Being gay is immutable. Maybe someday we'll figure out more of the science and it will be changeable, but we have no leads so far.

In these xenophobic times, when politicians are stoking everyone's anxiety about threats from abroad, I would argue that engaging with the rest of the world is not only a luxury, in the way that travel is, but actually a moral responsibility.

I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.

I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.

People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.

When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people; there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them.

Despair is part of love.