GEORGIE ZIADIE BECOMES A WOMAN AND BEGINS TO UNDERSTAND HER MENTALLY ILL PARENTS

Lady Colin Campbell takes the name she received upon her marriage, a brief marriage. As a young woman known as Georgie she had an ordeal to match her body with her female gender which would require surgery.  These are my notes selected to further her story from her memoir, Daughter of Narcissus, the prime reference for his month's posts. 

In May on 1968, Georgie had been cleared as psychologically well enough to consider surgery to correct her intersex condition and be a woman by gender. At the time there was intense pressure of young women to marry well before the age of twenty-five. Both of her parents were hostile towards her. In 1969 her narcissist mother denied that she had ever made the promise to her that she and her father would consent to surgery. Georgie however went to fashion school in Miami and had begun to sell some of the clothing she designed in New York. She needed $5000 for the surgery and attempted to earn it. But surprisingly she learned that her grandmother, Maisie, her mother's mother, had never known of her condition and, while visiting Jamaica, offered to pay for the surgery! She needed her vagina to be reconstructed and her clitoris reduced in size. Her parents offered to pay for it as suddenly and wanted her to forget her New York doctor and go to a Jamaican doctor instead. She had the surgery in New York with contributions from family and it turned out to be not as long a surgery as expected. Her mother bought herself jewelry with the money contributed in excess of the surgery costs rather than give it back to donors. Georgie had the surgery without family there but anorexia was another consideration and the doctors demanded that a parent come to New York. Her mother did, under duress, and then kept the medical paperwork needed to actually change her ID to female.  Eventually the redone birth certificate was done.

The other aspect of this change was that the upper classes in Jamaica were stunned to see a beautiful twenty-one year old woman rather than a young man in their midst, fashionable and a model. Her mother decided to tell the story her way, starring herself and all her suffering, blaming her husband for delays, and exaggerating all that Georgie had been through as well. Georgie chose to be straight-forward when asked but did not want to become news. It was time to let a suitable husband from the island's elite find her. But her mother was jealous of the attention she was getting and her beauty and an incident occurred in which Gloria, her mother, stabbed Georgie's cheek with a lit cigarette. In response she began battering her mother. I was 1972 and her mother would die without ever apologizing.  No chance of closeness, Georgie was through with trying or believing it would ever get better.

Georgie slowly became more aware that her parents were mentally ill and suffered from personality disorders for which they would not seek help.  She came to understand they were a mismatched couple dedicated to preserving the marriage but that the terms and conditions of marriage for women of their class could be especially difficult.

She came to understand that as Narcissists they were incapable of true care and concern for their children. Eventually accepting what they were and were not allowed her to deal with them with the distance she needed to keep to further be abused by them.

But psychology and psychiatry was not then what they are today today.  Georgie Ziadie was expected to marry early and well before the age of twenty five. Her beauty and status as a person of the British Jamaica colony attracted many a like-minded suitor who was prepared to marry, but the man she did marry proved to be exactly like her parents - and worse. She had to come to terms with the effects her parents abuse had on her without the acknowledgment we have today of Domestic Violence.

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