I first became interested in computers due to my number one role model: my mother. After over ten years away from school, raising children and being a wife, she returned to college and learned computer programming, eventually becoming one the first female programmers in the banking and insurance industries. I was fascinated with the first computer I saw at the college she attended, and I knew I wanted to program these machines, too.

Several years after that, as I ended my first year of high school, the district installed a couple of computer terminals in the back of the library. (It was connected to an IBM S/370-135 at the district office.) Being horribly shy and uncomfortable around people, these machines represented the perfect diversion from my utter lack of social skills. (Eventually I discovered my gender identity issue, and then my trouble relating to others made sense.) I quickly outpaced the high school's meager computer curriculum, and so I enrolled in the community college that had an aging IBM S/360-30. I graduated high school knowing BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL and IBM Assembler, plus a smattering of JCL.

After five years, mostly in the Air Force, I began a CS-degree program where I learned Pascal and DEC Assembler on a PDP-11/RSTS platform. I graduated the degree program with honors. During the last semester I left my wife, moved to the Tenderloin, began taking female hormones, and eventually began selling my body when I realized nobody would hire me as a woman (despite my qualifications).

As a newbie transsexual woman with no positive role models, I eventually became so discouraged by the blatant bigotry and socially sanctioned discrimination that I again tried to live as a man. During those unhappy two years I went to a technical/trade school, refreshed myself in IBM COBOL and Assembler, and used their placement department to get a programming job in a DEC/VMS shop at a San Francisco college. However I was so miserable denying my female identity and pretending to be a guy that I couldn't keep a needle out of my arm. Eventually I was fired.

Finally I got clean and sober, and I resumed my regimen of female hormones, electrolysis and gender counselling. I was eventually hired (in 1989) by a major provider of healthcare software doing development and customization programming of a VMS-based turnkey hospital IS. I've been with that company ever since, and am currently classified as a (Senior) Software Engineer VI.