OPINION:
The lot of a transgendered wife is not always a happy one, no matter how many genders and marriages she terminates with extreme prejudice. A cheatin’ heart can hurt in the unlikeliest places.
Tammy L. Felbaum, 58, of Seward, Pennsylvania, walked into the Westmoreland County Courthouse earlier this week looking for trouble. She put her purse on the baggage X-ray machine, as instructed, and told the officers that “I’ve got guns, an Uzi and a rocket launcher in my purse.” When she walked through the scanner, she told another officer, “I came here to shoot a judge.”
That got everyone’s immediate attention. Officers searched her purse and found none of the items she boasted of, but she was nevertheless arrested for disorderly conduct and making terroristic threats. She was held in lieu of a $100,000 bond, and learned the hard way that terror is no joking matter.
But it was Mrs. Felbaum’s history as an amateur surgeon that interested the officers, who no doubt winced a time or two on learning the particulars of Mrs. Felbaum’s unusual career.
She was born Thomas Wyda, a man, and says she castrated herself 30 years ago and underwent professional surgery afterward. She married James Felbaum 15 years ago, and when she caught him cheating on her she castrated him, too. She told The Associated Press that he took a painkiller medication after the sex-altering procedure and choked to death. Then she insisted that he castrated himself.
Though she said she had nothing to do with her husband’s “minor surgery,” she conceded that she has “an interest in surgery” and had “castrated bulls in the past.” Nevertheless, she was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, recklessly endangering another person and unauthorized practice of medicine. She was sentenced to 5 to 11 years in state prison, where she had no further access to knives, sharp or not.
Mrs. Felbaum, though not a qualified surgeon, is experienced in domestic bliss. She has had six husbands. The five others, so far as the authorities know, are still fully intact. The moral here, insofar as there is one, is that the idea that “you can be all you want to be” is sometimes true, but not always true, and when a naughty husband sees his wife approaching with a sharp knife, he can only hope that she’s not going to stand over him and say, “to be, or not to be?” Shakespeare probably had a word for that, too, but we’re not sure what it was.
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