gender presentation. I never wanted to be a man. I never felt comfortable being with men and have nothing in common with them. I never fit in with men and to this day can’t really understand them. I just never “got” what being a guy means and I never ever wanted to. On the other hand, I always did “get” what being a woman is all about. From the moment I became sentient, which I think occurred sometime around the time I was three years old, I have always identified with women and felt kinship with them. I have always understood and empathized with them because, regardless of what body I was born with, I always have been one.

But society violently reacts to people like me by trying to force us to confirm to an absurdly simplistic concept: that gender is solely determined by the physicality of the body you were born with. If this were so, it would stand to reason that men and women would be emotionally and psychologically much more similar than they are. A large part of society doesn’t want to understand the truth about gender and accept people like me. They force us to conform and the pressure of it is breathtaking. I am a woman and yet I spent 47 years desperately trying to be the very thing I wasn’t because it’s what everybody around me demanded and it hurt beyond words to have to try.

Childhood

I remember being three years old and telling my mother with utter certainty that I