This episode of Design Matters originally dropped in March of 2024.

For more than 55 years, I lived in a state of denial that kept my gender quandary suspended as a pickled in a chore.

I passed through periods of indulgence when I would give in endangering.

I had a range of stock fantasies that I rotated and embroidered upon.

Cast as a girl to school play, then persuaded to go out on the town in costume,

hired as an assistant by a wealthy society woman who amuses herself by dressing me up as a girl.

New roommate assigned to me in college has been dressing

as a girl for years and as a full wardrobe. But they were transvestite fantasies, to my thinking,

ultimately sterile. Then I would have periods of repudiation, when I would banish any such

thoughts and diagnose my situation as a fetish and unhealthy ideation.

A neurosis that I imagine might be cured by a good relationship with a strong woman who would fully bring out the man in me.

In both of these states, I could buy assorted gender questions and fixations scattered around different regions of my consciousness,

refusing to accord them coherence.

Thoughts about appearance went over here.

My various failures to fulfill a male role went over there.

The more existential questions were thrown on a shelf.

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Milman.

For 19 years, Debbie Milman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do,

how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on.

On this episode, Lucy's Sont talks about changing genders late in life.

I knew it was real.

I mean, the minute my egg cracked, so to speak,

...