was not a boy, that I was a girl. I kept asking her why everybody kept calling me a boy. That set off a firestorm in my house. I don’t remember exactly what shape that storm took but it colored my entire childhood. It was only years later, and after two years of therapy, that I realized that the issue of my transgenderism was the 800 lbs. gorilla in the room that nobody wanted to talk about.

My parents always pretty much let me have any toy I wanted. I was quite “spoiled” in that respect. I often wondered why they did that. Years later, it occurred to me that their thinking probably ran along these lines: “if Craig’s asking for boy toys instead of girl toys, we’re winning!”) (Oh, there were plenty of times I asked for girl toys. I just never got them.)

My transgenderism also affected my entire elementary, junior and senior high school experience. In elementary school they kept having me talk to a long succession of mysterious adults. Mysterious in that they never told me who they were and why they wanted me to talk to them.) I now know they were the school district’s child psychologists.

I also remember a very curious history lesson my fourth grade teacher taught us. We were studying what back then was called the “Great Age of Discovery” (the European discovery and colonization of the new world. These days we tend to characterize this period using terms like Imperialism, genocide and the rape of