KALAMAZOO, MI -- The initial epiphany occurred more than three decades ago, when Dyrk Hamilton was a teenager in Kentucky watching Phil Donahue on TV.

The talk-show host was interviewing a person who transitioned from male to female, and Hamilton felt a sudden jolt of recognition.

Omigod! That's me!

The sense of being trapped in the wrong body. The resulting confusion and frustration. The feeling of living a lie.

Hamilton was born with the body of a female, but the mind and psyche of a male. He felt like a boy, thought like a boy, played like a boy, dressed like a boy. He had crushes on girls in the way boys do.

Yet others saw Hamilton as a girl, a tomboy perhaps, but definitely a girl. A daughter. The middle of three sisters.

Watching the interview, Hamilton realized for the first time that how he felt was not the result of a teenager's overactive imagination. It was a recognized condition.

But his excitement was tempered by a second realization: It was a secret he could never disclose.

Not in 1980 as a teenager living in Kentucky, a time and place that took a dim view of people who were different. In Hamilton's small town on the edge of Appalachia, even someone without an eastern Kentucky accent was viewed with suspicion.

Hamilton's family fit the mold of small-town, conservative America. At mealtimes, Hamilton's dad would rail about Democrats and Martin Luther King Jr. and women who worked outside the home. On Sundays, the family went to a church that preached men were the head of the household, wives and children needed to be obedient and homosexuality was a sin.

In high school, Hamilton was caught having a relationship with a girl. For Hamilton, it was the sexual explorations of a teenage boy. Everybody else saw it as proof Hamilton was lesbian.

His parents' anger and despair, the ugly drama of what everybody considered as a scandal, was further evidence to Hamilton that his secret could never be revealed.

Still, over the next 30-some years, Hamilton would sometimes fantasize about making the transition from female to male.

What if I could? What if I did? How would I do it?

When Hamilton allowed himself to go there, the first step was always the same: Before starting his transition, he would fake his death.

He knew his hometown. He knew his family.

It would be easier for everybody to think he had died than to know he was transgender.

"Dying in a fiery car crash, that would be an acceptable tragedy," Hamilton says.

The journey

In the end, Hamilton did not fake his death.

But encouraging others to understand his journey is the big reason he is sharing his story now. At a time when the public is captivated by Caitlyn Jenner's transition from Bruce Jenner and transgender issues are moving more to the forefront, Hamilton wants to offer the perspective of a transgender man who recently transitioned.

The fact is, it took him a long time to become Dyrklain Hamilton, a 49-year-old man who today lives in Kalamazoo.

Dyrk Hamilton at his home in Kalamazoo. Hamilton was born with the body of a female, but the mind and psyche of a male. He felt like a boy, thought like a boy, played like a boy, dressed like a boy.

During the almost three decades he lived as an adult woman, Hamilton dropped out of college and spent four years in the U.S. Air Force. He worked as a supply manager in Phoenix during the 1990s, then returned to Kentucky.

At age 37, he enrolled at Eastern Kentucky University to get a college degree. While in college, Hamilton paid the bills by joining the Kentucky Air National Guard, a stint that included a short tour in Iraq during the summer of 2006.

Just before going to Iraq, Hamilton graduated with honors with a bachelor's degree in psychology and was the student speaker at the university's commencement, talking about lessons learned as an older college student.

After graduation, he worked with nonprofits serving the mentally ill and substance abusers. With his two dogs, Pixie and Bailey, he lived in a house next door to his parents.

Through all this, Hamilton identified as a lesbian. It wasn't his truth, as Hamilton puts it. But it seemed a palatable compromise. His parents already saw him that way, and the label allowed for romantic relationships with women.

During these years, he found joy in his jobs, his romantic relationships, his family, his church community and his military service.

A highly social person, he loved making connections and had a knack for working with people. He enjoyed helping others, taking satisfaction from shoveling a neighbor's driveway or volunteering. He once donated a building he owned to a food pantry. He took time for himself, too: His hobbies included writing songs and playing his acoustic guitar.

But living as a woman continued to gnaw at him.

The internal struggle

Occasionally, the disconnect between his public identity and how Hamilton saw himself was just too much to take.

He later learned these bouts of depression are common among transgender people, and even has a name -- gender dysphoria.

Experts describe gender dysphoria as a feeling of intense anxiety and dissatisfaction caused by a mismatch between one's body and internal sense of gender.

For Hamilton, it was simply the darkest despair imaginable.

In the mid-1990s, during a bout of dysphoria, Hamilton drunkenly blurted his secret to his girlfriend at the time. She seemed nonplussed that Hamilton might be a man trapped in a woman's body. In fact, she was much more horrified by his drinking to ease the pain.

Telling Bo McCreary was different.

