Meeting a Transgender Person

One thing that I thought would be interesting to share with the rest of you is my recent experience meeting a transgendered person myself. She goes by the name of Nadine, although I had spent most of my time knowing her as Nik. She attended my high school and I had worked closely with her (while she was still Nik) within my school's drama club. Although he always had a penchant for some feminine things, he never really stuck out to me as a person who had any inner struggles, let alone with ones concerning gender identity. However he came out at the end of the year as identifying as a female and began his final year of high school by completely dressing and acting as a female. She is currently on hormones and plans to get the sex-change surgery when she is 18.

What I find most interesting about her, (and the reason I'm sharing this story with all of you) is that it was only recently that she decided she was indeed a she. After exploring a little, I found that a good amount of transgendered people discover the incongruousness between their gender and body at a very young age, but that is not the case for Nadine. She only started to identify as a female over the course of her high school years. She said that as a child she thought of herself as a boy and she really only started to think otherwise once she hit around high school. For the most part she was confused as to what she may be, but as she thought more about it and realized that she liked more feminine things and had always wanted a daughter and wanted to be associated with all things female, that she was a woman. This worries me, since I think she may be jumping the gun, since hormone taking and (obviously) the surgery has irreversible effects and I think she may regret the switch as she hasn't given the gravity of the situation enough thought. Do you think that she is getting ahead of herself and should give the idea of switching genders more time or do you think she is in the right for wanting to switch over immediately? I'd actually legitimately like to hear back from you guys because I'd love to carry this information over to Nik/Nadine. Thanks!