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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.
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.
The amount of attention and sensitivity and education that we're getting in terms of specifically the transgender community is great, and certainly that's new to me. But it's not incredibly unfamiliar. I grew up in downtown New York in the '80s.
On 'Glee,' we often tackle the tough topics that young people face - in fact, my recurring character, Wade 'Unique' Adams, is a transgender teenager who finds herself navigating a lot of the same problems many young people face around the globe.
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.
The Trevor Project provides crisis-intervention and suicide-prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning teens and young adults. It's truly a lifeline to so many young people who just need someone to listen to them.
Also, I had read a book called She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, written by a professor who had gone through transgender surgery, but it took this person well into his thirties to come to terms with the absolute necessity of having to do it.
I, Mayor Ford... encourage the people of Toronto to send a strong message to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two-spirited and transsexual community, like all the communities, are welcomed, safe and valued in this great city we call Toronto.
We didn't have anyone to tell us that what was going on with me was alright. There was no information about transgender people when we started our journey, but we managed to make it through because of the tremendous amount of love that our family had.
I am very proud of the role I played in getting legal equality for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and in helping get rid of the prejudice by being visible about it, helping to block the conviction of Bill Clinton of impeachment.
For me, I know I am a trans activist and I try my best to stand up when the time is right, but at the same time, I don't always want to be considered transgender around my friends and people at my daughter's school. I just want to be considered a woman.
When I walk down the street in a dress, people think I'm transgender. The issue isn't that I'm embarrassed to be thought of as transgender: the issue is that people treat transgender individuals so violently, especially if they think it's male to female.
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.
With the removal of questions about gayness and transgender status in the Census, we really stand to lose a lot of the progress that has been made, and certainly not to make further progress. In order to have a fair system, you need a system you can measure.
As time goes by, we're getting more accepting of the differences between one another - whether it's gay or transgender, whether it's black or white - but there's still a lot of people in the world who don't feel that they can express themselves as they want.
I came out publicly as transgender and began hormone replacement therapy while in prison. When I was released, however, there was no quantifiable history of me existing as a transwoman. Credit and background checks automatically assumed I was committing fraud.
I remember, as a child, lying in my bed at night praying that I would wake up the next day and be a girl, to be my authentic self, and to just have my family be proud of me. I remember looking into the mirror struggling to say just two words, 'I'm transgender.'
You look at the Americans. They don't lack fervour in moral causes. They promote democracy, freedom of speech, women's rights, gay rights, sometimes even transgender rights. But you don't see them applying that universally across the world with all their allies.
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.
I want to make sure that people understand that, behind this national conversation around transgender rights, there are real people who hurt when they're mocked, who hurt when they're discriminated against, and who just want to be treated with dignity and respect.
Being transgender, like being gay, tall, short, white, black, male, or female, is another part of the human condition that makes each individual unique, and something over which we have no control. We are who we are in the deepest recesses of our minds, hearts and identities.
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.
Let's be under no illusions: There are attacks on, for example, transgender Americans from the Oval Office, picking on troops - people willing to lay down their lives for this country - not to mention teenagers in our high schools. So we've got to end the war on trans Americans.
The attack on the transgender troops - disgusting, disgraceful, outrageous. It's just endless. And then you try to do your day job of finding good bipartisan work across the aisle... You're doing both all the time. I guess I would describe it as intense. Everything is very intense.
I definitely feel that society sets expectations for transgender people to fit in and makes us feel as if we have to dress a certain way so that we blend in with everyone else. But I believe all transgender individuals should be able to wear whatever they want and not worry about fitting in.
I kind of cheer the presence of any gay characters at all - I think the more we can saturate television with any gay character or lesbian character or transgender character, I think that's a really great thing. We're kind of getting past the fact that they're the punchline or that they're the novelty.
As I got older, I learned about how some people treated their transgender children, and I was shocked. I couldn't understand how someone would leave their child and throw them on the street. I was always taught you give your kid unconditional love and if you don't, something's wrong with you, for real.
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.
I feel, in the sense that if you're heterosexual, if you're bisexual, if you're gay, if you're a lesbian, if you're transgender, whatever the vibe is, that's what you represent. I've always found it quite strange that we always like to try and define people and say this is how it is, and this is how it should be.
I think this is the most exciting time to be alive right now. We have a black president. There are transgender movies and media out there now. Gay characters are playing non-stereotypical versions of themselves. I feel like as a society, or in television at least, we're rising up. Even in society we're rising up.
We have a lot of things, you know, as a medical professional, we have to start looking at, some of the, particularly, the transgender issue has to be looked at in the psychotic - the psychosis in regards to the medical community and looking at that application because there's a lot of mixed studies in those regards.
I think what you're seeing is a profound recognition on the part of the American people that gays and lesbians and transgender persons are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our cousins, our friends, our co-workers, and that they've got to be treated like every other American. And I think that principle will win out.
The issue of equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals has vexed politicians for decades. I have my own cloudy history with the issue, having supported a law in Mississippi that made it illegal for LGBT couples to adopt children. I believed at the time this was a principled position based on my faith.
Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Jeff Sessions are using their powers and offices to make life as difficult as possible for everyone from the transgender worker to the gay widower to the queer undocumented immigrant. These efforts are not about bathrooms or religious freedom; they're about driving LGBTQ people out of public life.
Usually, when you are an ethnic person or a trans person, in your average, everyday, unsophisticated television show, you are there for that reason. And they clearly justify and overexplain why. You very rarely see a transgender actor playing the part of a grocery-store clerk without having to say, 'Oh, look at that trans person.'
The first time I heard the word 'transgender' had been in a sitcom episode that mocked the potential for cisgender people to find people like me attractive. Every time someone expressed any interest in the gorgeous trans guest character - her identity still a secret to most of the main characters in the show - the laugh track would cue.
When gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals come out, their friends and families, for the most part, understand what it feels like to love and to lust. Cisgender people have more of a challenge when it comes to transgender identities. I discovered that analogy of homesickness in conversations with my parents, in trying to bridge that empathy divide.
One of the biggest things going on in London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, and New York right now is gentrification. Every major city is dealing with gentrification, and it's always the sex workers they come for first. Cities feel they have to clean up their image and make themselves more attractive for tourism, more attractive to businesses. The Gezi Park struggle in Turkey a few years ago, for example, was a popular movement defending public space and land. What I found when I was digging into the goings on there was that the park was a place where transgender sex workers felt safe.