Wearing a two-piece bikini, Lonness Valenna slid down one of Wild Waves Theme Park’s many water slides.

“I stand up, swipe the water off my face but then I noticed my little bottom came off,” she said. “‘Oh, quick, come over and get it and put it on’ and then I turn around and see the lifeguard right there and she’s like … that was that.”

It was her first trip to the park with the Gender Alliance of the South Sound.

Knowing there was no way to avoid the lifeguard, Valenna decided to own the awkward encounter despite her mortification.

“So I go right up to her and I said, ‘the first show is free, the second will cost you.’”

Luckily, the lifeguard burst out laughing but had some obvious questions.

“I proceeded to take the next 15 minutes of my livelihood away and explained to her what transgender people are,” Valenna said. “I told her about G.A.S.S. and everything and now actually, every paycheck, she’s given 10 percent to us.”

Valenna is the president of the Gender Alliance of the South Sound, a nonprofit support and social group for the transgender community, which includes those from Federal Way. She goes by the moniker “Fairy Godmother” for the help she’s given to people starting out during their transition — including providing a place to stay for transgender people who find themselves homeless.

But her life hasn’t always been a Fairy Godmother helping the homeless.

Born in 1982 as intersex to Jenny Kiser in Houma, Louisiana, Valenna was named Harley Sturgis Kiser by her father who promptly left just after her birth.

“I was two fetuses that merged together in the womb,” Valenna said. “I’m a very unique individual … I was born with both organs, female and male, it is a very rare occurrence … My genetic structure is different from others. In fact, there are only 27 known cases.”

Because of her differences, and growing up in the south, Valenna said her mother wasn’t entirely aware of her condition.

“I was raised as a girl until the age of 7,” she said, bluntly.

Because her mother was a truck driver, Valenna went on trips with her as a child. To keep her occupied, she delved into children’s activity books and learned to read at a young age.

Her first experience with gender identity came when she stumbled upon L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, the author of the “Wizard of Oz.”

“There was 14 of them and one of my favorite characters in there was Princess Ozma,” she recalled. “She was actually a boy named Tip that went through and basically lived the life of a slave, and eventually became the princess of Oz, finding out that she/he was the heir to everything.”

Baum’s books go back to 1904, very radical ideas at the time.

Once Valenna was old enough to start school, the two settled down in Anderson, Indiana. However, signing Valenna up for school proved to be a challenge with a birth certificate that stated “intersex” as the gender.

At the time, Valenna said the school system told her mother that they “couldn’t have that” because it wouldn’t be safe if bathroom issues came up.

“They basically said, ‘We can’t have your child in school until he gets an operation,’” she said. “Because, in their minds, penis equals male no matter what.”

In 1988, Valenna had a traumatic “normalization surgery,” which was paid for through financial aid. Valenna said her mother thought it was just a bit of corrective surgery, but it turned out to be a “full blown hysterectomy.”

Valenna said she was forced into malehood and every feminine thing she loved was taken away from her.

“It’s the equivalency of a child being raped,” she said. “This felt like your soul was being raped. Your very being, your existence, your identity taken from you.”

Throughout her childhood, Valenna would go over to girlfriend’s houses and play dress-up in secret. By age 12, she expressed to her mother that she wanted to be a girl.

“She would call me a ‘collection of spare parts that was accidentally given life,’” Valenna recalled as their relationship took a turn for the worse.

One day, Valenna and her mom got onto a bus for Indianapolis, Indiana but stopped at a rest stop in Muncie, Indiana. As the two got off, Valenna returned to the bus but couldn’t find her mother. She figured she had sat somewhere else and that they’d meet up in Indianapolis.

But when she arrived, Valenna couldn’t find her. She had been abandoned in a big city at the age of 12.

“I wandered around for a day-and-a-half or two,” she said. “Eventually, the police found me and, well, they couldn’t find her so I became property of the state.”

Valenna said doctors tested her blood and other samples after finding out she was born intersex before she was sent to Ireland to live with her grandparents.

“Grandfather was in no way accepting while grandmother, on the side when he wasn’t around, let me do a lot of the women stuff. She was understanding, grandfather not so much,” she said. “It’s always kind of been the case going through life. The males just can’t grasp it.”

