Copyright 2004 Times Newspapers Limited  
The Times (London)
November 20, 2004, Saturday
SECTION: Features; Weekend Review 24

LENGTH: 808 words

HEADLINE: Highs and lows

BYLINE: Ruth Gledhill

BODY:
Raised as a boy, Lisa-Lee Dark inhabits an uneasy space between two genders. But there is nothing ambiguous about her singing talent. Ruth Gledhill met her

Lisa-Lee Dark has a five o’clock shadow, long braided hair and a voice of quite extraordinary range -from soprano down to the gravelly regions where tenors and baritones dwell. She also has a genetic disorder which means she is part male, part female -or more accurately, stranded between the two. The famous 19th-century opera singer Adelina Patti had a similarly distinctive range; Dark is Patti’s great-great-great-niece -could it be that they share the genetic disorder?

Dark, a burly young woman of gentle charm, is inclined to think so. There is no medical evidence to connect the condition with the voice, and none to prove that Patti suffered from it too. "But she was married three times and never had children."

Dark and I meet in her native Swansea -a city described by Dylan Thomas as "the graveyard of ambition". Not so for Dark, who has overcome a childhood of quite egregious misery and alienation to establish a respectable career as a singer.

This month, at the age of 27, she will release her first album, Breath of Life, arrangements of classic songs such as Una furtiva lagrima, Libera me and Miserere, Venera and an unabashed entry into the easy-listening market.

Dark was raised as a boy but discovered that she was biologically female at the age of 19 when her condition was finally diagnosed. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a disorder affecting one in 15,000 births worldwide, involves an inability to produce cortisol leading to a deficiency in a crucial steroid. In about a quarter of the baby girls affected, this can cause ambiguous or male like genitals at birth. Because the body continues to produce too much testosterone, girls develop as if they were boys.

Dark has two X chromosomes, making her biologically female, but ambiguous hormones, which gave her a male appearance. In social terms, she has not so much been de-sexed as de-gendered. She sees herself as neither masculine nor feminine, but as herself. It seems incredible that her condition was never picked up.

Sent to a boys’ comprehensive, she was badly bullied, spat at, punched and hit, called names. She refused to play rugby or football. One name the boys taunted her with was "Lisa", the name she has consciously adopted as her own as a symbol of her survival. Only when she reached her teens did she begin to realise something was awry and seek help.

Experiencing dizzy spells, migraines and muscular cramps, she was told by a doctor, who did not carry out a full examination, that there was nothing wrong with her and that she was "spoilt". On the contrary, home life was difficult, characterised by alcohol and violence. "I used to walk the streets a lot." When she was 10, her aunt died, leaving a four-month-old daughter; Dark began to stay away from lessons to look after her baby cousin.

Ostracised at school and neglected at home, the adolescent was easy prey for a paedophile ring. During her sessions with members of the ring, she began to understand that she was not a normal male. Her attempt to report her abusers led to a medical examination where she was diagnosed with a rare hermaphroditic disorder.

By this time she had begun to develop breasts and was put on a course of male hormones to arrest the process of feminisation. She put on more than five stone - weight she is still trying to lose -her hair began to fall out and she grew a beard.

Since being correctly diagnosed she has been weaning herself off the male hormones and has not taken any for more than 18 months. "If I took female hormones regularly it would speed everything up but I feel I would rather let nature take its course," she explains.

Does she feel more female than male? "Neither, I feel I am in the middle. It will take several years for everything to sort itself out, and that gives me time to accept it."

She has come a long way. Discovered at the age of six, singing in a park, over the years she has worked on films, backing tracks, lead vocals and voiceovers -a strange, alternative world to the grim realities of home, alienation at school and sexual abuse.

She says that when she was younger she often wished she could die. She still gets depressed but says that music and Catholicism sustain her, offering a spiritual path which "transcends" the thorny question of sexuality and gender. "There is always something that stops me getting too depressed. I put that down to my faith." She has not yet had a boyfriend but can envisage having a baby one day. "I would like one, a little boy, because I want to give that child everything I didn’t have."----- Original Message -----