"♪ Candy says ♪" "♪ I've come to hate my body ♪" "♪ And all that it requires ♪" "♪ In this world ♪" "♪ Candy says ♪" "♪ I'd like to know completely ♪" "♪ What others so discreetly ♪" "♪ Talk about ♪" "♪ I'm gonna watch ♪" "♪ Blue birds fly ♪" "♪ Over my shoulder ♪" "We are at an evolutionary moment." "One that pushes us to confront how we define ourselves and know one another." "We've outgrown categories and definitions that once held us." "Man, woman, boy, girl." "Masculine and feminine no longer reflect us all." "We've made way for something new:" "cis and trans, non-binary and gender queer." "The singular "they."" "We've seen an Olympian sprint away from her heroic past to declare herself anew." "A black child from Mobile, Alabama, reach unimaginable stardom on our screens." "An Army sergeant break rank to defend his right to serve our country openly." "These stories of triumph do not outweigh the tragedy facing many Trans-Americans who struggle with limited access to shelter, healthcare, education, and employment." "Susceptible to HIV, criminalization, suicide, and violence." "Despite the vitriol, despite the backlash, despite the discriminatory laws, we fight to be seen as we see ourselves and live our truth without compromise." "We are a constellation of experiences, expressions, and identities." "Ours is a mesmerizing constellation, so vast, it can't be contained, so plentiful, it can't be denied so brilliant, it shines through the dark." "This is "The Trans List."" "I grew up in a very rural community, which really still is close to my heart, in the middle of Missouri, called Fayette, Missouri." "Population hee-haw." "One flashing red light in the middle of town." "We're called "the buckle of the Bible Belt."" "I remember coming home every day after school and having private time with myself praying." "I prayed for unity of my body, mind, and spirit." "Now obviously, I didn't have those exact words as a child, but I knew that my body and-- and my mind didn't conform." "I wanted God to change me, to fix me, because I knew something was wrong." "I was masculine." "Always masculine." "Uber-macsuline." "I was never mistaken as a girl most times, and if I dressed up as a girl, it looked like I was in drag." "Well, I would try to pretend to be a girl, and that would last for, like, two days at school, and I just couldn't stand it." "I'm like, "This seems so... gay."" "My parents were children of slaves." "They loved me unconditionally, no matter who I was or am." "My father drove trucks." "I'd go on runs with him on my spring break, when I could be with him all week." "People would always say, "Oh, you brought your son with you."" "He just never blinked an eye and kept it moving." "Well, he was just always my cover guy." "He just innately got who I was." "A child that looked like me going to school had a very hard time with the skin color." "I'd lived as a high yellow and had taken a lot of hate from that as a child." "I got locked in the coat closet by the teacher for doing nothing, and luckily, my dad did truck deliveries and happened to walk into the school one day and saw what was happening." "He dropped a delivery and walked to the principal's face, and he said, "Don't you ever do that to my child again."" "I think Mother had more designs on who I should be and what I should be looking like." "I turned 18, my mother put her hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye." "She's like, "You know you're a girl, right?"" "I described myself as nothing, literally, and would just, like, avoid the question." "Then finally, I began to use the "L" word." "It was like, "Uh, l-- l--"" "Because my attraction was towards women," "I must be a lesbian." "But I was never at home in any of the spaces." "You listen to certain music, you read certain books." "I'm like, "Well, gee, this music isn't for me."" "For a black person walking around looking like a dude going, "Hey, man." "What's going on?" "How you doin', man?" Uh, they just didn't like that very much." "It wasn't until I found an article about Billy Tipton, who was a musician." "He hadn't sought medical treatment and he died of simply a-- a bleeding ulcer because he'd been hiding his identity for so long." "I'd hide that in our house every day to read after school, and it let me know I wasn't crazy." "I would always play Perry Mason on my little twin bed." "In my room was my desk and I'd have everything laid out." "What I had decided was that I would become a corporate lawyer." "It was horrifying." "Skirt suits, hose, and heels." "I couldn't wait to get to the parking lot to get in my car." "I was like Superman." "As soon as I got in the car, I was ripping everything off." "And I started dressing like this." "It's just innately me." "I had had a vision that one day I would do testimony before Congress, and I remember thinking that as a kid playing Perry Mason on my little bed." "And then that happened." "It was very emotional." "It took me back to the experiences that I had had of being treated as a non-human being just for being trans." "But I wanted to tell everybody's story through my story." "We need clear, explicit protection for trans people throughout this country so there is no doubt that somebody can't kill me just because I'm trans." "And if they do, then they suffer the consequence." "Today it's not such a big deal." "25, 30 years ago, it was a big deal." "Getting through the '60s and '70s transgender, it wasn't-- wasn't fun." "Back then, you just blended in." "Is there a certain way that you're supposed to be or