My gratitude is great to my family and friends for accepting me as the person who they now know me to be and for letting me show them the possibilities of a life well lived.
Access to public facilities like bathrooms is important for transgender people. But the fight for transgender rights does not begin and end at the bathroom door.
Transgender people, especially transgender women of color, face pervasive discrimination throughout life, including by those sworn to protect us.
During my sophomore year at American University, I was elected president of the student body. At the same time, I was struggling with my identity and whether or not to come out as transgender.
Too often, when transgender people die, family members or funeral homes will end up dressing a body of a transgender person in the garments of the gender that they were assigned at birth instead of their gender identity. They're often dead-named and misgendered.
We have to open hearts and change minds while at the same time pushing for laws that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination.
Whenever you tell a group of people that they can't use bathrooms, or they can't access spaces that other people use, that is dehumanizing. It is discriminatory, and it reinforces the stigma and the prejudices that the transgender community already faces.
The reason why access to facilities - and access to public spaces - is so important is because it's much more difficult to go to work, to go to school, to participate in the public marketplace if you can't access bathrooms that make sense for you, that match who you are.
There's no question that the political is personal.
When the work you're doing every single day is so directly about who you are as an individual and who you are as a person, it can be both exhausting and empowering in different moments.
Time and time again, we have seen a growing alliance of allies who are willing to stand with trans people, who are educating themselves on trans identity and trans equality, and who understand that our lives are worth celebrating and that our cause matters.
The Internet has been great for the LGBT community. I know many older transgender people who say, 'I didn't know there was a single person like me until I was 40.' I can't imagine growing up in my teenage years without access to that information.
We can celebrate the speed at which LGBT equality has progressed, but we also have to acknowledge that it wasn't fast enough, because too many people didn't get to experience it. We can never be too impatient.
If I only care about equality for transgender people, then I am leaving so many people behind - if I'm not at the same time seeking to end discrimination against people of color, seeking to end discrimination against women, seeking to ensure that people of every religious background have an equal opportunity.
It's OK to be talking to one another about what it means to be transgender. We don't have to shield everyone from the existence of people like me.
Everyone's journey to coming out as transgender is different. For me, I've know that I'm transgender my entire life.
I think it's really difficult for folks that aren't transgender to really wrap their mind around the feeling of having a gender identity that differs from their sex assigned at birth. But for me, it felt like a constant feeling of homesickness.
