Constable: Prostate cancer 'warrior' now raising awareness as a woman

During the annual SEA Blue Prostate Cancer Walk/Run at Chicago's Lincoln Park, the “Warriors” who have survived the potentially deadly cancer are called to the stage to the cheers of a crowd that includes wives, mothers, daughters, sisters and girlfriends.

This year, a Venn diagram of that moment would put Iris Farley of Gurnee in the overlap of the two groups.

“The crossover between trans folk and prostate cancer survivors is a pretty small one,” says Farley, 51, a survivor who will run on Sept. 26 as a transgender woman after years of running that race as a man. Farley's wife, the Rev. Nicole Farley, who ran alongside her husband in 2017, remains a staunch supporter, as does their 25-year-old son, Jim Farley.

Farley's cancerous prostate was removed in 2015, but that didn't end her advocacy. Farley says “anybody with a prostate” — including transgender women — needs to get the simple prostate-specific antigen or PSA blood test that often is the first indicator of prostate cancer. That's what saved Farley.

“It was completely off my radar,” she says, noting that the first elevated PSA was in 2010. The next year, the PSA level was higher, but two biopsies didn't show cancer.

“My grandfather died of prostate cancer,” says Farley, who eventually received a “saturation biopsy” that took more tissue samples and found cancer. Some patients delay treatment until the cancer gets worse.

“I was not a person who could do that,” Farley says. “The notion of sitting there, just waiting for it to blow up, I couldn't do that.”

Doing research on a prostate cancer support website called You Are Not Alone Now, yananow.org, Farley eventually made the decision to have the prostate removed by Dr. Brian T. Helfand, a Glenview urologist, in a robotic-assisted surgery that went perfectly. After that, Farley met with Jeffrey Albaugh, a board-certified advanced practice urology clinical nurse specialist and director of sexual health at NorthShore University Health System, who wrote the book “Reclaiming Sex & Intimacy After Prostate Cancer: A Guide for Men and Their Partners.”

Albaugh was the one who persuaded Farley to run the SEA Blue 5K in 2017. A 1988 graduate of Schaumburg High School and member of the cross-country and track teams, Farley enjoyed getting back into running. Farley ran four half-marathons and one full marathon at Disney World.

“The Princess half-marathon in 2020 was instrumental in understanding my gender identity,” says Farley, who ran a 10K wearing a running kilt and a top honoring Elsa, the Snow Queen from the movie “Frozen,” before donning a Snow White tank top with a red bow in the back for the longer race the next day.

“I was just trying to get as close as I could to where I wanted to be,” Farley says, comparing the path to transitioning to a trail of bread crumbs leading to the right decision. “I just felt joyful in a way I couldn't remember feeling for a long time. I ran the next race as a little kid who was happy. I was flying. It was great.”

But the transition at home wasn't easy and required lots of conversations and effort.

“As soon as I felt sure something was going on, I brought her into it,” Farley says of Nicole Farley. They met as students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, when Farley presented as a man named Scott. They married in June 1994. The path from Scott to Iris, a name chosen in part because Farley loves floral prints and Iris also is the Greek goddess of the rainbow, wasn't easy for the couple.

“I can be joyful for her finding her wholeness and still grieve the loss of a marriage and the loss of a husband,” says Nicole Farley, an ordained Presbyterian minister and active member of PFLAG, the national advocacy organization for the LGBTQ+ community. “All the hard work we put into our marriage carried over and now has a place in our friendship.”

They recently took a vacation together to San Francisco and show off a photo of the two of them smiling with their arms around each other as evidence that they had a good time.

But they are still working on “how we move from husband and wife to this thing we call BFF mode,” Farley says. “We want to remain part of each other's lives.”

The couple, who live together, are working out details for an amicable divorce and new lives as a newly single heterosexual woman and a transgender lesbian.

Their son, a high school math teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico, majored in women and gender studies as well as psychology in college. “He probably knew more about it at the time than I did,” Farley says of transitioning.

“He asked me, ‘What do I call you now?'” Farley remembers. “I told him, ‘I'm fine with you calling me Dad. I'm fine with you calling me Iris.' He still calls me Dad, which I like.”

When getting rid of male clothes, Farley gave her son a beloved Chicago Bears Walter Payton jersey, explaining that it wasn't feminine enough.

“For Father's Day this year, he sent me a cute women's cut Payton jersey,” Farley says, pausing a moment to cope with the emotions of that gesture. “It was pretty cool.”

Farley played a major role in making the transition easier at work in his job as senior director of human relations in the Chicago and Milwaukee offices of Kamatsu, makers of earth-moving equipment. “While still Scott, I had started to get involved in diversity and inclusion,” says Farley, who worked on the project for three years before finalizing a gender-transition plan in May 2019. “When I created that document, I had no idea I'd be the first person to use it.”

Farley talks openly about the privileges she enjoys as a white person with supportive loved ones and a good career. Many transgender people, especially people of color, are victims of abuse and violence, Farley says.

With the legal name change in December 2020 to Iris Marie Farley, and a 10-year passport that identifies Farley as female, the transition is almost complete, Farley says.

“On the day my dad went into the hospital with COVID, I was there,” says Farley, who first asked his father if he could arrive as Iris. His dad, who entered the hospital on Nov. 8 and died on Christmas Eve, texted back, “Yes” with a heart emoji.

Farley says she and her loved ones are in a good place and committed to making the world a better place. Nicole Farley is using her industrial design degree and her master's of divinity degree in A New Creation, which incorporates faith-filled art projects and creativity into churches. Iris Farley says she is a confident and happy woman.

“The smiles,” Farley says, “have gotten bigger in pictures in the last year.”