All my life I’ve know I was “different” from everyone around me. I didn’t always understand what that meant, but I always knew it to be true. Because of it, I spent the first 47 years of my life completely and utterly alone. I never felt I belonged. I never felt I fit in anywhere. I always felt that I was caught between two worlds. If you aren’t transgendered I don’t think you can even begin to imagine how much it hurts to feel this way, to be completely alone in a room full of people or lying beside your wife at night.

For the first 47 years of my life I felt like an alien in my own body. All those years I looked at women and felt an aching desire and need to be one, to look like one and to walk in the world as one. I’d look in the mirror and feel endless despair at what I saw reflected there. All those years I asked myself the question: why can’t the outside of me look like the inside of me feels? All those years, when no one else was watching, I’d wear women’s clothes and makeup. They felt “right” to me in a way that men’s clothing did not. And when I would dress that way and look in the mirror, I would feel an intense desire for it all to be real, and bottomless grief that it was not so.

The good news is that alI of this is finally in the past. Somehow, somewhere I was able to reach deep down inside of me and find the courage to stand up to the world, to look it straight in the eye and ask it to accept me as I truly am and to give me the simple respect that one human being deserves of another.