Almost as soon as I came out as trans, there was a spike in online harassment more vicious than anything I'd experienced before. It turns out there are many people who spend a good portion of their spare time making life as miserable as possible for trans people.
I dealt with depression for my whole life. That's not something that was caused by being trans.
I think a lot of people are very interested in why other people are trans or why people are gay.
I spent a long time reporting on trans issues, and I know in the course of that reporting I saw how deeply adversity runs.
It's hard because the phrase 'woman trapped in a man's body' is thrown around a lot, but that's like shorthand. It's deeper than that. There's so much more to it.
Everybody wants to have a partner; everybody would love to have a family, and for trans people, sometimes that can be extraordinarily difficult to do.
Many in the trans community are fed up with L.G.B.T. organizations that continue to erase trans identity or just give lip service to trans issues. We need our cisgender allies - gay and straight - to treat transgender lives as if they matter, and trans people need multiple seats at the tables in the organizations that say they're interested in L.G.B.T. equality; this absence has been painful since Stonewall.
America cannot be America in the new century until it deals with these new questions of gender, including the trans issues, and the questions around faith and Islam.
My experience started in the gay nightlife/drag life. I was just as consumed in ignorance about what is offensive to transpeople because at that time I hadn't found myself. I was living as a drag performer only.
I think it is necessary to educate folks on trans issues and to make them aware of trans identities and normalise it, because it is normal. But when you're shielded from something, and it's actively censored, it takes a negative connotation.
Trans stories have now entered the mainstream in this fantastic way, but the most important thing is what follows from that is hopefully a shift in the experience of trans people - so that there's more acceptance in the culture to the issues they face and more support.
He's trying to do info-tainment. He doesn't really want to talk about trans issues, he wants to sensationalize my life and not really talk about the work that I do and what the purpose of me writing this book was about.
It happens all the time! People are always talking about that explosive moment in their family history that sort of changed everything and rattled the cage, and more times than not it has nothing to do with trans issues. That's why people are relating to the show Transparent, because our family is their family and they understand that dynamic.
With trans folks, we have a lot of people accusing us of just playing dress up for whatever reasons, and that's just not true.
I have friends who are trans advocates, and they were upset that Jared Leto played a trans person.