look?" "We come in all shapes and sizes." "God blessed me with my looks to be able to work as a model, but it's also-- that's caused me the greatest deal of problems." "I think it would have gone to my grave." "I don't think I would have ever been open enough to say, you know," ""This is me." "So what?"" "It was just forced upon me and then having to deal with it." "After I was outed by "News of the World,"" "I felt desperate, suicidal." "It really wasn't anyone's business, and it should have been left to me if I wanted to talk about it." "I had all these tabloids ringing and-- and saying, "You know, just" ""let-- let's see your birth certificate." "Let's see some documentation."" "I was devastated." "I mean, it was very personal to me and private." "I thank the Lord that I did have my family." "That just gave me strength to fight." "The rights and recognition and, um, to be accepted." "It wasn't until I had sexual awareness that I realized, you know, "There's something wrong with me."" "I just assumed I must be gay, because I was attracted to boys and not girls." "I just needed to get away from home and find myself." "Grow my hair... tid a bit and look sort of girly." "I moved to London and I wasn't accepted in gay clubs, in the gay circles." "They said, "Oh, you know, we don't allow drag queens."" "And it's like, "Drag queens?" "I" " I'm not a drag queen."" "I was totally lost." "I had an evening job in a West End show selling programs, ice creams." "Quite a famous choreographer came up to me and said," ""Have you ever thought about being a showgirl?"" "and I said, "Showgirl?"" "And he said, "Well, you're beautiful." "You're tall." "You're slim."" "I said, "Well, um, I'm a boy."" "And he said, "Well, I know that, but in Paris," ""lots of the beautiful showgirls are all transgender and what have you."" "And he said, "I'm auditioning and I'd like you to come along."" "And I was like, "Okay."" "So, I went along for the audition and got the job and it was like, "Oh, my gosh."" "And it changed my life." "I was working in Paris." "This one particular person kept sending champagne and I met him after the show and he was very handsome." "I confided and, uh, he-- he thought it was fascinating." "He said, "You're beautiful, you're unusual," ""you should never have surgery." "You're unique."" "He gave me a beautiful penthouse, jewelry, clothes, love." "I had everything a girl would look for in a relationship." "But I just-- I weren't happy." "Without getting into the nitty-gritty of the sexual side of things," "I mean, he never touched me down there." "Obviously he was aware of it 'cause he could see it." "It wasn't something I was comfortable with." "Um, you know, it was just a part of my body that I detested." "I couldn't be active." "I wanted to be passive." "I tried being passive as the gay role, but... that just wasn't comfortable for me." "He said, "Well, you know, I'll give you the world, but I'm not gonna pay for your surgery."" "I said, "Well, that's okay."" "You know, so, um, I made my way home." "I've never regretted my surgery." "It was important for me." "I do know and have heard of people where, "It's gonna make me a woman."" "You know, "I can't wait."" "And it's like no, it'll help you function, but it's never gonna make you a complete woman." "That's just a small part of the whole picture." "And I did the Wella ad for a perm, and that was a big campaign." "Bras for Playtex." "I'd also been part of the Smirnoff Vodka campaign." "I was behind the Loch Ness Monster, waterskiing." "And it was a great campaign." "It was all in-- all the magazines and billboards." "And nobody knew." "It just-- it wasn't questioned." "But everything crashed down with the Bond film." "I can honestly say that" "I loved being successful as a model full-stop, not transsexual Tula the model." "There's a lot of bigoted, ignorant people out there that still give people like myself a hard time." "Odd character that say, "No matter what you do, you'll always be a mutilated man."" "Very unfair because we're not criminals." "You know, we were born this way and we just really try to make the most of life." "I just... pray for them." "It's all I can say, because they have more problems than I do." "I'm just me and I hate labels and boxes, so..." "As a kid," "I loved boy bands, and I still do." "I also loved Pee-wee Herman." "I loved "Pee-wee's Playhouse."" "His gender was so strange to me." "He was so otherworldly." "I also loved the movie "Stand by Me."" "Watched it obsessively." "Had it memorized by seven." "It felt like a raw connection." "Four young male friends in the '50s-- there was something there." "An experience that I was longing for." "I remember walking outside with my mother at the age of five and telling her" "I should have been born a boy." "It was a very simple conversation." "Like, "No, you don't." "Don't say that again."" "And then I don't think I did say that again for a long time." "I had long brown hair and bangs, and it was always pulled back." "I feel like I look the same." "Honestly." "With a few minor adjustments." "Shopping for clothes was always a nightmare growing up." "The girls' section of Kmart, that's where I would-- you know, those were my options, so it was, like, the most masculine stuff that I could find in those sections." "Clothing was the one thing where I felt like" "I had some control over how the world was seeing me." "Well, anything that would hide my body-- large, giant pieces of clothing." "I" " I really loved any kind of, like, oversized, hooded sweatshirts." "I didn't want