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.

Sex work may be an illegal thing, but it's far from being a bad thing. Quite a few of us on the male-to-female side of the coin have done sex work. I've done it myself for a couple of years. It's a place we can make a living and have some fun doing it. It's a place we seem to fit in.

Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I'd learned to rise to it.

Just across the ocean in, say Kenya or Tanzania, a two-gender system is vital for the survival of most of the folks who live there. Men do men's work, women do women's work, and so it all gets done and the jackals can't get into the hut and eat grandpa. So, the future of the transgender movement is like the future of all human rights movements: whatever the state of things in your area now, with some work it all gets a little bit better all the time, even if it is sometimes three steps ahead and two steps back.

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

There's a simple way to look at gender: Once upon a time, someone drew a line in the sans of culture and proclaimed with great self-importance, 'On this site, you are a man; on the other side, you are a woman.' It's time for the winds of change to blow that line away. Simple.

The current transgender movement is composed of a great number of factions, divided by those old favorites of class, race, age, language, region, and nationality.