Does the lady regret?

The NYT recently ran an article "The Lady Regrets" about Dr. Renée Richards, who is touting her new book, “No Way Renée: The Second Half of My Notorious Life.” In the article they seem fixated on pointing out that Dr. Richards seems regretful about her life as a transsexual by this comment:

“In 1999, you told People—” the reporter begins.

Dr. Richards interrupts.

“—I told People what I was feeling, which I still feel: Better to be an intact man functioning with 100 percent capacity for everything than to be a transsexual woman who is an imperfect woman.”

Is this really regret though? Is a [edit] pre-op, pre-self-disclosed transsexual a 100% intact man? I think not -- although remaining intact sexually is one thing, one is not intact mentally. I surely was not. I was depressed, morose, suicidal -- hardly things one could call functional. I was as much an imperfect man then as I am an imperfect woman now, except I'm a lot happier as who I am now. Sure, the plumbing doesn't work 100% well, but it is close enough. But more importantly, I am now functioning at a higher level than I was before. I think this holds true for most transsexuals, although I don't know all that many personally.

The NYT goes further with Dr. Richards:

In the same interview, Dr. Richards talked about wishing for something that could have prevented the surgery.

“What I said was if there were a drug, some voodoo, any kind of mind-altering magic remedy to keep the man intact, that would have been preferable, but there wasn’t,” Dr. Richards says. “The pressure to change into a woman was so strong that if I had not been able to do it, I might have been a suicide.”

I can understand what she's saying here, and although it may sound regretful, it sounds more like regret that there isn't a way to reconcile one's life prior to transition in the case of late-transitioning transsexuals (so-called "secondaries") who may have built lives for themselves and have children and so on (as I had done). It was hard to give all that over, and yet, the choice seems to be to transition, to become a woman, or to take my own life, just as it was for Dr. Richards. Is that a choice? Is that regret? There is no magic elixir to "cure" a transsexual, i.e., make the gender dysphoria go away and make them fully happy and functional in the body they are given. If there were, certainly for us so-called secondaries, maybe more of us might choose such an option. Then again, maybe not. I am a product of my upbringing, with a lifetime of thinking about myself the way I do, of living with the gender dysphoria. It has certainly sculpted me. Would such a "cure" make me into a different person? I don't know.

And yet it is all hypothetical because it does not exist. Even the NYT asks the million dollar question and gets the answer back straight from the doctor:

Does she regret having the surgery?

“The answer is no.”

So, no regrets, really, not facing the reality of life as it is. I have no regrets for how I went about it. Occasionally, I think to myself "gee, I wish I had transitioned earlier." But then I think about not having my daughters, and that sort of trumps that wish, because the world would be a much dimmer and unhappier place without them.

This so-called transsexual regret is not really regret at all, I think, but perhaps a realization that life isn't all roses on the other side of transition. And for that, we have no one to blame but ourselves and our glamourization. Perhaps our care-givers can knock some sense into us before we make any irremediable steps, but the pressure drives us on, anyhow.