Hello, and welcome to episode 27 of The Spectrum. This was recorded on September 1, 2025.

Today’s episode is the start of a a three part series. 

This is the life story of a transgender woman we are going to call Emma. She wanted to share her story but also wanted to remain anonymous to protect her and her family.

To protect her identity, we’ve digitally altered her voice and appearance but the words and inflection and emotion you will experience are entirely hers.

This first part covers the period from her early childhood until she reached what she called her breaking point.

With that, let’s turn it over to Emma:

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I am a woman who, through no fault of my own, started life as a male. I lived the first 25 years of my life pretending to be a boy and man because that’s what the world thought I was but eventually I couldn’t do that any longer. I started down the path that led me to being the woman you see today. Ok, the woman you don’t actually see, but you know what I mean.

My story isn’t really unusual. I’ve spoken to dozens of trans people over the years and there is a lot of commonality. Our stories aren’t the same but for most of us, what we felt is. I can’t speak for every transgender person but the words you will hear could be coming from any number of us.

I guess the easiest way to do this is to start at the beginning. 

When did I first know I was different? I was probably three years old. It is among my earliest memories. I knew that I was supposed to be a girl. Everyone called me a boy but I didn’t feel like a boy. I felt like a girl. 

If you ask me how I knew this, I don’t know. I just knew. How do you know that you are a man or woman now? I’m not talking about looking in the mirror. I mean, at the core of your identity, how do you know who you are? I’m pretty sure your answer would be the same. You just know. You just never thought much about it because your sense of self wasn’t at odds with your physical body.

If you ask me what the difference is between feeling like you are a boy or girl is, I can’t answer that. I just knew that I was a girl. I don’t know what feeling like a boy feels like. I’ve never felt that.

Your next question is probably, did you tell anyone? The answer is I don’t think so. If I spoke about it, I may have quickly learned not to. I don’t have any memory of ever having expressed my feelings or being scolded for expressing them. I know I had this fuzzy idea that I would grow up to be a girl and that this mistake would resolve itself somehow. I know that as I got older, I did learn not to express anything that would single me out as different.

My friends were the other kids in the neighborhood. I played with both the boys and girls but I felt a connection with the girls that I never felt with the boys. By the time I entered elementary school, the divide between boys and girls had begun and I was grouped with boys because that’s how the world saw me.

I never fit in and that was as clear to the other kids as it was to me. I had a few friends but, for the most part, I was an outsider at school. Every night, when I went to bed, I would pray, “Please, God, when I wake up tomorrow, let me be a girl”. I was speaking about my body. I was sure my soul, my spirit was that of a girl.

Things continued like this until I was 12. I was watching television with my mother and she was a fan of the show Medical Center. They did an episode about a transgender woman. They used the word transexual back then. I was stunned. For the first time in my life, I learned that there were other people like me. I kept glancing at my mother to see if she was looking at me. I was sure that she would be seeing this show and connecting the dots and looking at me but she wasn’t.

This show did two things. It told me that what I was feeling was real and that it had a name. It gave me a word that I could then learn more about. And, I did. I went to the library at every opportunity and found every book I could find.

What I read alternately gave me hope and terrified me. There were biographies and accounts from doctors that said that people could transition and lead happy, healthy lives. There were also accounts from others that said that everyone who did this ended up miserable and it should never happen.

I didn’t know what to believe. I alternated between hope and despair. It was about this time that Renee Richards entered the scene. She was a transgender woman who was in the news because she wanted to join women’s professional tennis.This was the first real transgender person I saw. The first time I saw an interview with her, it scared me. I didn’t want to be like her. I didn’t then know much of her story, only her notoriety so I didn’t know the extremely troubled life she had led. I just knew that I didn’t want to be like her and that maybe this wasn’t a path for me.

At this same time, I was entering puberty. I was growing and my body was changing in ways that I hated. I felt like an alien in my own skin. I couldn’t reconcile who I was inside with what the world saw on the outside. Now there were tears that accompanied the prayer.

Junior high and high school were hard. I hid who I was and I yearned for a place in the world I felt like I could never have. But, though all that was going on inside, nobody saw anything outside. I was thought of as quiet. I eventually learned to fit in well enough to not draw attention to myself but I was always at a distance to what was going on around me.

Then I went away to college. Fortunately, college itself provided enough of a distraction that I didn’t have time to think about my own problems much. I was away from home in a new place for the first time. It kept me from dwelling on my own problems. It taught me a coping tactic I was to turn to again and again: distract myself with a big change in my life.

