Stefanie Severance spent most of her life not knowing who she was.

PANAMA CITY — Stefanie Severance spent most of her life not knowing who she was.

Growing up as her family’s only son, Severance said there was a certain expectation placed on her — that she would be the one to carry on her father’s name, his legacy. But while her father wanted a son to play sports and do “guy stuff” with, Severance found herself wanting to be more like her three sisters and wondering why she didn’t fit in.

“I didn’t know how to explain that to anyone,” she said.

Lacking the words to work out what she was feeling, Severance pushed aside those questions. At 20 years old, she joined the military and eventually was stationed at Tyndall Air Force Base.

Hard statistics on the number of people identifying as transgender — defined by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation as someone who identifies with a gender expression differing from the sex she was born with — are hard to pin down. The most commonly cited statistic comes from a Williams Institute study, which estimates about 0.3 percent of the country’s population, or about 700,000 people, define themselves as transgender.

At the same time, a study by the National Center for Transgender Equality in 2012 found that of the more than 6,000 participants, 70 percent actively hid their gender or transition and 63 percent of those participants had experienced serious discrimination, such as losing their job or home, physical or sexual assault, denial of medical services, or incarceration because of their gender expression.

Recent events, such as the passing of North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” the Department of Education’s recent guidelines on Title IX and transgender students, and a mass shooting at gay nightclub in Orlando, have brought the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) communities into the spotlight of mainstream conversation — and not always in a positive way.

“Right now, it’s a really difficult time for me to even exist,” Severance said, her voice breaking. “You can see it everywhere you look.

“It’s easy to explain it, and it’s easy to sit there and hear it. But unless you experience it, it’s impossible to know what it’s like. It’s like living in a birdcage.”

Acceptance

Severance came to terms with her identity when she was 28, sitting on a lunch break while working at Tyndall. It had been a bad day, she recalled, and long-unanswered questions about her identity were beginning to bubble up.

“I was done pretending to be someone I wasn’t, and at that point in my life, I finally had the words to describe it,” she said. “I am transgender. I am going to transition, because I am going to be happy for a change.”

Transitioning is the process of changing gender to more closely fit with how the person identifies. This can be done socially, through changing their name, clothing and preferred pronouns, and physically, through hormone therapy and, sometimes, sex-reassignment surgery.

A little over a year into her transition, Severance is on a hormone regimen and plans to stick with it the rest of her life.

The first person Severance came out to was her wife, whose positive response helped set Severance on a path of confidence and determination. In 2015 she left the military on good terms. Now 31, and still married, she’s open about her gender expression.

But it hasn’t always been “peachy roses,” Severance said. She didn’t speak with her father for the better part of two years as he worked to understand how the son he thought he raised wasn’t actually his son at all. The two are closer now, she said, and the rest of her family has been very accepting.

Still, Severance said it’s “terrifying” to live openly as transgender.

“Every day that I go to the store, I worry if today is the day that someone decided to put a bottle bomb in the bathroom because I’m going into it,” she said. “Is today the day that someone is going to catch me on the way to my car and beat me senseless or possibly kill me?”

Despite that fear, Severance has decided to speak publicly about her identity and experience to, as she says, give a face and voice to people too afraid to come out. She’s spoken to several churches and local groups about her experience, and hopes her willingness to share and educate, along with the work of local groups like the Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Pride of the Panhandle (POP) can help promote better understanding and tolerance.