I know in my logical brain that I was a real person before I transitioned. I do. But whenever I see pre-transition me, all I can think about is how I looked like this weird energy sphere that was dragging around an awkward little puppet meat suit thing. There's just this disconnect between the body I see and the knowledge that there's a human in there, thinking and feeling things and making the body move in response to those things. It's uncanny, like watching a hyper-realistic robot try to act like a human but not quite nail it—it's not that you dislike the robot in the way you might dislike a shitty person and more that you just feel uncomfortable observing this odd phenomenon. When I look back at my post-transition self, I feel a whole variety of things—happiness, pride, embarrassment, empathy, disgust, excitement—but regardless, I feel something for the human that inhabits that body. That makes me happy.