For one of my last high school newspaper columns, I wrote about the transgender friend I made on a spring break trip. 

I've been thinking a lot about that experience as I write my transgender RA story. 

In 2005, while working in a soup kitchen located in the tenderloin of San Francisco, I remember eyeing what I then called a cross dresser and feeling immediately frightened. 

I was taking my lunch break, mingling with soup kitchen clients, and in the scenario I most dreaded, the cross dresser sat beside me. My body shook nervously and when she asked me for the extra roll on my plate, I could barely muster the words to say, "yes." 

During the next 30 minutes, though, Hannah and I had a conversation about feminism, law school, homelessness, and religion.

 "If God's so perfect, he must be a woman," she told me, laughing.

 My body relaxed and as I talked more and more with her, I looked beyond the stubble and fluffy orange wig to realize Hannah's humanity. 

Hannah grew up in a rich East Coast family and attended an Ivy League school. She moved to San Francisco in search of a more progressive and accepting community where she began cross dressing. Despite her work as a paralegal, Hannah struggled to pay the bills and ate regularly at soup kitchens.

 I only met Hannah once and can't say that I kept in contact with her. I can say, though, that my spring break experience four years ago has lead to me to dissect social constructions of gender and contemplate the ways in which I express my gender.

 Growing up in small town Oregon, I remember my classmates calling transgender people gross and abnormal. My parents taught me otherwise but somehow I was tainted by hateful notions among my community that if someone identified as transgender, he or she was somehow less human.

 Four years after meeting Hannah and telling my high school about the experience, I've come to transform my understanding of gender and sex by taking women's and gender study classes and attending programs put on by progressive campus groups.

 Who has developed my understanding of transgender issues most, though, has been Jake, the subject of my story.

 I no longer see him as a self-identified man who was born a woman. I see him as one of the kindest, most charismatic and talented college students at the University of Oregon. And that's all that matters to me.