About the Author
Meet Brenda Ward
Ms. Ward grew up in a house full of music and a family focus on small town retail banking. She too devoted herself to finance for decades with a finance-concentration MBA and a career in financial services.
But she always felt a compulsion to pretend secretly to be someone else---suppressed. It took decades for her to approach transition. Once begun, transition was unstoppable.
Years later, she examined her experience in The Fallacy of Assignable Gender. Beginning a new life as a PhD student in sex and gender psychology, she seized an opportunity to revisit her earlier work and she completed Forty Years to Life.
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Brenda Bradford Ward
What was your reason for writing Forty Years to Life?
There is far too much, and especially detrimental, confusion about the origin, diagnosis, and treatment of gender identity conflict (GIC). I faced that conflict alone for more than forty years. This book addresses each of those aspects from an intensely personal viewpoint.
What is the book about?
Each of us has the unfortunate ability to suppress conflicts which would destroy our lives or prevent our ever living real ones. For over four decades, I struggled with GIC in every possible way. The conflict would not remain in its carefully constructed little box but spring unexpectedly to overwhelm every other thought demanding action temporarily to satisfy its latest escape.
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In childhood, a promised “growing out of it” continually failed to resolve the conflict. Inevitable outbursts made pursuit of honor and self-respect impossible. This seemed entirely as a problem for which there was no answer on this side of the veil.
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Love of family, faith, reason, literature, etc. tell us not easily to surrender the great gift of life.
However unbearable “the whips and scorns of time,” Christ promised the Holy Spirit always will be with us. These are the thoughts, from earliest memory, that consumed a growing child considers continually.
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Regardless of the person or persons in whom such children might confide, the situation
remains hopeless, save the possibility of transition.
What would the book like to change?
For thousands of years, GIC has seen endlessly displayed examples of the conflict that has escaped its constraints seeking undeniable diagnostics and greatly improved mitigation. Michael Creighton wrote about our excessive faith in science to resolve our problems, but we have almost eight billion examples of cis-gendered DNA that should show us the evident misspelling(s) and how to correct them.