They met when Hamilton was a high school student and McCreary was his school counselor. Hamilton was drawn to McCreary's open mind and open heart. McCreary saw Hamilton as an unusually caring and perceptive teenager, not to mention smart and creative and fun to be around.

When the lesbian scandal occurred during Hamilton's senior year of high school, McCreary was his defender. This is such a wonderful young person, McCreary told others. Why can't you recognize that?

McCreary and Hamilton stayed close. In 2003, Hamilton was despairing over yet another crush that floundered because the woman was heterosexual and Hamilton was seen as a lesbian.

He visited McCreary at her Kentucky farm and poured out his secret: "I'm a man and I'm in the wrong body." They sat on McCreary's porch and talked for hours. Unlike the former girlfriend, McCreary understood the implications.

"I wasn't shocked," McCreary says. "I was heartbroken, because I recognized the pain sitting across from me. It was the truth and it was real and it was something that had to be dealt with and resolved."

McCreary raised the subject of sex re-assignment surgery. She offered the name of a therapist at Eastern Kentucky University.

But the therapist was on sabbatical, and Hamilton moved on.

Making the transition

It wasn't until almost a decade later, in fall 2012, that Hamilton once again hit a wall.

The trigger was the wedding of two lesbian friends. Hamilton found himself constantly surrounded by women planning an event that seemed a celebration of femininity.

It made Hamilton realize he had constructed a social life deeply at odds with his internal identity as a heterosexual man.

"Living as a lesbian was my compromise but it was not my truth," Hamilton says. "And more and more, I was compromising my identity to fit in."

After the wedding, Hamilton spiraled into an emotional pit. It was a despair so wrenching that he was reduced to sobbing on his floor. All the feelings he had suppressed over the years burst to the surface.

"It was a like an infection breaking open," he says. "It was not pretty."

It was the first time since 2003 that Hamilton felt a sense of crushing hopelessness -- only this time it didn't ebb after a few days. It got worse.

"I was ready to stop living," he says. "I wasn't actively seeking death, but I was the next step over. If I had gone to a doctor who diagnosed me with a fatal brain tumor, I would have considered that diagnosis a gift."

A few weeks into his depression, he realized he needed to face the transgender issue head-on. No more hiding.

Hamilton started by going to his mother and two sisters. In conversations with each, he laid it out.

"I told them, 'I'm a man in a woman's body,'" he says. "'I'm not well. I need help. I don't know what's going to happen, but this is going to be my front-burner issue for the immediate future.' "

They didn't discourage him from seeking help, but neither were they openly supportive. It was a lot for them to process. As for his father, Hamilton left it up to his mother to deliver the news.

Dyrk Hamilton with Program Director Michael Cleggs, Jr. and Director of Community Engagement Meg Bauer at the Kalamazoo Gay Lesbian Resource Center. Hamilton volunteers at the KGLRC.

Hamilton found a therapist in January 2013, and it was during those sessions that he decided to transition to living as a man. A pivotal moment came when the therapist asked Hamilton for his worst-case scenario. What, the therapist said, was his biggest fear about transitioning?

Hamilton's response: That his father would never speak to him again. As he said the words, Hamilton realized he could live with that.

Things began to fall into place. An inheritance meant Hamilton could quit his job, move away and live off his savings, allowing him to undergo a gender transition far from the scrutiny of his family and hometown. It was a plan endorsed by his mother and sisters, he notes wryly.

Hamilton picked Kalamazoo because he already had a friend here, and because it was a progressive community with affordable housing. It also was a manageable commute to the University of Michigan, which has a medical clinic for transgender patients.

Hamilton began hormone treatments in July 2013, around the time he moved into a house he bought on Kalamazoo's East Side.

He left his old name and female identity behind in Kentucky and arrived in Kalamazoo as Dyrk.

It was exciting but scary.

"It's the hardest thing in the world to transition," Hamilton says. "I was afraid to go to the grocery store" for fear that people would call him out as a transgender person.

Life in Kalamazoo

Hamilton initially envisioned he would "cocoon" himself during his transition and interact with the rest of the world as little as possible. But it hasn't played out that way.

His naturally gregarious nature led him to volunteer at the Kalamazoo Gay Lesbian Resource Center and to join People's Church, a Unitarian Universalist church in Oshtemo Township.

Through those connections, he has made numerous friends, including Greg Martin, a Unitarian Universalist pastor in Portage, and Andrew Alm, a 27-year-old student at Western Michigan University.

Alm, who met Hamilton at People's Church, describes him as a confidante and role model for the way Hamilton has come to grips with his life. The two regularly have lunch after Sunday church services, where their conversations range from solving the problems of the world to dissecting their own lives.

"For me, when people come out and are able to express their truth, that's powerful," Alm says. "So often, people hide a facet of themselves. Dyrk is authentic, and I appreciate that."

