How it all began

Hormones are interesting things. No one really understands completely how they work or what all they can do.

Over the past seven months, I've had a chance to find out for myself. See, this summer, more than four years after transitioning...

Perhaps I ought to back up a bit more.

I'm intersexed, which, in my case, basically means that my body is undecided. It's male enough that no one hesitated to raise me as a boy from birth, but female enough that I started getting breasts in grade five. From the age of nine, I knew beyond any doubt - some things you just know - that I was in fact a girl. I also knew, beyond any doubt, that this was not the sort of thing that one announces in a public forum, so I did everything I could to hide it. I knew that there were people who did what I knew I needed to do - when I realised that I had this problem, I ran to the encyclopaedia (how much of a dork was I?) - but I saw no way of doing it myself, so I did my best to keep it under wraps.

And I did a really good job of it. What happens in a situation like this is a lot like dissociative identity/multiple personality disorder. As a defence mechanism, you basically come up with an artificial persona that will allow you to function in society as a guy, despite the rather nettlesome problem of not actually being one, to avoid getting the crap kicked out of you. That artificial persona generally takes hold so well that it has a life of its own, and even you don't totally see through it. Mine was quite well researched - bits of every male character on TV or in movies or books that seemed to have any quality that I could identify with.

I totally resigned myself to the idea of living someone else's life for the rest of mine.

At twenty, it was now or never. I was thousands of miles away from my family, in a new place, with some actual privacy, and I realised that I had my first (and possibly last) clear chance of doing something about all of this. I transitioned within a couple of months of starting to think about it, and have lived as a woman ever since. My family - at least those members of my family that matter - have been very supportive, and are basically the only reason I've made it as far as I have.