anybody to see... anything, so I covered it up." "I really don't know what I was waiting for for so long." "It just felt it was no longer an option for my sanity or for my health." "I was trying to make it through without transitioning, and I couldn't." "I had to stop spending so much time covering up my emotions and my problems, and I had to deal with myself." "My drinking was a coping mechanism..." "to not deal with gender, to not deal with the way that I was existing in the world at the time." "And I know that if I had kept drinking," "I never would have done anything." "I had started taking photographs of trans men in San Francisco." "I met my friend, Rocco." "During his photoshoot, I was telling him" "I wanted to make all of these photographs and just put them into a zine." "And we ended up partnering up and making it into, this quarterly-printed magazine." "There wasn't really much trans experiences in the media at all." "I wanted to see myself reflected, and from there it grew." "The models and the people being featured were speaking for themselves as trans people." "They weren't just being photographed and put in a magazine, they weren't just having an article written about them." "They were talking, they were telling us their story, posing the way that they wanted to pose." "They were-- everything was very much like, you know, self-styled, and... that" "I felt like needed to happen." "Naming it "Original Plumbing"" "was like throwing it in people's faces who are always asking, you know, "What's in your pants?"" "Finding out that you're trans and just immediately thinking about genitals." "It's just acknowledging that that's a question that's asked constantly" "Passing is when you're not being" ""seen" as a trans person." "I think I noticed that I was really, um, "passing" when, um, men would say things if I made eye contact for too long." "I remember smiling at a young man and his young son, they were on a bicycle, and just, like, smiling at them, and he was like, "What the fuck are you looking at?" "Fucking faggot."" "I just would love to tell my younger self that there are more experiences than just male and female." "You will be an adult." "You will not be shopping in the women's section of Kmart." "You will become yourself." "The very first time that I dressed up, it was one of the greatest moments of my life." "I felt enlightened." "I just felt... me." "It was a white dress, strapless, and short to my-- down to my knees and it was flare." "I would say I felt like Cinderella." "The little mousies came and just gave me the magic wand, and I was just transform." "I am a very proud Trans-Latina immigrant." "Some people may think that I'm a troublemaker, but our time is now." "Our time to resist, our time to organize, it's now." "Oftentimes, the LGB community is not supportive of the issues happening with us." "Where the trans community is in comparison to the LGB community, we are about 40 years behind-- legislatively, economically, academically, you name it." "There was a very significant event that changed my life." "The murder of Gwen Araujo." "That sparked my anger." "That unleashed the deer in me." "Ever since then, I've been, like, nonstop, doing whatever I need to in order to not only make the voices of my community heard but disrupting whoever." "And when I came to Los Angeles," "I found my community here." "1988." "There were a gang of girls, 20, 30, in one corner." "Those who have a little more experience or that were a little more seasoned would take us under their wing." "How to do my makeup, how to do a body." "They give you tips and tricks." "I needed to go every single night to the street to get money." "That was my only source of money." "Drugs were my refuge." "Drugs was a way for me to cope with everything that was going on in my life." "Sleeping on the street, coping with the fact that I had just been raped." "Drugs did that." "Gave me the strength to continue to survive." "There were major crimes that I committed." "The crimes that I committed were generated because of my drug addiction." "I was in a prison of about 3,000 men." "There was this individual who, every time he would see me, he would say, "You need to stop it." "You need to stop it."" "He came with a big two-by-four." "Out of nowhere, he just started hitting me." "I ended up in the infirmary." "But then after, when I got out," "I seen him and..." "I did what I needed to do." "One of the proudest moments that I continue to feel is when I see the transformation of a young person." "Seeing them build up." "Seeing them transform themselves." "I felt like a-- like a proud mama." "I think I need a moment." "I always refer to myself as "Yo soy un milagro,"" "which means that I am a miracle." "There was a reason why I didn't... get killed when I was on the streets." "There was a reason why when I overdosed in an alley, the paramedics came and got me." "There was a reason why I didn't get killed when I was in prison." "I'm supposed to be here doing what..." "I'm supposed to be doing." "Testosterone is a powerful hormone." "It changed the way I think, it changed the way I interact in the world, it gave me confidence, and it also gave me confidence around my sexuality." "Loving your own body can change your life." "I decided I'm gonna make my own idea of what a man is, and for me, my idea of a man doesn't necessarily include a penis." "So I'm a man without a penis." "What does that say to the world?" "It says that you can be any type of man that you want to be." "My ideal man was G.I. Joe." "Since I was