There’s a famous quote about “Those who do not remem­ber the past are con­demned to repeat it” but it doesn’t apply to me. I don’t remem­ber my past, or at least from birth to about age ten.

I only dis­cov­ered this while tak­ing part in an exper­i­ment in my col­lege Psy­chol­o­gy class that com­plete­ly upend­ed my life. For one thing, I found out that I had no mem­o­ries of near­ly the first half of my life. I also found out some­thing else.

There’s anoth­er famous quote about “Walk a mile in anoth­er man’s shoes …” and so on. That’s what the exper­i­ment was, to expe­ri­ence life from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. For one stu­dent, it meant to wear a fat suit. For anoth­er, to spend time in a wheel­chair. For me, it was to expe­ri­ence life as a girl. And although the guy remained skin­ny under the suit, and the guy could get out of the wheel­chair, I dis­cov­ered that I was a girl, inside; I learned that I was transgender.

Once I learned that, I could begin to dis­cov­er my past, my lost child­hood … and then I could begin to dis­cov­er what my future would be. This is the long and detailed sto­ry of my discoveries.