1974—For a brief part of the Cold War I searched the ocean noise for enemy signals. I was very good at pattern recognition and minicomputers.

Armed guards watched over us during the day. The men on my team spent their nights in the barracks. The military stuck me in my own quarters, cut off from the rest of the world.

While stateside, my bike and I lived with suicidal abandon. Weaving through traffic, standing on the seat, riding sidesaddle—the only problem I had on a motorcycle was I lacked the muscles or the mass to recover from the situations my recklessness inspired.

I remember lying on my back after my last accident and wondering why I felt no pain. My bike and I had both gone airborne and tumbled down the road. Nothing was broken—other than my bike, and perhaps my pride, but I knew for a certainty that the next wreck would kill me. My Savior made it clear that I could live for him or die from my own foolishness. Time to change direction.

I’d heard of a psychiatrist in Miami who referred people to Johns Hopkins. Dr. Money and his team knew more about intersex and gender than anyone. Right? When I went to see her, though, she told me I’d need at least a year of counseling before she’d send me to Hopkins. My first step, she said, was to try having sex—as a boy—with a boy.

Rather than explain that my biology wouldn’t allow such, never mind my faith, I walked away. As I always had from physical relationships. Oh, I liked boys, alright, but sex was for people who had plumbing that functioned properly.

A few weeks after talking to the psychiatrist, I kept an appointment with an endocrinologist—maybe he’d know what to do. His main concerns were my weight—he thought I was anorexic—and my lack of hormones.

He suggested testosterone to give me a masculine puberty and anabolic steroids to help me build muscle mass. What did you expect? He was, after all, an endocrinologist.

My sexual development had gotten lost somewhere between Tanner 2 and 3. The nature of gonads in people with an XO (Turner Syndrome) cell line is that they start weak and fade away. A woman with the pure form goes through menopause before birth.

I’d always been small for my age. At nine I wore my sister’s size 6x dresses. I was the smallest in my classes until fifth grade. But I kept right on growing into my early twenties. At 5’6″, I felt like a giant. I was no longer the little kid with a cute pixie face. My fear was that male hormones would ruin the rest of me. So I told him no.

But you need hormones to remain healthy. He said that estrogen would help me gain weight and fix at least the chemical reason for my depression. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be a grown-up woman, but female hormones would let me keep my feminine characteristics.

For the first two weeks, I threw up every day. A few of the guys I worked with swore that I’d gotten myself pregnant, but otherwise work remained pretty much the same. Well, except that the twenty pounds I gained went to my hips and breasts—a bit of an embarrassment for someone who was supposed to be a boy.

After a year, I went home to see my family. My sister thought breast development was the best thing that had ever happened to me. Dad got all mad and wanted me to try sleeping with a girl before living as one. Mom liked that I seemed happier, and changed my legal status for me.

I got a job with a different company in a different city—doing the same thing. And the people who handed out security clearances didn’t care at all that my papers now said female on them.