Gender Dysphoria

----AUTHOR'S NOTE JANUARY 29, 2023: I look forward to revisiting this topic in the future, so maybe this essay can be a resource or a time capsule item, but please know that it was specifically created by the person I was in 2014, and even she wasn't anywhere near award-winning levels of rifling through one's own mental Rolodex or researching for her writing. Thanks for your time!---- 

          I’ve been learning more about gender and sexuality in the last few years and I have to say that I’m fascinated by a lot of it. As you know, gender is a complicated thing, so I've made a conscious effort to seek out the information. It started in my teens with an article in some girly magazine (Girls' Life? er...), interviewing a couple of gender-transitioning individuals and their parents, of which I now only remember a photo of Samantha, a trans woman, and her dad’s statement that he was supportive, and just last year, I turned to an episode of Our America with Lisa Ling on the OWN Network. I love that show, and in that particular episode, two adults, one of them middle-aged, were undergoing transitions, and I got to see how, in the one case, there was a woman who had lived in a man’s body for over four decades, married, and raised two sons, each of whom were in their teens or twenties when one of their parents started to build an identity that she could truly be herself in.