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Off-Ramp

Zoey 101: Chopper pilot Bob Tur becomes Zoey Tur, Part 2

By Off-Ramp Staff
Published Sep 4, 2013
Zoey Tur, five months into her transition from Bob Tur.
Zoey Tur, five months into her transition from Bob Tur.
(
Guru Thapar
)
One of the most obvious physical changes, as Bob Tur transitions to Zoey Tur, is that Zoey has breasts. Bob never really had a butt, Zoey does. Inside, Zoey says she's a much happier person than Bob ever was. "It was like living under the El in Chicago, and moving to Iowa. The noise has stopped."
One of the most obvious physical changes, as Bob Tur transitions to Zoey Tur, is that Zoey has breasts. Bob never really had a butt, Zoey does. Inside, Zoey says she's a much happier person than Bob ever was. "It was like living under the El in Chicago, and moving to Iowa. The noise has stopped."
(
John Rabe
)

About the Show

Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.

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Zoey 101: Chopper pilot Bob Tur becomes Zoey Tur, Part 2

In June, Off-Ramp welcomed Zoey Tur into the studio to talk about Gender Identity Disorder, also known as gender dysphoria, which she'd suffered, as Bob, her entire life.

Among other macho exploits, Bob Tur piloted the helicopter that hovered above Reginald Denny's beating during the LA Riots and found OJ Simpson during his slow-speed chase. Much of that behavior, Zoey told us, was acting out. Inside, she knew she was a woman, christened Zoey at the suggested of two close friends, and she started hormone replacement on May 6, 2013.

So far, Zoey has been taking the drugs for the transition, and there are definite physical changes starting, but the big changes will happen with surgery, the first of which she says she'll undergo in a few weeks.

Today, after not seeing Zoey since our first interview, I met her in Santa Monica, and we talked about the transition (it's going well, but the drugs do much more than she expected), men (she's being relegated to the "girls' table"), dating (she and her girlfriend both decided they didn't want to date a woman, and she thinks straight men don't want to date MacGuyver), and Bradley Manning (she blames the Army as much as Manning).

(NOTE: This post has been edited to fix pronoun inconsistencies. After discussion with Zoey, we've decided that "he" will be used to refer to everything pre-May 6, 2013, when Bob started hormone therapy, and "she" will be used to refer to Zoey after that date. -- John Rabe)

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