a kid, G.I. Joe was this guy that I wanted to be." "I wanted to have that masculine body and I wanted to have muscles and I wanted to take my shirt off." "And I know it just seems very... shallow in a sense, but I think for trans people, our outer selves are very important to us." "They're very important to the way we present to the world because it's the way the world comes back to us." "My first suicide attempt was at 16." "There was no future." "All I thought about was killing myself." "That was the only option I ever felt that I had." "It is that thing that in a way kept me going." "I always knew that I had this "option," right?" "This option to just check out." "I started going to therapy." "None of my therapists had the tools, right?" "In the '80s and '90s, nobody really talked about a transgender man." "When I said I felt like a man, they all said," ""Well, you're a very male-identified female,"" "which still, to this day, I don't really understand." ""Basically, you're a lesbian and just deal with it."" "But I knew that wasn't true." "Eventually, one day I found this amazing therapist." "And she would say, "Whenever you're ready to say something, it's okay, I'm here."" "She knew I needed to say something, and every week, I would just sit there for 45 minutes, 'til one day I walked in, I just started crying, and I said, "I feel like a man."" "And she said, "I believe you." "I believe you." "What can we do?"" "She saved my life." "There was no Internet back then, which is, like, such a crazy thing to say now." "There's no cell phones or Internet, right?" "There was no Internet, and I had to go to bookstores." "I found like a very homemade, punk rock, stapled-together book that I still have." "Resource guide for male-to-female transsexuals." "I knew that was me, but the opposite." "And in that, I found a hormone doctor." "He never dealt with a person like me." "He only dealt with male-to-female transsexuals, but he knew when he heard the urgency in my voice." "He said actually these words:" ""You will be my guinea pig," ""because I have no idea what I'm doing." "Are you prepared for that?"" "And I was prepared for it." "I didn't have a choice." "When I decided to get into making pornography, they had chicks with dicks, and I was like, "That's interesting." "I could be the man with a pussy."" "It didn't exist in the whole pornography world." "Who's gonna be my audience?" "Who's gonna be the people who are gonna be my customers?" "Who?" "Who?" "Who knows?" "Surprisingly so, it was gay men." "I got emails that said, "I've always fantasized, always fantasized, about a man with a vagina."" "I was like, "What?"" "Nobody acknowledged my work in my industry." "Nobody acknowledged my work, and then all of a sudden" "I won the "Oscar" of the porn business." "What I learned from my work and what I really believe about sexuality and desire is that it is a human thing." "People are attracted to people." "I've pretty much had sex with pretty much every type of human being there is." "And it's because I was attracted to them as a person." "Becoming connected to your sexuality and your body sexually is a huge part of becoming yourself and understanding and loving your body." "It changes everything." "It's difficult." "Because my life did get better and I feel so blessed in so many ways, but when I look back and I see that little" "I see that little kid, and I... and I know how that little kid feels, and I know how that little kid doesn't see the light at the end of the tunnel." "And I know you can say it to that kid." "I could say it to him right now." "There is a light." "There is a light, believe me." "But I know how deep it hurts." "But what I could say to that... kid is," ""You can be G.I. Joe." "You can."" "Miss Major:" "I don't need your acceptance." "I just need your respect." "Read your Bible, go back to the Pharaoh, and pick any eunuch that you can think of, see if it had a first name, which was probably Bob, and what they call it now, Loretta." "Oh, that's a transgender person." "Well, shit." "Oh, dear." "We've been around since time began." "Duh." "The '60s were a moment of everybody trying to self-identify, everybody trying to be who they are and get recognized for that and appreciated." "My family told me that..." "Chicago was not big enough for the both of us." "Went to New York and got my world turned upside down." "It was vibrant and young, and people were dressing up to go out, and the clubs were sparkling and everybody was doing their own thing." "No matter what you were into, you could find it there at any time." "It was absolutely fabulous." "Stonewall was a meeting place in the Village in New York for transgender, nonconforming people to meet and socialize and hang out." "When you were through hooking', you know, you could run in and have a quick drink before you went home, chat with your friends, see who made the most amount of money, make plans for the next day," "and then hit it." "You had to step away from another person of the same gender." "You had to have three articles of male clothing over or under your dress or they would arrest you for fraud." "And when that Stonewall incident happened, it just became a thing of... the shit just finally hit the fan." "I was there when the fighting started." "I got knocked out." "Thank God, or they would have continued to beat me until I couldn't have walked." "And it went on for days." "Did it change things?" "It did for the gay and lesbian community." "Did it change things for my transgender community?" "It really didn't." "We're