There are just too many opportunities - and an increasing number of them - to hide systemic, institutional wrongdoing behind legal veils, legal theories, and arbitrary exemptions. I hope that we can start to chip away at this, but it sure looks like society is still sliding in the opposite direction.

There is far more to transitioning in the public eye than money, public relations, and logistics.

There is an awful lot of work to do to protect trans folks. We are still disproportionally poor and administratively and institutionally discriminated against at all levels of society.

As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan.

The most important people for me, at least in the last couple of years since I came out, are my supersecret trans friends and confidantes. I think I need to come up with a code name for this circle.

I want people to see the truth.

I lived a few miles outside of a tiny town in central Oklahoma. I would often run amok though the fields of wheat, the patches of trees, along the railroad tracks, and on red dirt roads. This had a profound effect on my view of the world - vast, open-ended, full of opportunity, and ready for exploration.