Irrevocable Discovery

JennaFor many people, a life changing moment comes about from accomplishing something they thought impossible or overcoming some unbearable loss; for me, it came while I was gaming in my pajamas late on a Sunday night.Colors splashed across the screen of my laptop, illuminating the wall behind me and refracting a mirage light around the dimmed room where I sat.This went mostly unnoticed by me as I had long since been sucked into the monitor on my desk.I was ignoring the college applications I had to do by spending the last hours of my night playing a silly dating-sim game I found online.After a few days of conversation, one of the characters I had been talking to told me a secret that she kept from most people, one that roused something I buried in myself a while ago.That she had been born physically male.That she had been taking hormones for years to look more feminine.That she was transgender.Of course, I had heard about trans people before then-it's impossible not to at least once when you live on the internet-but being "transgender" was just a label that ended up on people that didn't quite look male or female.It was just this title that was bestowed upon people without much meaning behind it.This two-minute conversation at just before midnight with a cartoon character that didn't exist had just brought a sledgehammer down on what I knew about trans people and left my mind swimming from the implications.I slid my mouse up to the corner of the screen, closing out the game and opening Google.One curious search quickly became five, then fifteen, then twenty.I went through Wikipedia pages, Reddit posts, and forum threads in a rush to read every minutia of detail I could find about what it meant to be transgender.By the time I had finished my flurry of research, the sky had gone from black to grey.I clicked my laptop shut and leaned my chair back until it hit the wall with a light tap.My eyes were heavy from the hours of reading from a screen, but I kept them locked open, staring up into the ceiling, focused on some point miles beyond it.For the first time, I honestly asked myself if that could be me.I had had dreams of being a girl for years, but quickly shut them down with thoughts of "That's just a fantasy," and "Maybe if it was possible in real life, but it isn't."But sitting right here in front of me was mountains of evidence to the contrary.If I could be a girl in real life, would I? Could I actually be transgender? LOOK HERE:Check out the National Center for Transgender Equality.