You can live with a lot of pain if it creeps up on you over a long time, so slowly that you have time to get used to it and don't even notice it's gradually getting worse and worse. You can live with a lot of pain if it's always been there and you've never known anything different. Then one day, for one reason or another, it goes away for a little while. And when it comes back, you realize you can't live with it anymore.

I think this is why some people get addicted to heroin. I think this is why some people can throw away years of investment in a marriage over a brief romantic or sexual fling. I think, on a massive scale, this is why Gorbachev's innocent reform-minded policy of Glasnost brought a quick and quiet end to seven decades of oppressive Soviet tyranny. I think there are probably any number of other ways this singular phenomenon manifests itself.

Let me tell you what happened the time my pain went away.

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I spent the first forty-one years of my life feeling like I didn't quite fit in. Anywhere, ever. See, the world is divided into 10 kinds of people--those who understand binary, and those who don't. OK, bad joke. Call it gallows humor. Geeky gallows humor. No, seriously--I'm talking about boys and girls, men and women, male and female. Depending how you slice it, I've been all of the above, or none of them, quite.

As far back as I can remember, I've felt like I was in some sense a girl. Oh, sure, I had explained to me at a very early age about the difference--I had a penis, therefore I was a boy; my sister had a vagina, therefore she was a girl. Well technically the part you can see is the vulva; the vagina is hidden away inside, where (if you ask me) proper sexual organs belong. But everyone calls it the vagina these days; who am I to resist the inexorable forces of etymology through ignorance? If I say 'vulva' I get mostly blank looks ('why is he talking about a car?'); if I say 'vagina' everyone assumes I'm using it as a more-polite synonym for 'pussy.' So 'vagina' it is and shall ever after be.

So back to the point--penis means boy, vagina means girl. No exceptions, no gray areas; it's a definition, hard and fast (no pun intended--well, maybe a little). And as a definition, you kind of have no choice but to accept it; to do otherwise is to be misunderstood. I had a penis, therefore I was a boy, by definition. QED. End of story.

Only not.

See, there's a lot of other baggage that gets stuffed into the overhead compartments on the "boy" and "girl" flights. A lot of societal expectations, cultural norms, guidelines and rules--one set for boys, another for girls. Sure, there's some overlap between what's allowed under the two sets of rules, in most cases. More and more all the time. Still, there's enough divergence that a lot of people--maybe even most people--don't really feel entirely comfortable being limited to only column A or column B, no substitutions, please. For some reason we all mostly put up with it but few of us are really entirely happy about it. I'm probably less happy than most.

So you might be surprised to learn this isn't the source of my pain. Most of it, anyway.

Oh, sure, that baggage is a source of some irritation and angst. The real problem though, the real source of my pain, is that I've always felt fairly strongly that I was supposed to have a vagina, not a penis, in the first place. I can't, and couldn't, deny that I did and still do have that absurd appendage "down there," but it wasn't like I asked for it or anything, or was even ever asked how I'd feel about having it. No, I just came out of my mom with it right there for everyone to see, and everything else that usually goes with it appeared to be there too, so they all just naturally assumed everything was as it was supposed to be, and never bothered to consult me about it.

If they ever had, I could have put them straight. Sure, there were times when I felt there were certain advantages to "being" a boy, just as there were times when I felt there were disadvantages. But I can't remember any time in my life when, if told I could choose between (a) keeping the penis or (b) having it replaced with a vagina, and my feelings about it were the only ones that mattered, I wouldn't have immediately shouted out, "Oooh, (b), please," without hesitation (and with a great deal of anticipation). And I can remember pretty far back.

To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced any appeal the baggage choices in column B have for me isn't just a result of the grass always being greener; sure, it seems like I'd be more comfortable with those choices than the ones I have, but there's no guarantee if I'd grown up under that regime I wouldn't have felt the same way about column A. It's easy to see the good parts you're missing out on and overlook the bad parts you don't have to put up with, or think they wouldn't be that big a deal.

