I was asked, "Why did you suddenly decide to become a woman?"

The short answer to that question is, "I didn't." The long answer is very long. In fact, it is forty two years long.  I am forty eight years old. I discovered at the age of six that I could never actually be me. Or rather that I could never let anyone else know who I really was. We went shopping for school clothes and I got very upset that I couldn't buy the pretty colorful clothes that I saw in the store. I had to get jeans and t-shirts just like all of the other boys. But I didn't want to be a boy. And I knew that I couldn't say that. I couldn't tell my parents that I didn't want to be a boy. They had already made it clear to me that God had decided that I should be a boy and that I should be proud that he had done that. God had made me perfect and I was going to grow up to be a good man.

My mother did a wonderful job with me, bless her heart. But she never knew what was going on inside. In school I used to play with the girls instead of the boys. Girls were a lot more fun to play with, boys were just mean. Then my baby sister came. I was eight at the time. We were very poor, so my mother took old clothes, cut them up and made baby clothes out of them. I was fascinated with that. I had her teach me how to sew because in the back of my mind I thought if I can learn how to do this, I can make my own pretty clothes. So for Christmas that year I asked for a sewing machine. I think my father kind of freaked out. I got the sewing machine. It was a toy, of course, but it really worked. But that wasn't the only thing I got for Christmas that year. I also got a 4.10 shotgun and a hunting knife. Then when summer came along I got a motorcycle. Yup, an eight year old with weapons and a powered vehicle. That same year I was taught how to drive our manual transmission pick up truck in order to help haul hay. Needless to say, my life got so filled with learning and doing manly things that I didn't have time to play with my sewing machine.

For the most part I gave up trying to be me. I devoted my life to pretending I was a boy. It was a good thing too, because where I grew up, if I had told anyone that I was really a girl the school would have sent me to corrective therapy. If I had ever tried to wear a dress I would likely have ended up in the hospital if not actually dead. Sometimes, when no one was around I would play with my sisters dolls. It was frustrating that Barbies' clothes wouldn't fit on Ken, but I tried. Then I would feel so guilty later because boys weren't supposed to like that sort of thing. I spent so many years of my childhood racked with guilt that it is amazing I survived.

As I got older I became a nudist. I hated actually wearing clothes. I didn't realize it at the time because I had so buried who I really was, but it wasn't that I hated wearing clothes, it was that I hated wearing men's clothes. The faster I got out of them the happier I was. I was one of the first men to start wearing an earring in one ear. I got made fun of for it, called a fag and everything else you can imagine, but I didn't care. When it was normal for a guy to wear a single earring I got both ears pierced. It wasn't long before that was normal too. A few years ago I started wearing fingernail polish. Now that is starting to become normal. I have always pushed the boundaries of gender norms. Oh, and my purse? It was never a man-purse, murse or an urban shoulder bag, it was a purse thank you very much.

For all of my adult life people have mistaken me for a woman. My wife and would go shopping and people would ma'am me all of the time or say, "Welcome to [some store], ladies. Can I help you find something?" I finally just came to accept it. I decided to quit pretending that I was something I wasn't. I'm not a man, I never have been, I just pretended to be one in real life. I was never a boy, either. I just pretended I was because I didn't have any choice.

So the answer to the question is; I didn't suddenly decide to be a woman. I have always been one. Over the years I have slowly come to accept that and have recently decided to embrace it.