the third or fourth letter in that alphabet soup thing that they have, GLBT." "Well, to me, "T" should have been first." "We were there doing most of the fighting, so let's start there, and then let's get the gay and lesbian and bi." "We were unemployable." "I gotta eat." "I'm hungry." "And like Scarlett O'Hara says," ""Child, I will never be fuckin' hungry again."" "So it was a matter of doing what you needed to do to survive." "I hooked up with some girls who hooked a lot." "I learned how to boost and rob johns without them knowing it." "I got arrested for getting in a fight with a cop and knocking him out." "He tore my silk organza dress, girl." "That is not a thing to do." "Took me too long to find that dress at my size." "You want me?" "Catch me." "So, he caught me, and I wound up going to jail." "While you're in there, you were suffering the same abuses that you were suffering while you were outside the prison wall." "And the assaults are not just physical." "They're mental, spiritual, and emotional, so it was hard." "It was very-- it was-- it was hard." "We're not safe." "We are running around with targets on our back." "We have to constantly be on our guard." "Constantly watching what anyone and everyone is doing around us." "I got gray worrying about all that stuff all the time." "I want to make sure that every young girl has an opportunity to get to this point safely with the least amount of bullshit happening to her and knocking her on her ass and trying to keep her down." "I want us to get a chance to appreciate smelling a rose, walking through the park without your shoes on to feel the grass on your toes." "Go to Monterey and walk on the white sand." "Oh!" "And those are things that we don't get a chance to do." "What would I like my legacy to be?" "She came, she cared, she left." "What else would there be?" "Bathrooms is sort of like the focal point of trans issues?" "Ooh, the bathroom." "What do we do about the bathroom?" "It does start to... collapse that structure of two-gender that has been here for so long." "Just bathrooms." "We all gotta use 'em." "Doesn't have to be so protected." "Not the Pentagon, just a bathroom." "In the fifth grade, they have actual, like, multi-stall bathrooms." "That was the year where" "I started going by Nicole and I started wearing skirts and had my ears pierced and everything." "That was really what marked transition for me." "We'd worked with the school and they said," ""We think that it'd be best if she have her own space away from the other students."" "I had a staff member six feet behind me at all times." "If I wanted to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of class, I had to wait for the staff member to come with me to make sure that I didn't go into the girls' bathroom." "And it really made me feel like I was an outsider and that I wasn't fit to be with the other kids." "Like there was something wrong with me." "This is very, very common among trans youth everywhere." "Someone's gotta say somethin' about it." "A year after middle school, we had filed a lawsuit for wrongful discrimination based off of my gender, which was protected under Title IX." "It took a while." "I think it was six years it took." "Wow." "When the Susan Doe versus RSU 26 case was decided," "I was in the lunchroom, you know, doin' my business," "I think I was eating waffle fries, and I got a text from my mom." "It was just, you know, all capital letters, lots of exclamation points, "We won!"" "You know, I was running around telling everybody." "This case is really a landmark case, 'cause this is the first time a court has ruled in favor of a trans youth." "This is what happened in Maine, now we can make it happen other places." "The dreaded bathrooms aren't gonna be something that we're all so afraid of anymore." "We can just pee in peace." "I'm an identical twin." "I have a twin brother, Jonas." "I'm older by 10 minutes." "Growing up with somebody who was an exact mirror of what I could have been was scary to me when I was little." "He was always what society sort of expected of me." "I started hormone blockers right before I started puberty." "We totally cut off testosterone, and it worked amazing." "I can't stress enough how I dodged a bullet." "Our journey was a family one." "My dad struggled for a while and said, "You're not a girl."" ""Yes, I am." "No, you're not." "Yes, I am."" ""No, you're not." "Yes, I am." ""Dad, you've gotta face it." ""You've got a son, you've got a daughter." "There's nothing you can do about it."" "Well, I think it was really my mom that helped my dad come around." "She left Jennifer Boylan's book" ""She's Not There" on the coffee table." "She didn't tell him to read it." "She just sort of left it there." "And it didn't work on the coffee table, so she did the next best thing." "She put it in the bathroom." "Couple days later, the book wasn't in the bathroom anymore." "When he got on-board... he got on-board." "He's just totally become this figure in the community and it's amazing to watch his transformation as well as mine." "To a young person whose parents aren't necessarily on-board," "I'd say you gotta advocate for you." "That's what I did with my parents." "You know, they wouldn't have known if I really wasn't as vocal." "Advocate for yourself." "Do not take no for an answer." "Do not settle for less." "This is your life." "Just save yourself." "Slay your own dragon." "You can do it." "The United States Military is a hypermasculine environment." "There's only three percent female, so the United States Marine