My parents drove me to my first college class when I was 14 years old. I got top grades in Computer Science, Math, and Physics, and graduated with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. In 2004, after a few years as a software engineer, I enlisted in the US Army to do my patriotic duty. The Army trained me to be an intelligence analyst and I again graduated at the top of my class. I was a terrible soldier but a great analyst.

My first tour I was the brigade expert in roadside bombs, which the military called “IEDs”. My job was to know everything there was to know about IEDs and to share that information to help soldiers stay safe while on convoy. I took my job very seriously – every single injury and death weighed on me, and it still does. The analysts I worked with took their jobs just as seriously – and far too many of them have taken their own lives since we came back. My second tour was highly classified but my job involved finding terrorists. I have a very specific definition of “terrorist” – these men were responsible for blowing up public markets filled with civilians. I was highly decorated for the work I did in Iraq, and I’m proud of what I helped accomplish.

I was honorably discharged after my second tour and spent several years working for a national security contractor. After nine years of federal government work I was disillusioned and decided to go back to the private sector. In the corporate world I made over a million dollars in salary and bonuses in less than a decade. For five years I helped develop products and improve yield for AMD’s processor assembly line. I also worked at Athenahealth and Google, until Google downsized me in 2023 for getting too political.

I’ve had a lot of luck and a lot of success over my 25 year career, but I had a secret the entire time: I was a woman pretending to be a man.

I don’t know if any of my relatives ever figured it out, but my happiest childhood moments were when I was reading “girl books”. When I was a pre-teen my favorite book was “The Hero And The Crown” – a story about a young woman who is tall and thin and is often teased for dressing and looking like a boy. Aerin fights and kills a fire-breathing dragon, then an evil wizard, then returns home just in time to save her people from an invading army. I loved the story and in secret moments I wished I were her.

Later on I became fascinated with Anne of Green Gables, reading the entire series several times. Anne hates her red hair and wishes it were any other color. I would have been happy to have red hair if it meant that I was able to be a girl. I loved my books and my teenage years were spent escaping into secret dreams where I could be a girl.

My family was religious so I wasn’t allowed to listen to popular music until I got my driver’s license and my own car. Grunge and Alternative was popular at the time, but my secret love was Melissa Etheridge. The first time that “Come to my Window” played on my radio, I began to cry so hard that I had to pull over to the side of the road. 30 years later and I’m still brought to tears when I hear her sing the bridge: “What do they know about this love, anyway?”

Like I did with my books, I was very careful to hide my love of “girl music”. Whenever someone rode in my car, I would either stop playing music or turn on some “dude tunes” like Korn or Limp Bizkit. I preferred Jewel, Tori Amos, Garbage, and Nelly Furtado, but I felt like I had to perform masculinity through my music choices.

Joining the Army was another experiment in trying to perform masculinity. Basic training is absolutely one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. I reached the limits of my endurance in the first week, and by the seventh week I had a new disability to cope with: busted knees that have caused me pain every single day for the last 20 years.

Just before I left for basic training, I met a woman and we got married. I loved her and wanted her in my life, and being married was a very good way to deflect any potential accusations of queerness. Part of my reason for joining the Army was a desire to “butch up” and be more obviously masculine, and being married to a woman helped with that.

During basic training I realized that I needed to hide myself even more. I was sitting in a theatre listening to the Army band sing an a capella version of Maroon 5’s “Harder to Breathe” and I could not stop crying. I was unable to leave so I sat there and hoped that none of my drill sergeants noticed the tears streaming down my cheeks. I distinctly remember the moment when I compartmentalized myself – I took all of the things about myself that I thought were “weird”, put them into a little mental box, and then I closed it up. All of my “girl books” and “girl music” and every secret desire to be a woman went into that box, and it was so effective that afterwards I couldn’t even remember what I had put in there, although I never forgot the moment.

Years later I opened that box while sitting in a different theatre. I was at a software conference and a transgender woman had been invited to speak on the difficulties of being transgender in tech spaces. At first I was skeptical – I was uncomfortable with the concept and didn’t really want to listen to her speak. After a few minutes she began to talk about the experience of being transgender, about how dysphoria felt for her, and I again began to cry uncontrollably. All of the feelings that I had stuffed down for decades came flooding back, and I spent the next 30 minutes crying while she spoke.

Dysphoria for many transgender people is looking into the mirror and seeing a stranger staring back at you. It doesn’t take very long before you stop looking into the mirror at all. Embracing my identity has allowed me to see myself in the mirror for the first time in decades. Every day I celebrate the simple joy of being my authentic self. I am not ashamed to see myself in the mirror, I am overjoyed that I get to express myself truthfully.

So who am I? I am a human being. I am transgender woman. I am autistic. I take estrogen every day. I have soft skin and hips and breasts. I am a lesbian. I am a spouse and a parent and a dog owner. I am a world-class software engineer. I am a combat veteran. I have worked alongside other brave women and men in order to stop terrorists from blowing up civilians. I love learning US history, even the dark parts that feel uncomfortable. I’m protective of family and community and nature. I love to support diversity. I love to be of service and to help make the world better. I am empathetic to the extreme.

Most of all, I don’t hurt people. I’ve never harmed a child. I’ve never been charged with a crime or even arrested. I’ve never tried to convince anyone else that they were transgender, and I never would.

I don’t want kids to be transgender, I want the children who are transgender to be safe to be themselves.

I exist. I am not part of some mind virus or conspiracy – I’m a real person and I’ve always been this way. I was a 14 year old girl – pretending to be a boy – when my parents dropped me off at college. I was a young woman when I enlisted and went to Iraq to fight terrorists. I was a woman when I built software for all those big tech companies.

Happy Transgender Day of Visibility. Thank you for seeing me.

– Kate Walker