thoughts about transgender

Has anyone known a truly transgender person? What do you think of the whole subject?

A friend of mine was going to a male doctor in North Carolina who became a woman through the transgender process. She moved to New York City because of the lack of acceptance in North Carolina.
I knew a fellow student in law school who had completed the transgender process from a man to a woman. She was a very intelligent and nice person who had been through a lot of misery. And even in that fairly liberal setting, she said she had been told there were jokes about her written in the graffiti in the men's rest rooms.

She said a couple of things I've always remembered:
"All my life as a male I never understood the way males think. I always felt like a spy in a hostile foreign country."
"I knew the transformation to being seen as a woman was successful when I found that when I was in a discussion with men who didn't know about my past, they didn't take my ideas and opinions seriously anymore, compared to how men reacted when I was a man."