My gender transition is not something that began recently, and it certainly didnât begin with surgery, hormones, a driverâs license, a passport, or changing a letter in a government computer system. Those things are milestones in my story, but they arenât where my story started. My understanding of myself goes all the way back to childhood.
From a very young age, I knew there was something different about me. I knew there was a disconnect between the person everyone expected me to be and the person I understood myself to be inside. When youâre a child, you donât necessarily have words such as âtransgenderâ to explain those feelings. I certainly didnât have access to the information and resources that young people can find today. But not having the vocabulary to describe something doesnât mean the feelings arenât real.
As I got older, those feelings didnât disappear. Unfortunately, instead of being given an opportunity to safely understand them, when I was 15 years old I was put through conversion therapy. The idea was essentially that this part of me could somehow be changed, corrected, or made to disappear.
It didnât disappear.
I learned how to suppress it. I learned how to try to live according to other peopleâs expectations. But there is an enormous difference between hiding something and actually changing it.
For years I tried to fit into the life that society expected me to live. On the outside, a person can sometimes become very good at playing the role everyone expects of them. On the inside, however, you still know when something fundamental doesnât match.
Eventually I reached a point where I couldnât continue spending my life trying to be the person other people expected me to be. I needed to find out what life could look like if I finally allowed myself to be Kathryn.
In 2013, I began hormone replacement therapy.
That was an enormous milestone for me, but HRT wasnât some magical overnight transformation. Transition doesnât work that way. Changes happened slowly over months and years. My body changed. My appearance changed. My understanding of myself continued developing. I also had to learn how to navigate the world differently.
But something much more important was happening at the same time: for the first time, I was actively moving toward the life I had spent so many years trying not to allow myself to live.
By 2016, I was ready for another enormous step. I began living full-time as a woman.
That meant Kathryn wasnât somebody who existed only privately or under certain circumstances. Kathryn was simply me.
I was living my everyday life as a woman. I was presenting as a woman. I was using my name. I was interacting with other people as Kathryn. The person I had spent so many years suppressing was finally allowed to exist openly.
And 2016 became the major year for my legal transition as well.
In August 2016, my gender information with the Social Security Administration was changed to female. My Wisconsin driverâs license was also changed to reflect me as female.
Then, in September 2016, my Iowa birth certificate was officially amended to female.
I also obtained a United States passport identifying me as female in 2016.
My FAA certificate and records were changed to female as well.
Those dates are important because they put my transition into perspective. Sometimes people hear about my surgeries or other recent parts of my transition and assume that I recently changed my gender legally.
I didnât.
My major government documents and records have identified me as female since 2016.
That means that in 2026, I reached approximately 10 years of being legally recognized as female.
And by the time those documents were changed, my transition had already been underway for years. I had started HRT in 2013, and the feelings that ultimately led me to transition went all the way back to childhood.
Changing my documents in 2016 was incredibly important, but it wasnât the finish line.
There really wasnât a finish line.
Transition became a long process of bringing different pieces of my life into alignmentâmy social life, my legal identity, my physical appearance, my voice, my medical care and eventually my anatomy.
I continued hormone therapy over the following years. Hormones gradually changed my body and appearance. I also underwent multiple sessions of facial and body hair removal. Those treatments were another part of making my physical appearance more consistent with how I wanted to live and present.
Some aspects of transition required conscious effort in the beginning. Eventually, many of them simply became normal parts of my life.
Thatâs one of the things people who havenât transitioned may not always understand.
At some point, you stop waking up every morning thinking, âIâm transitioning.â
You just wake up.
You get dressed. You go places. You talk to people. You go grocery shopping. You spend time with friends. You handle appointments. You deal with bills. You laugh at things. You get annoyed at things. You live your life.
I wasnât constantly âbecoming Kathryn.â
I was Kathryn.
Years passed that way.
Then, on April 3, 2025, I underwent an orchiectomy.
That was another very significant medical milestone for me. But by the time I had that surgery, I had already been on HRT for approximately 12 years and had been legally living as a woman for approximately nine years.
Thatâs another reason I donât describe surgery as the thing that made me a woman.
I didnât walk into the hospital as one gender and leave as another.
I walked into the hospital as Kathryn, had a medical procedure that was appropriate for my transition, and left the hospital as Kathryn.
The surgery changed my body. It didnât suddenly create my identity.
Later that year, on November 24, 2025, my United States passport was renewed, continuing to identify me as female.
That renewal was meaningful because my first passport identifying me as female dated all the way back to 2016. This wasnât a new gender marker being added to my passport. It was the continuation of the same legal identity I had already had for years.
Then came another major milestone.
In March 2026, I underwent gender-affirming vaginoplasty.
That was obviously one of the largest physical and medical steps of my transition. It involved major surgery and recovery, and it represented something I had worked toward for a very long time.