Corps is alpha male, straight forward, hooah-hooah, hardcore, oorah, you know, badass motherfuckers." "They don't have time to be worrying about, like, who's peeing in a ditch and who's peeing standing up." "They're just wanting to get the mission done." "My performance standard was so high that nobody really gave a shit." "It was like, "That dude's awesome at his job." "That dude's a chick." "All right."" "It's just gonna fall off the table." "And they just let it go." "No one's just gonna come and square off." "I mean, now I'm bigger, but even then I was a badass motherfucker." "I was just, you know, 140 pounds versus 180 pounds." "The first time I went to Iraq," "I was only 18." "Two weeks in, I saw a woman get stoned," "I watched one of my best friends get his legs blown off." "It's everything you can imagine." "It smells bad, it's hot, it's sandy." "There's a lot of chaos, a lotta high anxiety, a lotta high-stress moments." "That first deployment to Fallujah, more than a third of our Marines were killed in action or wounded." "My particular platoon only had 30 people, and when we came back, we only had" "12 of the original people we'd deployed with." "It was really hard to deal with." "I'm still dealing with it." "I learned about discrimination from a very young age." "I grew up on reservation land." "My great-grandmother and-- and my grandmother are both 100% First Nation Cherokee." "I lived with my great-grandmother off and on during the summers during my childhood." "I always heard her stories of what it was like to be, you know, an indigenous person in America." "My family's people were originally settlers in the Virginia area, and they got pushed to Kentucky." "So, I had first-person accounts of what it was to face adversity." "When I went in the United States Marine Corps, it was still under "Don't ask, don't tell."" "I think that my recruiter thought I was a lesbian, and so like, he made me sign that waiver that says, like," "I'm not a homosexual or whatever, but he gave me this odd look while I was signing it." "I definitely felt the oppression as far as it applies to sexuality." "I identify as queer or pansexual." "For me, it was kind of like a sense of panic." "It's like a witch hunt." "Somebody's gonna, like, jump out of the woods and be like, "Ah, gotcha!"" "Legally speaking, for the last five years, I am male." "My military passport, my official red military passport says "male."" "With the Department of Social Security, I'm male." "But the entry system which holds the data for every service member, male, five-six, blah-blah-blah, that hasn't changed for me." "I still have to be addressed by members of my senior command as female." "I'm not allowed to correct people, because it's military law." "Uh, I can't be like, "Hey, you're using the wrong pronoun,"" "because technically speaking, they're in the right." "Being listed as a female but being seen as male with your peers, probably one of the largest reasons why my anxiety level is really high." "I never know which bathroom to use at work, so I just conveniently always, like, use the bathroom when somebody else is not there." "But I usually use the men's bathroom because it's really inappropriate to, like, walk in-- in a female." "It's just always a really weird situation." "I was going to the Pentagon and they wanted me to wear a female dress uniform." "To do that was incredibly humiliating." "Like, the civilians there were interacting, but they were like, "Sir, that's a woman's uniform,"" "and I'm like, "I know."" "The United States Military uses a medical code based on the "DSM-IV,"" "which is very, very outdated." "If you're transgendered, it says it's a psychosexual condition, which is-- also lines up with bedwetting, dementia." "Everything is still as it was before." "You have to pretend to be this other person that you're not." "There's been no accommodations made for anyone." "I've always just been this guy that always just kinda wanted to help people." "I saw that no one was advocating for military rights for trans military people, and I felt that people needed to see, "Hey, I'm an American soldier," "I can do this job, and I do it well."" "Martin Luther King says, "If not me, then who?"" "You know, "If not now, then when?"" "So, I had to do something." "I swore to serve and protect the people of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." "What are you gonna do?" "You're gonna protect them, right?" "What is normal?" "Let's be honest, everybody has their stuff." "This happens to be my stuff." "This is what I dealt with all my life, secretively, behind closed doors." "I just couldn't do it any longer." "I'm just so lucky in life." "I'm this white, privileged older guy, ya know, financially all set and this and that." ""Oh, it's a different story for you."" "Every journey has its struggle." "Mine..." "I had to do it publicly in front of literally billions of people with their perception of, "Oh, my God, Bruce Jenner," "'Mr." "Male Athlete of the World,' is really trans."" "Going from a very positive masculine figure to what a lot of people perceive as a feminine, weak figure... publicly, not easy to do." "I'm comfortable in my womanhood." "But what does that really mean?" "What is this thing "female"?" "I still struggle with that." "It's more than hair and makeup." "It's more than the pitch of your voice." "I didn't grow up having my first period." "I didn't grow up on my first date." "I didn't have all of these things that all women experience." "I am a trans woman." "My experience is different and I