I come from a small town in Indiana. I grew up playing basketball and became a high school all american and received a full scholarship to play ball for Villanova University. I graduated from Villanova as one of the greatest players to have ever played. I turned pro and played for years overseas but began to decline mentally as I got older. I grew up struggling with my identity, constantly questioning who I was and what I was. The only time I felt whole was when I was on the basketball court and when season was over, I would slump into a deep depression. I struggled with this until the age of 34. I grew up asking my parents what was wrong with me all throughout my childhood and they reassured me that everything was okay and that I should just focus on the good things that were happening to me due to my hard work. After my last year of playing ball, I fell into the deepest depression that i have known in my life. After talking with my parents again about it, I felt like I wasn’t getting the full truth from them and needed to seek out my medical records. When I received them, I felt a true sense of who I really was. I was born male with underdeveloped reproductive organs so the doctors convinced my parents to allow them to change me into a female and were instructed to raise me as such.
I got into so much trouble growing up because I was an active boy’s boy who never stopped playing hard. Teachers would punish me because I was acting too “Tom Boy” so they would place me in the corner of the classroom in a corner. Throughout high school, I stayed to myself and always felt like an outsider because of my internal turmoil. The best times of my childhood were when I was on the basketball court because the act of playing a sport becomes gender-less. Especially when you are literally pretending to be Michael Jordan. I would walk like him, talk like him, and play like him. I was all sorts of fucked up when I went to college because I began growing into myself and further away from the gender that they turned me into. This began my downward spiral into depression. Nobody knew this about me because I enjoyed pain and suffering in silence. I sought out extreme exercise just to make the external pain match my internal pain. This brought me balance.
The night I found out the truth, I only have one word to describe. FREEDOM! It felt like shackles were released from my body and I have never felt so complete in my life. I didn’t sleep that night and the next day I went into work and told everyone that I found out the truth about who I was and that I was going to transition back to my birth gender after living 34 years 10 months and 15 days as someone I was not.
I never looked back. I called my parents and told them that I had found out the truth and they were so scared that I would be angry with them and were scared about who I would turn into. I took this with a grain of salt because I didn’t blame them. I have no idea what I would have done back in 1977 if I had a kid born with abnormalities and the men in the big white coats were telling me a way to “correct” this. I can’t blame them. I didn’t push harder when I had questions that weren’t being answered. That is my fault and I will live with that for the rest of my life.
Since then, every morning I wake up, more free than you could possibly imagine. There has never been a day since that night I discovered the truth that I take for granted. I have never fell back into depression because I don’t have time for that shit. I have a lot of catching up to do in life because I wasted my younger years being something that I wasn’t. Within 5 years of discovery, I built my own business, got married, am raising a child, turned 40 and am still getting after it! I am complete now and stronger than I have ever been. I still seek out pressure daily to become stronger because I am used to living uncomfortable. When one gets used to living uncomfortably, they don’t take freedom for granted. I’m grateful to be alive everyday and that is why I say that I have never had a fucking bad day in my life!!!

In Strength,
Jay