That's not the point.

The point is, if I'm going to be stuck with some baggage or other and have an equal chance of being happy or unhappy with either one, I'd prefer it to at least be the right baggage. The same baggage that everyone else in my half of humanity--the half I was supposed to be in, not the half I was so carelessly put in--was stuck with too.

Now you know the source of my pain.

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So for the first four point one decades of my existence on this planet as a separate, viable entity, I spent most of the time trying to ignore, suppress, or otherwise deny these feelings other people didn't seem to have, these feelings of a general, permeating wrongness to my life that led me to see myself in ways at least some others apparently couldn't see me without wanting to hurt me. This was punctuated by occasional, relatively brief episodes where I cautiously peeked out of my self-defensive bunker and considered actually doing something about the wrongness instead, only to wind up facing some terror that sent me back screaming for cover.

Like the times I tried dressing as a woman, some part of me hoping I think that switching sides would turn out to be as simple as changing clothes; I'd see myself in the mirror and maybe at first think, "Hey, that's not too bad; maybe this will work," but sooner or later I'd have a bad day and see an ugly man in women's clothes in the mirror, and in a fit of self-loathing throw out all the items I'd so painstakingly acquired through mail-order sent to a P.O. box so no one, not even the mail carrier, would suspect what I was up to. Yes, I was a bit paranoid. Getting beat up by bullies repeatedly as a child will do that to you.

Or if it wasn't seeing a man in a dress in the mirror that sent me screaming for cover, it was seeing a man in a dress on TV. One thing I was certain of was that I was not like them, those emotionally damaged, self-deluded, sometimes perverted, but always painful to watch freaks paraded under the name of "transsexual" in front of the gawking masses by the modern incarnation of the carny barker, the daytime talk show host.

Or if it wasn't on TV, it was in the movies. Silence of the Lambs escalated my sense of self-loathing to new heights, or depths I suppose would be a more appropriate choice of word. Escalators go down, too, so I think that metaphor still works. Now I wasn't just a pervert and a self-deluded freak, I was a sociopathic killer too.

After one long-term relationship broke up, leaving me with shared custody of our son, I went through another brief cycle of wondering if there weren't some way to fix the wrongness only to be frightened back into hiding, the usual problems this time compounded by worries over whether it would cause custody issues and fear of becoming a freak and spending the rest of my life alone, or with no one but a son who was only there half the time. It didn't take too long for me to decide I had to push this silly fantasy aside once and for all, and just get on with making the best of the cards I'd been dealt.

For a while it seemed to be working; in relatively short order I found my soul mate, got married, and had another son and then (after some trials and heartbreak) a daughter. I seemed to have made the right choices, and had made the best of a bad deal. Life as a male was actually looking not all that bad for a change.

So what happened to bring all that to an end?

I got a new job. My dream job.

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I'm in the tech biz. A software engineer--a senior software engineer, a geek of the first order. Just before the turn of the third millennium I hit the dot-com stock options jackpot and actually semi-retired, traveling the world with my family, going to a summer intensive film school program, figuring I wouldn't have to worry so much about finances anymore and could just try different things until I found my true calling. Then the bubble went 'pop,' and literally overnight I went from 'retired' to simply 'unemployed.'

No one in Seattle appeared to be hiring, so I had to look farther afield. Way down in fabled Silicon Valley I finally found a company that hadn't yet burned through its latest round of venture capital and was still looking to fill more seats, so we traded the mortgage for a monthly rent, hired movers, packed up the camper van and headed down the coast to our next adventure.

A year and a half later that company had run out of money and I had to look elsewhere yet again. Luckily, there was at least one company left in the Valley that hadn't spent all their venture capital yet. Or maybe I should say, There was at least one company. Because that was the name of the company that ended up hiring me--There dot com.

I'll try to avoid the "who's on first" jokes as much as possible, but it won't be easy.