Two years later, Valenna returned to her family after she got a call that her mother was looking for her. She had married, had a son named Jesse James Kiser and was living in Georgia. Valenna tried to stay with family but, feeling unaccepted, she moved out and became homeless — not her first time.

“Because of a traumatic incident that happened a little bit after [my brother’s] father’s death, mother started really hating things of diversity,” Valenna said. “We went to Louisiana and I was kind of in the poorhouse for a time because she wanted to keep me around but she did not want me going towards the other side, so I left.”

Valenna got a job at Wal-Mart while in high school and reconnected with a pen pal who would later become her wife.

Holed up in a studio she called an attic, Valenna finally had a place of her own. With her job, she was able to buy “girly stuff,” which included trips to a formal dress store.

“I’d go in there, talk with them and one of the ladies who worked there was a lesbian,” Valenna said. “She was about the closest thing you can get to diversity out there.”

She told the dress store employees that she worked in a playhouse and was looking for theatre costumes.

But, after a while, she couldn’t stand living a lie.

“It was getting to the point of depression, almost suicide, not being able to be your authentic self and having this facade,” she said. “Not because I wasn’t ready but because the world around me, the environment wasn’t ready for such a thing.”

Valenna decided enough was enough. She put on her “poofiest” dress on her birthday, hid a sword for defense and committed “social suicide.”

When people asked, she said, ‘This is how I am. Don’t like it? You know where to find me.”

Over the course of two days, no one came. Valenna mistakenly thought it was acceptance but it turned out no one knew where to find her.

She received backlash from her employer for wearing a skirt and was bullied.

“I wore a pleated skirt, a Cathy skirt, to work because that was the uniform at the time and people would just come gawk at the weird person,” she said. “Unfortunately, it made the store’s sales rise.”

But after Hurricane Katrina, and the suicide of Valenna’s brother in 2010, Valenna’s mother was committed to Bayou Oaks mental facility.

“Harley was a strange kid for me when he was growing up but now since he’s given me a name that I can call him now, which is Lonness, I love the name,” Jenny Kiser said in a phone interview. “I think it was thought out very well.”

According to Valenna, “Lonness” is Irish and is old Gaelic, which means elegant. Valenna is Gaelic for “to transform.”

Jenny Kiser spent a few years in the mental health facility and is undergoing diversity training at a a local Gay Straight Alliance club at the community college in Houma, Louisiana.

“It’s been a long journey for me,” Jenny Kiser said. “I have read three books on this and I’m fixing to read another book he’s sent me,” she said. “I’m just loving my gift, it’s priceless.”

Valenna sends her books to read and study, with the most recent being “Where’s My Book? A Guide for Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Youth, Their Parents and Everyone Else” by Linda Gromko, PhD. Valenna is also a contributing author with her chapter on page 243.

After the outburst with her mother, Valenna moved to Seattle with her wife and friend.

“Seattle kept coming up,” she said about her search for transgender communities.

Car-less, jobless and out $7,000 from moving costs, Valenna, her wife and a friend moved to Des Moines.

“Day three — I’m going to go to Capitol Hill! This is what I read about,” she said, referring to the Seattle neighborhood known for its LGBTQ inclusion. “But I saw one drag queen. Where’s all the trans people?”

Valenna was told Capitol Hill was the “gay neighborhood” and that she “might want to go further south.”

After much research, she found the Gender Alliance of the South Sound, which is based at the Rainbow Center in Tacoma. Valenna said they were extremely accommodating — asking if she needed therapy, hormones, something to drink or eat. It was the start of Valenna’s activism in the transgender community, where she’s still making waves.

Since her time in the northwest, she’s helped friend and current vice president Amy Colbert create Amy’s Out House for homeless transgender people. Valenna started her own house in the Renton area called the Candy House, and she’s helped the group through positions such as events/social coordinator, vice president and is now the president of the Gender Alliance of the South Sound, which has satellite groups in Olympia and Bremerton.

As the Fairy Godmother, she takes women on small shopping sprees, hosts roller skate nights and has restructured the Gender Alliance of the South Sound to be a social group instead of just a support group.

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