Jennifer Finney Boylan: "We Can't Call You Daddy if You're Going to be a Girl."

By 2002, transition was behind me. I’d been a boy, but now I was a woman. It had been a long journey, involving therapy, endocrinology, a minister, a social worker, and a trip to the large size shoe store. There were times when it seemed as if that journey--which more than anything else resembled a kind of emigration--was never going to end. I had plenty of friends in the transgender community who suggested that it never would end, in fact; one such well wisher even sent me, on the day of my surgery, a card that said, “Now the journey really begins!” I remember putting the card aside with a feeling of exhaustion. The last thing I wanted, after everything my family had been through, was another journey. And for the most part, that turned out to be true. As a couple, my wife and I went from a time in which we suddenly seemed, after twelve years together, like strangers, to a time in which once again we seemed familiar, if altered.