"I doubt I could adequately describe what “gender sadness” feels like to someone who is not transgendered. I suppose that in some ways it is similar to other kinds of sadness. For instance, you know that feeling you get when someone you love more than anything breaks up with you? And it’s about a month or two after the big break-up and you are trying to get on with your life. But no matter how busy you keep yourself, thoughts about that person just keep popping into your head about 100 times a day, and everytime they do you feel a bit of sadness. Well that’s kind of what gender sadness felt like for me during most of my life. While i was always struggling with it, I could still go out and have a few laughs or go about my business and be relatively productive and happy for the most part. But unlike most types of sadness or grief, which tend to get a little less intense with every day that passes, gender sadness just keeps getting more and more intense. And by the year 2000, I had reached the point where the sadness felt more like what one feels on the actual day of the big break-up, when you can’t concentrate at all and you are totally consumed with thoughts of the person you loved. That’s how I felt almost every day: consumed with gender sadness. Literally every other thought I had was about gender, about my pain. I could not get around it. It sucked all of the life out of me. I stopped calling friends, stopped writing songs and listening to music, I would go into work and just stare at the computer screen without really doing anything. It hurt as much as any other pain (physical or emotional) that I had ever felt before. And I knew there was only one way to ease that pain: transitioning."