The former Ron Ross leaves her hometown, readies for sex change
Kansas City, Kansas City, here she comes.
A Portlander most of her life, Donna Ross has moved from her hometown to follow spouse Christy, who has taken a job with the National Weather Service in metropolitan Kansas City, Mo.
Ross, 51, leaves behind a radio career that included broadcasting 811 consecutive Portland Winter Hawks home hockey games alongside play-by-play announcer Dean Vrooman, and several years working in various capacities at KBPS (89.9 FM).
And, of course, she leaves behind the fact, that until recently, she was a man.
“It’s hard to say goodbye to a lot of people, especially the ones who stuck with me,” she says. “Much like when I left hockey, I won’t miss the work as much as the people.”
Ron Ross became Donna Ross last July, shortly after telling her story in the pages of the Portland Tribune. She yearned for years to be a transgendered woman, and the desire becomes a reality Sept. 6 in Bangkok, Thailand, when she visits surgeon Dr. Kamol Pansritum to have a sex-change operation.
She also plans to have cosmetic surgery around her eyes, and maybe breast augmentation. Then she plans to return to Portland to visit friends and relatives at the end of September.
Ross says she couldn’t be happier with her transition, after living with internal strife for so many years, which included a half-hearted suicide attempt and thoughts of others. “I reclaimed a life I was preparing to throw away,” she says.
“I’m happy. I’m peaceful. I smell better,” she jokes. “Some days I’m taller (with heels).”
Ross says there won’t be any legal ramifications for her marriage, which began when she was a he. And, “we’re already cleared with Christy’s employer,” Ross says. “Our marital status as far as they are concerned won’t change. We’re not anticipating any problems.
“But, like the old ‘I Love Lucy’ line, there’s going to be a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.”
Ross, who attended Cleveland High School, doesn’t regret telling her story of transgenderism in the Tribune. “I don’t know if it’s been therapeutic … ,” she says. “It was something I was going to have to face: ‘Hockey announcer becomes girl.’
“And it allows me to give back to those people who have helped make my path easier.”
Ross continues to try to build the bridge between her and her parents, who have had trouble accepting her change. She becomes teary-eyed — “a leaky moment” in her words — when talking about how co-workers at KBPS “not only accommodated the change, but embraced it.” Ross was the station’s operations director and the IBEW Local 48 steward; she left June 30.
She said goodbye to her therapist, Heather Leffler, and had some emotional moments in the last days living in her hometown — looking out at the softball field at Benson High, where she coached so many games, or walking through Sewell Crest Park where she grew up.
She and her spouse and dog zipped off to Kansas City in their Ford Escort ZX2, nicknamed “Little Red Sports Car.” Ross plans to be a homemaker at first and maybe become active with transgenders in Kansas City, as Christy works at her new job, teaching at the National Weather Service Training Center. “Radar is her forte,” Ross says.
Eventually, Ross will start looking for work; it probably won’t be in radio.
“It’s going to be interesting to see if I can land a job there,” she says.
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