a man again has been much harder than I ever imagined.

"After what I've been through, I now think that sex-change operations shouldn't be allowed. They should be banned. We live today in a consumerist society where we all believe we can have everything we want, but too much choice can be a dangerous thing.'"

He laments the level of counselling he's received both times, but ultimately comes across as someone who is still as confused as ever about who he is and what he wants to be.

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I can't believe he was able to go from having the thought to having chop in just 6 months - it usually takes years. I suppose when you've the money you can do what you want though!

I know one person who's had a sex-change, and while I can't stand her as a person, it's made her life much happier, so to hear this maniac complain about how he didn't feel like going shopping etc just seems massively shallow.

[nekokate]

I once saw a documentary about this person. It's a case of having more money than sense.

[pirtybirdy]

I remember this documentary. He had bought a yacht. He seemed to be quite an eccentric person. Sort of an oddball. I'd like to see a follow up documentary on this guy. Strange, but interesting.

[Bat]

What a prick no, a cunt no, a fanny no, a cock, whatever. Pratt.

[Skylace]

[eefanincan]

[SpursFan1902]

Sounds like he had no idea what women are all about. I say keep him out of the club!

[luke]

[Kezza]