Webloggin » This is so very San Francisco

I have no comment or insight at all. I just note this story because it is so very San Francisco, no matter how you look at it:

If ever there was a real-life, rags-to-riches fairy tale, Theresa Sparks’ story is it.

Only, this being San Francisco, Cinderella used to be a man and went from riches (traveling in a corporate jet) to rags (driving a taxi and sleeping on friends’ couches) to prominence again by becoming a pioneering transgender activist and the chief executive officer of a multimillion-dollar sex-toy company.

It’s not the way Sparks, 58, ever thought her life would turn out.

As she says in her profile on an Internet dating site, she’s “just another San Francisco trans-woman with the uncanny ability to get myself into trouble.”

But this week Sparks started what could be one of the most important chapters in her life when she was voted president of the San Francisco Police Commission. Her election shook up City Hall — she beat out Mayor Gavin Newsom’s pick for the job and prompted a prominent member of the board to resign abruptly.

After her election as president of one of the city’s most powerful commissions, which oversees department operating rules and sets crucial policies, Newsom’s administration is promising to work well with her, the transgender community is hailing her ascent as groundbreaking, and Sparks is enjoying the ride.

“Yesterday, I hit a new record in phone calls,” Sparks said Friday, juggling a morning of interview requests from the media and meeting appointments with Newsom and other City Hall politicos. “I actually had to start counting them. Fifty-three!”

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Born and raised in Kansas City, Sparks enjoyed dressing up in women’s clothes from a very early age, but fought those urges as a young man and underwent intense therapy, including electric shock treatment, hoping to suppress his desire to live as a woman.

Eventually, Sparks realized the only way to be happy would be to stop living as a man. By 1997 Sparks was living full time as a female, and three years later she traveled to Thailand for sexual reassignment surgery.

“It’s an unusual condition, but it’s not unnatural,” she said. “You discover that the only way to live with it is to transition physically so your physical appearance matches how you feel about yourself.”

She moved to San Francisco to blend in easier and formed a support network and a close circle of friends in the transgender community.

San Francisco is thought to have the largest population of transgender people in the country — estimates hover around 19,000 people. The term “transgender” covers a range of individuals, from men and women who have undergone surgery to change their gender to cross-dressers and the intersexed.

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In her search for a job, Sparks took temporary work at the sex-toy retailer Good Vibrations, packing vibrators in the shipping department over the Christmas holiday in 2001.

A few weeks later, she applied for a job as the company’s chief financial officer and got it. Two years ago, she became the chief executive officer. The company that started out as a small Mission District shop opened by a sex therapist now does $12 million in sales annually and has stores in California and Massachusetts.

But it was the rampant discrimination she experienced when she became a woman that pushed Sparks into her activism. She became a regular face at City Hall meetings and the Police Department, demanding fairer treatment for people like her.

Sparks fought for things like getting the city to cover sex-change operations as part of its insurance plan for government workers and helped implement new rules for police sensitivity training in dealings with transgender people. She organized vigils for transgender homicide victims and founded the Transgendered Political Caucus in 2000 to advise local politicians.