These are the entries from before anyone at work knew, newest first. I've fixed a few typos and left everything else alone.

Filed the petition yesterday at the county courthouse downtown. Forms, a filing fee, and a clerk who never once looked up, which I appreciated more than I can say. The hearing is set for October 19. If nobody objects, the judge signs. Who objects to a name?

Before then, the order has to run in a newspaper once a week for four weeks: the legal notices, the tiny type in the back that nobody reads. My old name and my new one, side by side, for anyone who reads tiny type. It is the strangest kind of announcement, public but addressed to no one.

This morning the news was all about John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane, missing off Martha's Vineyard. I sat with my coffee and watched them search the water. A man with every name and history anyone could want, and it doesn't protect you from anything. I don't know why that was the thought I had. I turned it off and went to buy flats.

Told Kath.

I'd planned it for months. I had a speech. I had typed the speech, of course. I drove to Sacramento yesterday with the speech folded in my shirt pocket, and we sat on her back porch with iced tea, and I opened my mouth, and what came out was, "Kath, I'm not your brother."

She said, "Okay. What are you?"

I said, "Your sister. I think. I'm pretty sure."

She looked at me for a long time. Then she said, "Is this why you were always stealing my Barbie shoes?" and I laughed so hard iced tea came out of my nose, which is not a sentence I expected to type about the most important day of my adult life.

We talked until 2 a.m. She asked good questions. She cried once, when I told her about the years I'd spent not telling anyone. She said, "You should have told me. I'd have been mad you didn't tell me." Then: "I'm mad you didn't tell me."

I drove home this afternoon with the speech still in my pocket. I never took it out.

Eight weeks on hormones.

What changes, for the two of you who wrote to ask (both kind): less than you'd think, and more than you'd think. My skin is softer. I'm cold all the time and keep a cardigan at my desk. I sleep better. The noise in my head, the one that's been running since I was about seven, like a server fan in a closet, is quieter. I didn't know it could be quieter.

Also, I cried at a long-distance commercial. Twice. The one with the grandmother.

Otherwise I'm still a man at work, in button-down shirts one size too big, and myself at home and on Saturdays, and I have a very organized closet in two halves, and I'm getting tired of the halves.

Every night on the news: Kosovo, the refugees crossing into Macedonia and Albania on tractors and on foot, carrying what they can. I watch and feel ashamed of how large my problems are inside my own head. Dr. R. says both things can be true. Dr. R. says that a lot.

Dr. S. is an endocrinologist with an office near the hospital and a bowl of lemon drops at the front desk. Dr. R., my therapist since September, wrote the letter the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care call for before hormones. I have read the Standards four times. I could cite them by section. I didn't, today, which I consider growth.

Dr. S. took blood, took my blood pressure, and asked about my family's heart history and my liver in the same matter-of-fact voice. Then she wrote two prescriptions, Premarin and spironolactone, and explained each one in three sentences. We'll check levels in six weeks.

The pharmacist, a young man, didn't blink, or else blinked professionally. I drove home and sat at the kitchen table with the two bottles in front of me like chess pieces.

Took the first ones at 7:14 p.m. with a glass of tap water. Very undramatic. I'm writing down the time because I'm me.

New Year's Day. Everyone at the party last night was talking about Y2K and whether the ATMs will work a year from now. I spent the whole night thinking about a different kind of date change.

One resolution: this is the year.

I'm 38. I've known since I was about seven, the way you know your own handwriting. I have spent thirty years maintaining a system that doesn't match its documentation, and I am very tired.

I'm starting this journal because I need a place to be her before I'm her anywhere else. I'll write it here first, and then, if I'm brave, out there.

My name is Andrea. I've never typed that before without deleting it.