http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/12/vivienne-ming-self-discovery-gender-transition_n_3998281.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay%20Voices
Author: Katie Arnold-Ratliff Source: Huffington Post via Oprah Magazine
One day in 1984, 12-year-old Evan Campbell Smith -- freckled and towheaded, with the same brilliant eyes that now glint behind Vivienne Ming's futuristic glasses -- stood in his uniform at football practice, watching his teammates huddle, hustle, hike. The long-ago scene is hazy in Ming's memory, but the insight it provoked is as clear to her now as it was to Evan then: "I was out on the field," Ming says, "and I realized I was playing for the wrong team. I didn't want to be a boy."
[. . . ]
On October 19, 2005 -- Evan's 34th birthday -- he and Norma were preparing for bed when he said, apropos of nothing, the thing he had never said to anyone: "My secret is that I wish I were a woman."
However unfathomable such a revelation may seem -- however impossible it would be for many of us to absorb these words with a modicum of grace -- Norma admits to no anger, no terror, no sense of betrayal or despair. If Evan had ever given her reason to question his sexuality, had ever tipped his hand about his discomfort with his gender -- made some half-jesting crack to test the waters, say -- Norma does not disclose it. Her flat tone is a kind of fortress: There are some things, many things, she will not reveal. And so when she speaks of Evan's 34th birthday, the night that effectively ended their former lives and thrust them into a brand-new one, the one emotion she describes is surprise: "I remember thinking," she says, "'Do you have any idea what you've just told me?'"