So Chastity Bono is transforming into the new and perhaps improved Chaz Bono. Yip, being lesbian just didn't cut it. Fourty years of life in a woman's body was so torturous that she prefers to chop off her lactiferous lumps and grow a penis. Cher, if she accepts their little 40-year-old girl undergoing a sex change, is probably busy sitting in the hospital waiting room, redrafting the "I've Got You Babe" lyrics:

 They say you are old and the truth will show

Through the complications of being a male Bono

Who cares about the fuss, do what in your heart is true

And we'll still love you no matter what you do

Babe, you got us babe

You got chest hair babe

Oh lord help my babe….

Humor aside, transgender surgery is a serious issue and often controversial. It really is amazing what medical advancements can do. You can almost become anyone you want to be, change any part of you that you are unhappy with, mold your face into one that resembles your favorite celebrity, slice off bits, add bits or change bits to your lover's approval…whatever you wish.

Does it make you more confident? Does it help you fit in? Does it make you feel loved? Does it make you happier?

We tell ourselves that we do these things to make ourselves happy, but happiness doesn't require all that pain, humiliation, societal ostracism and extremity. I'm not an expert on knowing how it feels to be a man trapped in a woman's body, but honestly I wouldn't know whether I was meant to be a man or I was just unhappy with being a woman. We don't pluck our eyebrows instead of wearing them bushy across our whole forehead or stick contacts in our eyes instead of wearing those nerd-magnet glasses because it makes us happier; it just makes us more "likable," makes us feel that we can love ourselves a little more because others would approve of the change.

Nine years ago when I entered high school, I had no friends whatsoever. One or two people would talk to me but not without making me the butt of their new joke to their own circle of friends. Lunch times were spent in the library, free time was spent with my nose in a book, and teams were normally chosen without me causing my teacher to be mediator and assign me into the first one that squirmed. So that year I made the resolution to change. I threw out my Stephen Hawkings and filled my shelves with overpriced Cosmopolitan magazines; I made a bed for myself in front of the TV and wrote down lists of the cute jock-type actors that seemed to be popular in the school corridors so that I could float around throwing their names into arb conversations:

It made me one of the more popular girls in school; it also made me fail some subjects in my last year. The truth is that I never actually changed because changing wasn't what I needed to make me like and accept myself. It didn't make me happier in the true sense; it just made others like me. Reading made me happy, and a monthly diet of Cosmopolitans did not satisfy me, which made me watch more and more mindless TV until I was so engrossed that I couldn't tell who I was any more. I ran away from who I really was because it made others like me. When you hide from something you love, it doesn't make you stop loving it; it just makes you forget how good you felt when you were doing something you loved. Of course I can't say the same for Chaz. Only he understands his decision. I don't.

Tharuna Devchand