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 want to create a place where trans people and our allies could come together to share experiences, information and ideas. Being transgender or loving someone who is transgender can be challenging in our society and I hope that members of this site will also use this space as a place to support and encourage each other. Together, we can strengthen our community and open the hearts and minds of others.

Deep down, my mom had long suspected I was gay... Much of her anger and hurt came from her sense of betrayal that she was the last to be told.

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.

So when I was about 13 or 14, I realized I was attracted to women and then made the assumption that I was a lesbian, and didn't realize that that wasn't the case. It was the fact that I was a man and a heterosexual man. The issue wasn't my sexual orientation, but rather my gender identity.

I came out around 25 publicly.