I grew up like this.
So it’s like, this is me.
Transgender people are not a fad that started with Caitlyn Jenner.
Before I would go to bed, I would pray “God when I wake up I want to be a girl.
Please make me a girl.”
It didn’t work … for at least another, you know many, many years.
I was living life as a lesbian, and I just started to slowly realize that that was not me.
That that was not me being 100 percent myself—that was only just part of myself.
When I was a teenager, at the time I would often like wear my sister’s clothes sometimes
or my mom’s clothes when no one was around.
And later, I started buying wigs and like experimenting with what it would be like to
present as a woman.
Some of the biggest misunderstandings they have about being trans is like you’re trying
to be someone else.
No, you’re trying to be you— you’re trying to be you to the fullest.
You know, I felt very alone.
I felt that, you know, I felt that nobody was ever really going to understand me.
That if I did speak about it that I was going to be sent away to kind of a re-education camp.
You know they have those, they have those available for a lot of kids.
I thought that the people that were closest in my life would be the most understanding,
but they were not.
It took my mom about 6 months to come to terms with it.
And she started, she realized that she loved me regardless.
I came out very very slowly in the late 80s, and you know the gay community was the gay community,
and sometimes the gay and lesbian community.
And it was just like, you know, I was invisible.
Now, the knowledge is out there. You know?
In the public eye it seems as if transgender people get more respect,
but in terms of day to day respect, it’s not 100 percent fixed yet.
Every day one of my transgender friends goes out,
I’m nervous that they’re not going to make it home.
I’m nervous that when they go on a date
some guy is going to get upset that they’re transgender and hurt them.
I think a lot of people when they think about trans people, they are still really holding
on to some very base ideas about sex and gender that they grew up with.
We’ve got all of this stuff that’s really kind of like embedded in our operating systems.
Being trans is as varied as being a straight person.
That’s the biggest misconception, that if you associate as being trans
that that's all you are.
Like not all transgender people take hormones, some of them do.
Not all transgender people need surgery, some of them do.
Some of them are accepted, some of them are not.
So they’re vast complex stories.
It just doesn’t happen overnight.
I haven’t started taking anything yet.
So before my voice deepened, and I would walk into interviews and look like this
and a girl voice would come out, I had to explain to everyone what transgender was.
So that they weren’t looking at me like “What are you?” or “Who are you?”
or you know.
And I’m pretty sure I did not get a lot of jobs because of that.
I really had gotten to a point where I thought that surgeries in particular
were never going to happen for me.
My insurance company, you know, finally came around to our way of thinking, and realized
we are going to cover trans healthcare, we’re going to cover surgeries.
I’m on top of the world.
I feel so lucky to have been able to get there and feel really at home in my body in a way
that I never thought was going to happen.
Some of the greatest parts of being transgender and transitioning, going through that process,
are being called “ma'am” each and every day.
It’s more of like the world externally accepting me as a woman because I realized I’ve been
a woman the entire time.
The best part about accepting and expressing my gender identity is that
I don’t think about that anymore.
I just wake up and go about my day.
At the end of it all, this has been an amazing experience
and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.