But it wasn't always easy for Jay to be himself. Growing up as Kyana, it was hard to be feminine. As a child, Welch threw rocks in the alley with the neighborhood boys and played the male lead in a high school play.

Jay Welch, a transman, poses in a downtown Kent alley. Welch knew he was different when his dad yelled at him as a young girl because he was playing with the boys in the alley.

When he was fifteen, Welch hung out at a teen club where he would dress as a male.

"We called them packers," he says of the prosthetic phallus he used. "You put them in your pants, and it gives you a realistic look. I think my parents found that."

Soon after, Welch's parents sent him to a mental health facility where he stayed in residential treatment for a year and a half.

He still remembers the conversation that led to his diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder. The therapist asked him if he wanted to be a guy.

"That question kind of threw me off guard because I never even thought of it that way," Welch confesses.

The rest of his time in residential care was devoted to curing him of his Gender Identity Disorder. Jay says he did feminine things in order to be evaluated as cured of his Gender Identity Disorder.

"I played the role," Welch says. "I had them take it off my diagnosis sheet and didn't hear from it until my freshman year of college."

"I met her with lip gloss, eyeliner, cover-up," Boyd recalls. She thought the waning makeup and baggier clothes were signs of their progressing relationship.

"When I got comfortable with her, I let it loose," Welch says about his masculinity. "It was very hard for me to cross my legs for hours or be dainty."

He struggled with his gender identity for four months before he came out to Amanda.

"Before I told Amanda, she was asleep, and I was looking it up; using crazy words to get to it," he says. "Life is too short. I wish I'd have just known forever. Then I could have started and just been a man for real and not have to do all this technical stuff."

These technical stuff Jay does every day includes binding his breasts, which are currently 38 DDD. He also packs. He says he has never been mistaken for a woman in public.

"People think I'm a 12-year-old boy, and 12-year-old girls are like, 'Yoo-hoo,'" he says, laughing.

"Back off, Suzie," Boyd jokes.

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