A Belgian woman has ended her life under the country’s euthanasia laws following a sex change operation in the first case of its kind.
“Monster”
Nathan Verhelst, 44 (born Nancy), requested the procedure after complaining that a sex change operation had turned her into a “monster”.
She is thought to have been given a lethal injection by cancer specialist Dr Wim Distelmans, on the grounds that she was suffering from “intolerable psychological pain”.
Just hours before her death, Ms Verhelst revealed that she “was the girl that nobody wanted”, and that her mother had always wished that she had been a boy.
Rejected
After being rejected by her mother, she pursued a homosexual lifestyle and later attempted to turn into a man through an operation which she said had failed to meet her expectations.
“While my brothers were celebrated, I got a storage room above the garage as a bedroom. 'If only you had been a boy', my mother complained. I was tolerated, nothing more,” she told Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper.
“[Following the operation] I was ready to celebrate my new birth,” he told the newspaper. “But when I looked in the mirror, I was disgusted with myself. I do not want to be... a monster.”
Debate
The incident is likely to re-ignite the debate on euthanasia in Belgium, after statistics showed a 25 per cent increase in euthanasia cases in 2012 compared to the previous year.
Dr Distelmans is the same doctor who controversially euthanized two deaf twin brothers, Marc and Eddy Verbessem (45) after they expressed fears that they would turn blind as a result of a genetic disorder.
As in Ms Verhelst’s case, neither was suffering from a terminal illness or unbearable physical pain.
Recent figures have also shown an increase in the number of Dutch citizens killed by euthanasia, with a 13 per cent increase in 2012 from the year before.
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