Today is my hatching day.
Three years ago my wife told me I needed to seek out a therapist and figure out wtf was causing my depression and anxiety. That night I laid awake in bed, unable to sleep, wrestling with a demon in my own head.
I got out of bed and went to my computer, and I googled a term that I had learned 20 years prior out of a college psychology textbook.
Autogynephilia. A word deeply reviled by many trans women. A word that has invalidated so many of us. A word coined by a man who has singlehandedly done more harm to trans people in the last fourty years than any other person.
What I discovered was that the things I had read in that textbook were wrong. Massively wrong. So wrong that the vast majority of modern psychology has completely thrown it out. I learned that what I had been treating as a paraphilia for my entire life was actually Gender Dysphoria.
Twenty five years after first learning that it was possible for a boy to become a girl, and desperately wishing I could be one of those girls, I learned that I am, and that I can!
My entire life changed on that day. The demon in my head, the one I had created out of a need to stay protected… he took a heavy blow that day… and he never recovered.
May you live in interesting times, indeed.