Madeline H. Wyndzen, Ph. D., a transgendered professor of psychology, discusses her personal experiences with gender dysphoria and critiques the mental illness model of “gender identity disorder”:

It feels like everything should have been so obvious when I look back. But everything was so confusing as I grew up. It’s like, one day I was absent and everybody else was taught the crucial aspects of being a boy or girl. I would lie in bed at night practicing and rehearsing how to be a boy. One day in middle school, after being pushed around again, a principal tried to teach me to “stop crying” and “be a man.” Bullies, teachers, and others taught me the same thing: there was something terribly wrong with my feelings. I tried so hard to purge from myself every expression of emotion. Really I only needed to be taught one lesson; we do not need to learn to be ourselves, we just are ourselves. Or maybe what it means to be a person is that we invent ourselves. In 1998 I transitioned; I no longer practiced being a boy, I just became a girl. Today I have wonderful friends and the most perfect partner. Even after transitioning, my life has continued to be rocky and I hope to revise my autobiography in the next year to reflect the way I now understand myself as bi-gendered (someone who goes beyond androgyny to embrace different gender roles in different situations). I am sorry that updating the site takes me awhile because I recently completed my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology and I am now a new professor. I designed this site to share with others what I have learned from being educated in psychology and growing up with gender dysphoria.