Chaz Bono: Sex change

After years of struggling with his sexuality, Chaz Bono opened up about transitioning to a man on today's "Oprah."

Life was always so much more difficult," he told Oprah Winfrey about his former life as Chastity Bono. "It also felt like my body was literally betraying me."

"The boobs threw you off," Winfrey said. "Ugh," Bono grunted. "You have this image of yourself and all of a sudden your body does the exact opposite of what you feel.

Added Bono, 42, who announced his momentous decision in June 2009, "We had to really almost re-learn how to communicate and how to be around each other."

"Things had changed," said the author. "Just me saying the same thing that I would have before with a deeper voice and more of a presence."

We were talking about how we were going to break the story, and it broke without us, because my voice started changing," Bono, 42, recently said of his transitioning process, achieved through surgery and hormone treatments. "People notice things and they call the tabloids.

"I couldn't do it privately," he continued. "So I could either have done it (and people would have known,) and other people would have written about it, and it wouldn't be the truth. Or I could do it myself and try to help people and put a face on an issue people don't understand.

The singer said in 2009, when Chaz Bono revealed his decision to undergo a sex change, that she respected "the courage it takes to go through this transition in the glare of public scrutiny and although I may not understand I will strive to be understanding. The one thing that will never change is my abiding love for my child."

Cher said in a November 2010 interview with Vanity Fair that she sometimes mistakenly refers to Chaz Bono as a woman.

She and Sonny Bono were married between 1964 and 1975. Sonny Bono, a singer-turned-politician, died on Jan. 5, 1998 at age 62 after a skiing accident.

Cher also has a son, Elijah, with ex-husband and musician Gregg Allman. Sonny Bono has three other children, including two with his fourth and most recent wife, Mary.

"Becoming Chaz," is set to debut on Winfrey's OWN network on Tuesday at 9 p.m. Check out a promo below.