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.