Many were puzzled when the story of an ABC News anchor’s three-month stint as a transgender woman broke earlier this week. The decision to transition is not one that should be made in haste, so what would prompt someone to essentially transition twice in one summer?

Well, “transient global amnesia,” if you ask Don Ennis. For others, the explanation is not as simple.

Not to be outdone by ABC News, the folks at HuffPo discovered Philip Porter, a man who says he lived 34 years as a transgender woman. He worked both as an NFL cheerleader and topless dancer before going through a “mid-life crisis” and “changing back” to his birth sex.

Porter says he felt more female than male for as long as he can remember, but didn’t have many options or resources while growing up in the ’70s. “Back then…we did not have Google, we did not have Internet — it was very difficult to find, you know, a professional doctor or psychologist who could hear my story.”

He eventually did find that doctor in Dallas, and began transitioning just two days after:

“I was in his office the next day, an endocrinologist office the day after that, and just began my life living as a female. And did that very successfully and very happily for 32 years — I was an NFL cheerleader and I was a topless dancer for many years.”

But 32 years later, Porter says his hormones became unbearable:

“I think part of it might be the mid-life crisis, where like you’re starting to have the hot flashes and be very uncomfortable and it’s like the hormones were having different effects on me. I just said ‘Ok, I’ll stop taking these for awhile but it’s not going to change back after 34 years of taking them.'”

But once he stopped taking his hormones, Porter says things did change:

“And after that, it just started happening. After about 6 months to 9 months being off of them, ‘you know, you never gave yourself a chance to sort of live as a male. What would that be like?’ And it kind of was something in my mind that started as just a little thought that kind of like snowballed. And you know, I mean that’s just kind of how it happened.”

Check out the full interview here.