In HuffPost

This isn't earth-shatteringly important. Just kind of sweet.

I had become resigned to living the rest of my life as if it belonged to someone I emailed with a few times but never actually met, but then came an unexpected 12-month span that turned everything around. My son had graduated from college and my daughter had just started, so they had clearly moved on with their lives. I discovered home movies of my biological dad, who had died before I was born so I’d never seen anything but some photos of him. I turned 60. And there was a pandemic, which brought with it endless hours of isolation and contemplation.

[…]

Once you’re past 60, your internal “fuck counter” hits zero, so I have none left to give. I don’t have time to waste worrying about what others think of me. I only have time to let others see that it’s never too late to be who you’ve always wanted to be.

It’s taken so long for me to find my path, but now that I have, walking along it appears to suit me. Recently, I had drinks with some friends I hadn’t seen for a while. After a couple of minutes, one of them stared at me, waving her hands in my direction, and said, “This just feels right.” That was a phrase I honestly never thought I’d hear.

When you can relate…

But the truth is more complicated than any before-and-after story. Testosterone didn’t suddenly turn George from girl to boy. As a young child, he was different in ways that were undefinable but palpable enough to make him an outcast. Invitations to sleepovers and birthday parties were rare. Kids thought he was strange; he thought they were incomprehensible and cruel.

George was bookish, had odd interests and was utterly ignorant of the things that captivated the girls around him. He stood outside the worlds of either girls or boys in a state of loneliness I can still hardly bear to recall. And then puberty came along and took his suffering to new levels. It was like being buried alive in a body not his own, a body suggesting roles he could in no way fathom.

Staffers from more than two dozen Democratic offices say they are receiving an unprecedented number of calls and emails demanding for members to support a cease-fire — an onslaught for which their caucus was wholly unprepared.

Following the Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel by Hamas militants, up to three weeks passed ― and the death toll from Israel’s retaliatory strikes reached the thousands ― before many offices even formulated an official response. “Let it go to voicemail” was the prevailing guidance in several offices, one staffer said.

The yawning mismatch between voters’ and members’ sentiments on this issue strikes many staffers as outrageous.

“This building is not listening,” said one Democratic aide. “I’ve never seen such a disconnect between where voters and constituents are and where Congress is, and that’s saying something because there’s always a disconnect.”

Boris Johnson said he would rather “let the bodies pile high” than impose another lockdown, the Covid Inquiry has heard.

The former prime minister has previously denied ever making the statement, both on television and to the House of Commons, after an anonymous source told the Daily Mail in 2021 that Johnson said: “No more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”