I was a lonely, frightened little fat kid who felt there was something deeply wrong with me because I didn't feel like I was the gender I'd been assigned. I felt there was something wrong with me, something sick and twisted inside me, something very very bad about me. And everything I read backed that up.

When you're a Scientologist it's like the movie Goodfellas, where the gangsters hang out with only other gangsters. We only hung out with each other, so we knew we were saving the world.

This Western culture of ours tends to sacrifice the full range of experience to a lower common denominator that's acceptable to more people; we end up with McDonald's instead of real food, Holiday Inns instead of homes, and USA Today instead of news and cultural analysis. And we do that with the rest of our lives.

It's easy to fictionalize an issue when you're not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.

I was obsessed, and like most obsessed people, I was the last one to know it.

Look, nearly everything in the culture says we're freaks. Doing sex work, we're desired; we can get rewarded for being what we've always wanted to be. What's so bad about that? My own notion is I wish sex work would be decriminalized (not legalized, please note the distinction) so that more trannies could get into the field if they wanted to and not get into trouble for it.

What is a man? What is a woman? And why do we have to be one or the other?