There's a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they're mismatched. That's all it is. It's not complicated, it's not a neurosis. It's a mix-up. It's a birth defect, like a cleft palate.
As you get older it's more confusing. Suddenly, there's more pressure to fit in to your assigned gender.
I absolutely believe in assimilation. I don't believe I'm any different from straight people. My wants and needs are the same as theirs. I don't look at sexual orientation as that big of a deal. It's just an orientation.
It felt as if my body was, like, literally betraying me because I went from a very athletic, straight-up-and-down little kid to a very curvaceous woman, and it was just horrifying to me.
I've been an activist in the LGBT community for a long time. I think nothing's changed, I'm just a little bit more focused on the 'T' now than I was on the 'L' or the 'G.'
I always wanted to shave. It is a very natural process. For my birthday I got a lot of shaving stuff.
I'm just a regular guy. All these ideas that children shouldn't watch me, I'm going to be confusing, all this stuff, it's crazy.
Around 2001, I started analyzing lesbians. I started to realize that even really butch-acting or -dressing women still had a strong female identity that I never had.
For me, it was never a question of whether or not I was transgender. It was a question of what I'd be able to handle transitioning and having to do it in the public eye. One of the issues that was hard for me to overcome was the fear of that.