There turned out to be my dream job, in more ways than I ever expected. Because There had been inspired by one of my favorite recent science-fiction novels, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, to build a version of The Metaverse--a virtual on-line 3D stereophonic world with lifelike customizable avatars, real-time voice or text chat, and loads of actual stuff to do so you weren't just sitting around chatting; it was like actually being there with other people in a virtual world. A virtual world called There.

You probably haven't heard of There. It's still there (www.there.com, check it out) but doesn't get a lot of press. Not like its most significant competitor, Second Life, which there's a somewhat better chance you have actually heard of. Anyway There was there first, or at least contemporaneously, and I was There when the service first went public.

To tell you the truth, when I first got my company-provided avatar and logged in, I didn't really get the appeal. But before it even opened to the general public, during the beta period, it was already becoming clear that certain types of people saw it as a godsend.

Basically, people who want to be sociable but for whatever reason, can't in real life. Maybe they're stuck on a farm in the middle of Nebraska. Maybe they're on a military base halfway around the world. Maybe they've moved recently and don't have a social circle in their new city yet. Maybe they're wheelchair-bound and have a hard time getting out and about. Maybe in real life they're overweight, over-the-hill geeks with low self-esteem, but in There they get to be young and fit and confident.

These people got it in a way I didn't, and were overjoyed by the opportunities it provided them. I could see that, and it made me feel good about where I worked and what I did in a way I never had before.

The thing is, when they hired me and gave me an avatar, I could have chosen any avatar I wanted--of either gender. I was nowhere near "out" to anyone at the time, so I chose "male," but not without hesitation and a twinge of regret. That was the first crack in the dam of my denial.

Each of us engineers had on our desktop what was essentially a private, unpopulated version of the There world we used for development and testing purposes. I realized I could use a female avatar in that world and no one would be the wiser. I found I enjoyed altering my avatar's appearance to match what I thought I would have looked like--should have looked like--and having her try on different combinations of the virtual outfits, hairstyles, and so on that were available in the There store. No one else could see me, but that's why I felt safe doing it. That was the second crack in the dam.

Toward the end of my period of employment There, about a year after I started (all good things must come to an end, but that's another story), I had a Dell laptop from work that I could take home, and used it to tentatively log in to There a couple of times for a "free trial" period (they do it a bit differently now), anonymously, with a female avatar. And I was able to interact with other actual human beings, albeit through their avatars, as a female, and be treated as a female, and not have to worry about being "read" or even questioned about it as long as I didn't use voice chat (which cost extra anyway) or say something stupid that gave me away.

That's when the pain went away, for the first time in my life.

That's when I realized, for the first time, how much I'd actually been hurting.

That's when the dam burst.

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I only got to spend a couple of hours, total, in the "real" There world, with avatars that reflected how I saw myself, before leaving the company and giving back the Dell laptop. I've been a Mac owner (and developer) for over twenty years now, and in spite of my tireless efforts while working There to convince them to let me build a Mac version of the software, to this day it only runs under Windows. So I haven't been able to get back There since*.

But those couple of hours were enough to open my eyes to what could have been, what might be, and more importantly, what was, that I'd been trying so hard to deny. My pain.

That was nearly four years ago. It took me nearly three years of soul-searching and researching--I don't know what I'd have ever done without Google--first, to truly accept who and what I was, had always been, and as far as I could determine, always would be; second, to discover that I wasn't alone, that there were others who shared my pain and even some of my experiences, and to connect with them (you) through my, and their, writing; and third, to come to the conclusion that continuing to keep it from my wife was ultimately doing her (and us) more harm than good.

The jury's still out on whether that last conclusion was right or not. Keep your fingers crossed for us, won't you?

* - This isn't entirely true--I used BootCamp to install WinXP on my Intel-powered Mac last year, and almost immediately thereafter installed There. I logged in and created a new female avatar; I just don't get a lot of the quiet, private moments when I don't have work to do that I need to go There for any length of time. And to be honest, now that I'm contemplating ways to try to deal with my pain in real life, doing it in simulation has lost some of its appeal.