Early Life
Theresa Sparks was born on April 8, 1949, in Kansas City, Kansas, where she grew up. Assigned male at birth, Sparks expressed her gender identity at an early age by wearing women's clothing, though she later resisted these impulses in adolescence.
Sparks went to Kansas State University and graduated with a degree in engineering. She served in the United States Navy. Later she managed several waste management and recycling companies and patented two recycling techniques.
She married her first wife in 1971 and together they had three children: two sons and a daughter. After nine years of marriage, Sparks finally revealed to her wife her desire to live as a woman. They separated shortly after and eventually divorced. Sparks remarried, but that marriage also ended in divorce.
Sparks underwent "intense therapy and an electric shock treatment" to try to suppress her femininity, before deciding at last to embrace her gender identity. "It's an unusual condition, but it's not unnatural," she said later. "You discover that the only way to live with it is to transition physically so your physical appearance matches how you feel about yourself."
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