Dyrk Hamilton poses for a portrait at People's Church in Kalamazoo.

For Martin, who recently came out as gay after a long marriage, part of the bond with Hamilton is their shared interest in spirituality, as well as their discussions about the fluidity of sexual orientation and gender.

"It's been a transformative friendship for me," Martin says.

While he's long been active in gay rights issues, Martin says he didn't know much about transgender people until he started spending time with Hamilton.

"It's given me real insight into this whole other world and its struggles and challenges," Martin says. "It's been a real education."

An example of those challenges came early in the friendship when the two went to dinner and gave the server their credit cards to pay for the meal. The server loudly questioned why one card had a female name.

"That one moment made me realize how he had to be on his guard all the time -- all the time," Martin says. "You're constantly dealing with the possibility this will come up and not knowing what the reaction will be."

Hamilton says he found the restaurant episode so mortifying that he spent the next year paying for everything in cash until he could change the name on his credit and debit cards.

Moving forward

In the past two years, Hamilton has completed his transition to life as a man.

Hormone therapy and reconstructive surgery have changed his physical appearance. After the surgery, he was able to get the gender changed on his Kentucky birth certificate and that allowed him to get a new Michigan driver's license.

He still needs to change his name and gender with the Veterans Administration, and amend the name on his college diploma.

Another piece of unfinished business remains his relationship with his family. He knows the transition has been difficult for them.

"I know my family feels like they're losing the person they knew me to be," Hamilton says. "Their sense is that this is like a death and a replacement person has come in."

While he understands that point of view, he says, "It's so painful that they only saw the external mask and they didn't see the real me."

Still, he says, his sisters and mother are coming around. In the past month, Hamilton has had a couple of hours-long, heartfelt talks with his mother. She still mourns what she sees as the loss of a daughter, but is working to appreciate her new son.

"She's trying," Hamilton says.

His relationship with his father remains more problematic. When Hamilton went home for Thanksgiving, his father minimized interaction with him.

Hamilton says he has never discussed his transition directly with his father. The one time Hamilton broached the reason he was moving to Kalamazoo, his father abruptly changed the topic. Hamilton's mother recently told her son that his father may never call him "Dyrk."

"I have to reach deeper inside and say to myself, this is as far as he can go," Hamilton says. "But we love each other. I know my dad loves me."

Meanwhile, a surprising number of friends and acquaintances from Kentucky have been supportive -- a fact that became apparent when Hamilton shut down his Facebook page with his old name.

After months of internal debate, Hamilton posted a final message on the page announcing his transition. The message also said people who wanted to stay in contact with him could send a friend request for his new Facebook page. He was surprised at the numerous public posts of support, as well as the number of friend requests under his new name.

"There are a lot of people who love Dyrk," McCreary says.

Moving forward, Hamilton is now thinking about getting a job once again and finding a romantic partner.

"I think right now, my greatest longing is for a relationship," he says.

But he recognized both getting a job and pursuing romance could be complicated by his backstory.

Before the transition, "I had secrets," he says. "Now I've crossed the bridge, but I still have a secret that could cause me to be ridiculed or ostracized or have my heart broken."

That reality is, he says, "I can't erase the 47 years of history" of his life as a woman, and so his plan is to be upfront with potential employers and lovers.

One reason for going public with his story is to put it out there, he says, and perhaps reduce the explanations.

Still, he sees himself as fragile. The battle is not over, and may never be over because of the stigma attached to being a transgender person.

"I still don't know if I'll make it," he says.

At church

For now, Hamilton is trying to adjust to being a regular guy living a regular life.

People's Church is one place where he feels not only safe, but loved and appreciated. In his two years in Kalamazoo, Hamilton has become a highly visible member, which speaks to his people skills, his leadership abilities and the importance he puts on spirituality.

He has bonded with members such as Gordon Bolar, general manager of public radio station WMUK-FM (102.1), who lost a son in Iraq in 2007 and was surprised to learn that while Hamilton was in Iraq, he was part of the honor guard overseeing the caskets shipped home.

On a recent Sunday, Hamilton arrived early to fulfill his role as the week's service coordinator.

In between his organizational tasks, he got into a conversation with one member about her artwork, made arrangements with another to give her 11-year-old son a ride home, and recruited a few members to serve as ushers for the service.

As the Sunday service began, it was Hamilton who offered the official Words of Welcome. He ended with words he wrote that morning:

"I thought there was no greater pain than living behind the mask until I took mine off. Then I learned the pain of being known only for the mask. Love is the only remedy for the pain of invisibility. Loving the mask is not loving the person. We must keep learning to see the soul through which no mask can hide."

Julie Mack is a reporter for Kalamazoo Gazette. Email her at jmack1@mlive.com, call her at 269-350-0277 or follow her on Twitter @kzjuliemack.