Up until this point, I had never dated. I had asked one girl out in high school but she turned me down. She was nice about it but it devastated me enough that I never had the courage to ask anyone else. I was not attracted to the boys at all. Then, in college there was a woman I met in one of my classes. She captivated me but she was dating someone else. We became part of the same study group and it was clear her relationship was not gong well. I was the shoulder she cried on but I never told her how I felt about her. But, when she broke it off with the guy she had been dating, she turned to me. 

I was ecstatic. I threw myself into the relationship with no hesitation. For the first time in my life, I thought maybe I was wrong about the way I felt. Maybe I just needed the right situation to show me that. You wouldn’t believe how badly I wanted that to be true. I wanted to be normal so badly. I wanted either my body to change or my mind to change and I didn’t care which it was so long as I could feel at peace in my own skin. I thought that this relationship had given that to me. It felt like it had, for a while. It was serious enough that we talked about getting married after graduation.

But, I couldn’t separate my feelings for her from my desire to be like her. The feelings that I had tried to bury were still there only now the pain was even worse because I wanted to be what she wanted and that was impossible.

I tried to talk to her about what I was feeling. I never used the word transexual or transgender. I talked around the subject. I know she misunderstood me because I was deliberately vague. But, she was there and she held me and in that moment it was enough.

We talked about taking our relationship to that next level but neither of us wanted to rush things. But, eventually, she decided that she was ready. And, I wanted to be everything she wanted. 

It was a disaster.

I felt more out of touch with my physical body than I had ever felt. I felt like a fraud, an imposter, and to say that it was not a magical moment for either of us is an understatement.

We tried a couple of other times with the same results and then we stopped trying.

I tried to talk to her again about what I was feeling. I still couldn’t use the words and talked around the subject. I don’t know if she understood what I was trying to say but I know I scared her.

This was the beginning of the end of our relationship. At graduation, she broke up with me. It wasn’t mean or nasty. She wasn’t hurtful but it was clear that this wasn’t where she wanted to be.

I was crushed. Then the job that I had been offered right before graduation fell through and it felt like my life had been destroyed. I was about two weeks away from having to return home because I was out of money when I found work. That solved part of the problem but my emotions were raw. 

I wanted to see if transitioning was an option for me but I also had no real reason to hope that it was. I felt like I was a bad candidate and I knew that I couldn’t face it if the world looked at me and laughed at me. I didn’t have that kind of strength. I also realized that I couldn’t make major decisions like that after the trauma of a breakup that had so hurt me. I also didn’t have any money so it really didn’t matter. 

I had nothing in my life but work and books. My college friends were gone, living their new lives and I was stuck in this one room apartment without even a television for company. I did a lot of walking and a lot of reading and a lot of thinking. 

The raw pain receded but the same feeling that had been there as long as I can remember was still there, still at the core of my being. The only thing that had changed was that I was no longer praying to God to fix my body. It was clear that wasn’t going to happen. I resolved that I was going to have to learn to live with this because that was the only real option I had.

Work proved enough of a distraction that I was able to cope for months but the feeling wasn’t going away and as I got used to my routine it was still there. A new job opportunity came my way and I jumped at it and for a time was able to submerge those feelings in work and by this point I had made some friends outside of my work circle. 

But, none of these people knew me. They knew the facade I had constructed to show the world. The person they saw was carefully built to keep them at arms length so they would never know the truth about me.

This continued until about two months after my 25th birthday. Though the prayers had stopped but the tears had continued. I cried myself to sleep almost every night. I was starting to wake up in the morning and the tears were right there. Just getting out of bed in the morning was becoming harder and harder.

I looked ahead in my life and all I could see was loneliness and pain. I felt like I was slowly, maybe not so slowly, sliding into a hole and that if I got all the way in, I’d never be able to get out. I wasn’t thinking about suicide but the idea it might start to seem reasonable in the not too distant future scared me.

One night, I reached a breaking point. I was sitting in my now larger apartment that even had a television but I was still coping each night by holding back my tears until I was alone. I finally hit a point where I said to myself that I knew what the problem was. I had always known. I had tried coping and living with it. I had tried to change the nature of my identity but I couldn’t. Maybe it was time to see if the other option could work for me.

I was terrified but I also went to bed without crying for the first time in ages.

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This concludes part 1 of Emma’s story. We’ll have part 2 in episode 28.

Thanks to Emma for sharing her story.

If you have a story about LGBT+ life you would like to share, contact me at spectrumpodcasthost@gmail.com.

Until next time, take care.