I don’t want to be too personal here, but can you talk about your own experience a little bit or —— Yeah, no, no. Maybe that’ll help make it more concrete. My experience is that I had no idea what it meant to be transgender growing up. My first encounter with a transgender person was “Boys Don’t Cry,” the film about Brandon Teena, who was murdered —— Hilary Swank —— with Hilary Swank playing Brandon Teena, and that however —— How old were you? How old were you? Oh, gosh. I was born in 1982, so this is around 17 Yeah and my experience growing up is one of alienation, self-alienation from my body. But I did not have words for it. I didn’t have language for it. And in my recollection of my childhood, I do not recall ever thinking, “Oh, I am not a girl.” I just knew I was unhappy, I was in therapy, I did all of the things that you’re supposed to do and had parents who loved me and tried to support me. And throughout this time, I should say, there’s no real access to the internet, there’s no social media. And I am —— So you are as a teenager —— Yeah, OK, so just gender-nonconforming teenager and young adult who then comes out as gay and is — and still just feels this sense that it’s not a “Oh, I’m uncomfortable with my body as such, but my body is the wrong right body for me.” But I don’t have the language for it. I think that ultimately what ends up happening is I have a realization through lots of therapy that there is something called transgender that fits my experience, and that I start to then think about how to align my body with my sense of myself as male. And my experience is not representative of a lot of people, I’ll say, because I do, as maybe is noticeable, I don’t identify, I don’t express myself in a very masculine fashion. I try in little ways, but I recognize that I’m going to have an androgynous appearance, that is part of how I see myself. But then I did spend time in my early 20s having access to surgery, taking hormones, and starting to feel like everything in my life that I had tried to hide away, that I had tried to get rid of, what made sense. And I was able, I was able to go to law school. I was able to become a lawyer that went into court, things that seemed absolutely unimaginable to me before. And recently, when my mother was selling the house that I grew up in, and I went back and was packing things up, I found some old journals, and every single one of those journals had these just painful memories, that I just kept saying, “I don’t understand why I’m not a girl. I don’t understand why I’m not a girl” and I can’t explain it in words, these visceral, core feelings, just like many things that people don’t understand until they feel them inherent to who we are. Can you just say something about just on the point about medical interventions, how you felt the connection between that sense of psychological change and acceptance and making hormonal and biological changes to your body. Yeah, I mean, and again, I’m saying this from my experience, everyone, everyone is different. And I can — the best I can say is it felt like coming home. It felt like resolving a longstanding period of homesickness and then finally getting into your own bed. And that enabled me to feel like there was a place for me in the world that I didn’t feel before. And so that experience then allows me to go to law school, have a family, become a father, do all of these things that I think I always wanted. But if you’re alienated from yourself, it’s a lot harder. And I’ve seen that story with many people in my life. And then I’ve heard it from my clients about their kids. And I understand why people feel nervous when it comes to kids. I have a kid. I get very anxious about bringing my kid to the doctor and not understanding what information I’m getting back. And I also think that we as parents do a lot of work to help our children grow and thrive. And I think my clients who made these decisions for their children also did that.
