I’m always fascinated when folks declare they have no regrets; I regret almost everything. I was born into an Evangelical Christian home in 1962. I knew from my first cognizant moment that I was a girl, but I had to argue that fact as soon as I could talk. A pesky protrusion noted on my birth day had me labeled wrong from the get-go.
Suffice it to say I had to keep my feminine identity a secret for most of the ensuing decades.
It was that or poverty and maybe an early death, or so I believed at the time. In my late twenties, I was a member of a smallish (100-member) Pentecostal church with all the usual accouterments, such as speaking in tongues, prophesies, and the occasional bona fide miracle.