think I am different than other women, and I never want to disrespect women from that standpoint, but I'm much more comfortable over on that side, and that's the first time in my life I can ever say that." "All of a sudden now, I am... like this spokesperson for the trans community." "Not even close." "I am an expert on my story." "Nobody else's." "I would love to show other stories through the media, and yes, I do have a platform here, and that platform is very important." "I can't go out and help anybody else or talk about this issue if I'm not so clear in my soul about who I am as a person, and this is who I am." "For the first time in my life," "I wake up in the morning and I don't have any more secrets stored up in my soul." "Growing up, I was a dyslexic kid." "Suffered from terrible low self-esteem." "I had gender issues all the time." "My outlet to prove my masculinity was to play sports." "'Cause that was all of me." "That was the little trans kid, that was the little dyslexic kid, that was a person with great drive." "When the games were over with, I got up the next morning," "I put the gold medal around my neck and I looked in the mirror, not a stitch of clothes on, and I said," ""Oh, my God, now what do I do?"" "You know, now I look back on it," ""Go, Bruce!"" "But we've moved on." "A sense of humor is extremely important." "This is pretty funny." "Ya know, me of all people, the big Bruce Jenner, ya know, dealing with these issues." "That in itself is a sketch on "Saturday Night Live."" "For Halloween, they were coming up with a Caitlyn Jenner Halloween costume, the bustier I wore on the cover of "Vanity Fair."" "I think it's pretty funny, ya know?" "And boy, some people in the community go," ""How can you do that?" "How disparaging."" "You know, "You're putting trans people down,"" "and stuff like-- and I said," ""No, I'm thinkin' I like to go through life with a sense of humor."" "And to me, that was-- yeah, that was funny." "I feel so blessed that I did transition later on in life 'cause I loved raising my kids." "I loved carpooling my kids." "They were just great." "They said, "Can we still call you Daddy?"" "I said, "Of course you can still call me Daddy." ""I'm gonna be your dad until the last day I'm here on Earth, okay?" "I'm always going to be your father."" "My daughter-in-law just had a little girl." "She will only grow up knowing Caitlyn." "I thought, "Isn't that so cool?"" "So of course we're trying to come up with a name." "I don't know if we're gonna go with it, but they came up with..." "Boom-Boom." "Why Boom-Boom?" "I don't know, but it seemed to stick with all my kids in the room to call me Boom-Boom." "And I've been called worse." "Yeah, I've been called worse." "Yeah." "Ah." "Remember, keep your sense of humor." "Gender is an essence." "Personality." "The power of gender is precisely that it can never be defined." "I don't think that gender is fixed." "I think that gender can actually change every single day." "Myself is many selves." "One day I might feel really masculine, one day I might feel really feminine." "The next day, I might feel neither, and every single day, I should have the autonomy to self-determine who I want to be." "I identify as non-binary, which means I don't identify as either a man or a woman, but I identify as femme, and I understand femininity to not be the same thing as womanhood." "I think femininity exists outside of bodies and outside of one type of gender." "My femme identity is part of a long ancestral lineage of all the feminine people in my life who have done so much profound emotional and social work, but have been completely discredited." "Like caretaking, helping people process trauma, grief, or depression, cooking for people." "These are all things that are substantive and real and powerful, but we're taught from our society that they're insignificant and wrong." "For me, identifying as femme is about saying," ""No thank you, patriarchy." ""My strength comes from my femininity, and my femininity is not confined to just my body."" "So much of what Western culture is obsessed with is the body." "We live in a culture that's routinely fat-shaming people, policing people's skin tones, holding up certain bodies to be more desirable than other bodies." "Why are we so fixated on people's physicality?" "We literally have a women's movement today that says being a woman means having a vagina." "That's the most misogynist equation" "I've ever heard in my entire life." "Patriarchal society has taught us that women are just vaginas, that women are just mothers, that women are just reproductive agents." "Feminism should be about complicating that narrative." "Constantly, people will tell me," ""You're just a man because of how you look,"" "and I have to step back and be like," ""Let's check a lot of those assumptions you're making there." ""One, you're assuming that just because a doctor" ""told my mother when I was born" ""that I was a boy that that should be my fate for the rest of my life."" "I'm fighting for a world where people can actually have the self-determination to choose who they are." "There's no one way to look like a woman, there's no one way to look like a man or a femme." "There's just a way to look like yourself." "I think that there have always been people like me." "Learning that is so important." "In India, there's a long ancestral tradition of gender nonconformity." "We have gods who changed genders, and in large parts of South Asia, you can be represented as the third gender on your identity document." "When the