First Hand History

"I will always remember what I was doing that night."

""In my experience in life, usually the people that are very scared are actually very interested in it and they don’t want people to know that they like that, or, they are also going a through a “Am I having these feelings?” and “Can I accept myself with these feelings?”"

"At this point in my life, I refuse to apologize for who I am."

"I think the in many ways it helped me grow stronger too because it made me realize what’s really important about me and it’s not winning the approval of everyone around me."

"Life goes on and that’s what happens and you just live with it."

"Transgender people are more likely to face discrimination from doctors Sometimes it's deliberate because there are people that are not very nice out there and some of them are even doctors and they still might not be very nice but sometimes it's just because it's a doctor who's older, and just doesn't have this understanding and so they accidentally make mistakes"

"...one of the things I like the most about being LGBT is the sense of community and the connection to my subculture and to be politically engaged..."

"What do I think of people that have lived happy, successful lives, and they are learning how to deal with all of it? I think I have the utmost respect for them. Those will be the people that change the world."

"To understand how much God loves me and to say that even that person that’s different from me, that I don’t understand, who’s life is very different from mine, God loves them every bit as much as God loves me"

"All social change comes from people who either have a change of heart or feel more comfortable talking about their actual beliefs."

"When they attack Muslims they attack the LGBT community, because there are LGBT Muslims. When they attack women they attack the LGBT community because there are women in the LGBT community. When they attack immigrants they attack the LGBT community because there are LGBT immigrants."

"You can be unapologetically yourself, but you can be unapologetically yourself safely, too."

"The myth that this is for the safety of non trans identified students, is exactly that. It’s a myth. There’s no danger there for them. So with President Trump’s removal of that executive order, he doesn’t do anything to make other students safe and he endangers gender diverse students."

"When you're told that you're not okay, that who you fundamentally are is not acceptable, it's easy to see the need to leave the planet."

"Very healthy young men were coming down with an illness and then dying within months..."

""It just comes from a place of misunderstanding.""

"The idea was educate people about the legislature that we really didn’t want in place, and just had to explain that it’s not about social rights, it’s actually about taking away people’s rights, and keeping people from having equal rights."

"We are still at the point where there is not a lot of representation for women in government and political leadership, so once we kinda get that it might get better."

"Could you imagine to have your partner in the hospital, dying of cancer or something like that, and for the nurse and doctor to say, 'Well you're not a relative, you can't come in to see your partner'?"