As an activist who uses storytelling to combat stigma, I have always been adamant that we tell our own stories.
I knew very early on that I was not pretty. No one ever called me pretty. It was not the go-to adjective people used to describe me.
I get invited to a lot of college campuses, and administrators think it's going to be a lecture on 'trans-ness' or whatever. But when young people get there, their questions are about just life.
For many, hair is just hair. It's something you grow, shape, adapt, adorn, and cut. But my hair has always been so much more than what's on my head. It's a marker of how free I felt in my body, how comfortable I was with myself, and how much agency I had to control my body and express myself with it.
We are all inundated with images that present a limited scope of what is considered beautiful. For American women, the closer she is to whiteness/paleness, cisness, thinness, and femininity, the more she is considered beautiful.
Like many teens, I struggled with my body and looks, but my despair was amplified by the expectations of cisnormativity and the gender binary as well as the impossibly high beauty standards that I, and my female peers, measured myself against.
Femininity in general is seen as frivolous. People often say feminine people are doing 'the most,' meaning that to don a dress, heels, lipstick and big hair is artifice, fake, and a distraction. But I knew even as a teenager that my femininity was more than just adornments: they were extensions of me, enabling me to express myself and my identity.
We must have the audacity to turn up the frequency of our truths.
Movies have always been spaces of refuge for me. For a few harmonious hours, I could escape my reality of being a girl living on the margins.
It's great to engage with the mainstream media to get messages out, but the most empowering tool is to create records of our lives, and our own images, which are not filtered through judgements, biases, or misunderstandings.
My personal style really started in my teens when I gained purchasing power to actually buy my own damn clothes. For so long, my parents dictated what I wore, which largely was their way of containing me within the gender binary.
Being trans, I've grown up with the understanding that most women are born girls, yet some are born boys. And most men are born boys, yet some are born girls. And if you're ready for this, some people are born girls or boys and choose to identify outside our society's binary system, making them genderqueer.
The transgender community has always been a part of Hawaiian society, where people who don't conform to the binary system of man/woman, masculine/feminine are accepted or, at minimum, tolerated.
One musical that deeply influenced me - and continues to do so - is the 1997 ABC TV movie of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'Cinderella,' starring Brandy, with Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother and Whoopi Goldberg as the prince's mom.
I came out, as not enough of our stories are told from our perspective. 'Marie Claire' was offering the chance to be a part of a women's magazine, which often celebrates ordinary women doing extraordinary things.
I learned to hide aspects of my personality. Playing with girls was fine, for example, but playing with their Barbies was something I could do only behind closed doors.
The Internet has introduced me to some of my closest friends.
When I was a toddler, my father cut hair in the townhouse we had shared together in Long Beach, California, where Dad was stationed with the U.S. Navy. The buzz of clippers consistently hummed as he gave fades to his coworkers, my uncles, and my brother, but his clippers were never oiled and plugged in for my head.
Stern and critical, my father couldn't accept how feminine and dainty I was in comparison to my rough-and-tumble brother.
When I was younger, I wish I would have been told more often that I was right and nothing was wrong with me, that I was deserving of everything this world has to offer, and that my visions for my future were worthy of pursuit.
