Ted Audio Collective

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For more than 55 years I lived in a state of denial that kept my gender quandary suspended as it pickled in a chore. I passed through periods of indulgence when I would give in in daydream.

I had a range of stock fantasies that I rotated and embroidered upon, cast as a girl

the 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 has 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

diagnosed 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 kept my 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 Sont talks about changing genders late in life.

I knew it was real. I the minute my egg cracked so to speak I knew this was real. Before her latest book, Lucy Sondt had written, edited, or translated a shelf full of books,

fiction and non-fiction, and a mountain of short pieces for magazines like the New York

Review of Books. In 2021 at the age of 66 Lucy shared an announcement that she had joined the other team and was

transitioning and that her pronoun, thank you very much, was she. We should consider ourselves lucky for all of the above because she has

written about the experience and her life both wittily and magnificently in her

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