But again, I think itâs important to distinguish between gender identity and anatomy.
My vaginoplasty did not make me Kathryn.
It did not suddenly make my government records say female.
It did not suddenly cause me to begin living as a woman.
By the time I underwent vaginoplasty, I had already been living full-time and legally recognized as female for approximately 10 years.
What surgery did was bring another part of my body into alignment with the life and identity I had already been living for many years.
Surgery changed my anatomy. It didnât create my identity.
Another interesting moment happened in August 2026, when I specifically confirmed with the Social Security Administration that my gender information in their system had indeed been changed back in 2016.
For me, that confirmation closed an interesting circle.
Social Security wasnât looking at something that had recently been changed after surgery. Their records had recognized me as female for approximately a decade.
My driverâs license had reflected female.
My amended birth certificate reflected female.
My passport reflected female.
My FAA records reflected female.
And my Social Security record reflected female.
Those werenât changes I made in response to something happening in 2025 or 2026. They were changes I made 10 years earlier.
When I look back now, itâs almost strange to reduce my journey to dates because there is so much life between those dates.
There is childhood.
There is being 15 and experiencing conversion therapy.
There are the years when I tried to suppress who I was.
There is 2013, when I finally began HRT.
There is 2016, when I began living full-time as Kathryn and changed my legal documents.
Then there are all the ordinary years afterwardâthe part of transition that doesnât fit neatly into a timeline.
Those years matter just as much.
They were the years when being Kathryn gradually stopped feeling like something I had to consciously work at and simply became my everyday existence.
There were also years of continuing medical transition, hormone therapy, hair removal, working on my presentation and developing my feminine voice.
Then came my orchiectomy in April 2025, my passport renewal in November 2025, and my vaginoplasty in March 2026.
And now Iâm here in 2026, roughly 13 years after beginning HRT and 10 years after beginning to live full-time and becoming legally recognized as female.
One of the biggest changes today isnât something anyone can find in my medical records.
Itâs how ordinary my life as a woman has become.
I can go out into public and simply be Kathryn. I can interact with strangers, use my feminine voice, and be recognized and treated as a woman. I can participate in womenâs spaces without feeling as though I need to walk around carrying my entire history with me as an explanation.
There is something incredibly powerful about reaching the point where something that once consumed so much of your life becomes ordinary.
Iâm not constantly introducing myself to the world as âa transgender woman.â
Most of the time, Iâm simply a woman living her life.
Of course, being transgender will always be part of my history. I donât want to erase it. There are experiences I had because Iâm transgenderâboth incredibly painful ones and incredibly meaningful onesâthat helped shape the person I am today.
But transgender isnât the sum total of who I am.
My life is much bigger than my transition.
And thatâs actually one of the things I appreciate most about reaching this point.
For so many years, gender occupied an enormous amount of mental and emotional space because I was fighting against it, hiding it, trying to understand it, transitioning, changing documents, undergoing treatments and eventually having surgeries.
Today, I donât have to spend every day trying to become myself.
I already am myself.
When I look at the timeline, I can see just how long the journey has actually been.
I knew something about myself in childhood before I had words to explain it.
At 15, other people attempted to change it.
In 2013, I finally began medically transitioning.
In 2016, I stepped fully into my life as Kathryn and changed my Social Security record, driverâs license, birth certificate, passport and other records to female.
For the next decade, I lived my life as a woman while continuing the parts of my transition that were right for me.
In 2025 and 2026, I completed some of the largest medical milestones of that journey.
And through all of those chapters, there was never one particular day when I suddenly became Kathryn.
There wasnât a government employee who made me Kathryn by changing an âMâ to an âF.â
There wasnât a hormone injection that suddenly made me Kathryn.
There wasnât a surgeon who made me Kathryn.
Those things helped my body, documents and outward life finally reflect the person who was already there.
Thatâs why, when I tell my story, I donât really think of it as the story of becoming someone else.
In many ways, it is exactly the opposite.
It is the story of spending years being told who I was supposed to be, surviving an attempt to change who I was, eventually finding the courage and opportunity to stop hiding, and slowly removing the barriers that prevented the outside world from seeing the person who had been there all along.
There were difficult chapters. There were milestones I once wondered whether I would ever reach. There were things that took years longer than I would have wanted.
But there were also extraordinary momentsâthe first time my documents said female, the first passport that recognized me correctly, reaching the point where strangers simply saw me as a woman, and eventually realizing that I wasnât thinking about transition every minute anymore.
Thatâs probably the best way I can describe where I am today.
My transition is an important part of my history, but it doesnât have to be the main event of every day of my future.
Iâm Kathryn.
Iâm a woman.
I have a complicated history of how I got here, and Iâm not ashamed of that history.
But after all these years, perhaps the most meaningful part isnât complicated at all:
I finally get to live the rest of my life as the person I always knew I was. â¤ď¸