British colonized us, they created the first types of colonial legislation which defined trans people as "eunuchs,"" "a.k.a. defined trans people as men without penises." "and it became a fixation on our genitalia." "They criminalized us and taught our own people to hate us even though for thousands of years, my cultures had found ways to understand gender as a relationship with our land, our relationship with our families, our relationship to caretaking." "All of those infinite ways of understanding gender were lost and made into genitalia." "And that has everything do with the history of colonialism." "Liberation looks like every single person being able to self-determine their identity without fear of persecution or violence." "I shouldn't have to modify my body in order to be safe and I should not be victim-blamed for being who I am." "I should be able to wear a skirt, a dress, a beard, interchangeably all the above, with no fear." "I grew up in a world that taught me that" "I should be confined by my body, but I refuse to accept that." "And that is a lesson that I think everyone could learn from." "You are so much more tremendous and incredible than something so simple as what you look like." "I've always known that I wanted to be a performer." "In the black church, there was this whole thing about being made over, about being sort of, you know, transformed by the spirit or something." "And I think that very early on," "I wanted to be sort of transformed by art and by television and by the theater." "As a kid in Mobile, Alabama, my environment was not necessarily the most affirming place, but in my imagination," "I could go anywhere, and my imagination saved me." "The first time I saw Leontyne Price was when I was five or six years old." ""Evening at Pops," Boston Pops, which they used to do on PBS." "And she was this regal black woman with big, full lips like me, and high cheekbones, and she had so much dignity." "And she was singing "Un bel di vedremo"" "from "Madama Butterfly," and it was sort of just this big, huge, rich, smoky voice coming from this elegant woman." "And it was just-- I was like," ""I wanna be like that."" "I started begging my mother to put me into dance classes when I was five, and I danced around everywhere." "There was a lot of gender policing from people at church and my teachers, particularly in elementary school." "A teacher would say, "You need to take" ""that child out of those dance classes." ""Those dance classes are making them gay, or gonna make-- turn them gay,"" "and, "You're acting like a girl."" "My mom said, "No, no, no." "I will let my child do what they want to do."" "I had a dance scholarship to Indiana University and then to Marymount." "I got to travel all over the country 'cause of art." "Art has consistently been this thing that has saved my life, and it sort of rescued me from darkness." "As a black trans woman, it is difficult to get a job." "I mean, like three years ago, I was barely paying my rent." "Like I was literally in housing court, you know, trying to avoid eviction." "Working at Lucky Cheng's, a restaurant that dubbed itself the "drag queen capital of the world,"" "as a trans woman was deeply challenging." "The clientele at Lucky Cheng's came for a spectacle, came for the spectacle of what they perceived to be men in dresses." "My identity as a trans woman is not a joke." "However, I'm a performer and I'm an actress, and I was there doing a job." "I am not sure I would have had a job if it were not for Lucky Cheng's." "The trans women and the queens that I worked with are some of the best people that I've ever known." "I would not be here if it were not for that sisterhood." "For years, I would audition for agents and casting directors, and they would say, "You know, uh, maybe you should move to L.A." ""There's not really work for you trans people." ""There's stuff here and there." "I don't know what to do with you."" "And there was just, like, people telling me that I probably wouldn't be able to do this." "The morning I found out I was nominated for an Emmy," "I was in my tiny studio apartment in New York." "It was like a..." "It was incredible." "And I think it meant a lot to a lot of trans people out there who thought that a trans person will never have this kind of moment." "I've always been in this place with my looks where it's not enough." "I'm tall, I have broad shoulders," "I have big hands, I have a deep voice, I have big feet." "I'm recognizably trans." "For many years, I would sort of like sort of cower and sort of try to make myself disappear so people wouldn't notice that." "I can't make myself disappear." "I'm a-- I'm a big presence, and so I had to start owning this trans thing." "This is it." "Yes, I'm trans." "It's wonderful, it's beautiful, I'm gonna own this." "I'm starting to believe in my own power." "My voice matters." "My truth matters." "We live in a world that tells so many people that they're not enough." "I'm here to tell you that you are." "You-- you're enough just as who you are." "♪ I've been set free ♪" "♪ And..." "I've been bound ♪" "♪ To the memories ♪" "♪ Of yesterday's clouds ♪" "♪ I've been set free ♪" "♪ And..." "I've been bound ♪" "♪ And now ♪" "♪ I'm set free ♪" "♪ I'm set free ♪" "♪ I'm set free to find ♪" "♪ A new illusion ♪" "♪ I've been blinded ♪" "♪ But... now I can see ♪" "♪ What in the world ♪" "♪ Has happened to me ♪" "♪ The prince of stories ♪" "♪ Who walks right by me ♪" "♪ And now ♪" "♪ I'm set free ♪" "♪ I'm set free ♪" "♪ I'm set free to find ♪" "♪ A new illusion ♪" "♪ ♪"