Growing up in a working class community just north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I, like many other gay men and lesbians, knew at a very early age that I was “different” in some way that I could not quite put my finger on. It wasn’t until about 6th grade that I began connecting the dots. Sound familiar?

I won’t lie and say that those first few early years of trying to wrap my head around what being gay meant were easy. At that age, you really do just want to fit in. It isn’t until college that marching to the beat of a different drummer really is considered cool (maybe by then people just don’t care). Nevertheless, there was no changing who I was, and even during those first confusing years, I really didn’t want to.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a household with parents and a sister who I knew would always be there for me no matter what. I can’t really say enough about how just knowing that can put you at ease. Being raised by two people who care passionately about issues of social justice and civil rights also helped.

When I did eventually come out and tell my family what was by then a long accepted part of my own identity, they were indeed there for me (as I always knew they would be in the back of my mind). Today, my dad keeps me in the loop about the latest goings on about gay rights issues back home in Pennsylvania. I’m sure pride parades can’t be too far off!

I know this is not the reality that many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are lucky enough to experience growing up. There are some people who feel it best to keep that part of themselves permanently tucked away out of fear of the reactions from those closest to them.

As someone who works for the ACLU, I should probably spend this time urging you to join the efforts to secure full marriage equality for the many committed and loving couples who currently lack the protections others take for granted or encourage you to contact your members of Congress about FINALLY passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. For the record, I do encourage you to do those things. But there is something much simpler that can be done by each and every one of us that does not require legislative action or groundbreaking court decisions – simply work to create a society where lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people can live their lives in the open and with the support and love of those closest to them.

We’ve made really fantastic progress in the four decades since the Stonewall Riots, and it would not have been possible without the many untold numbers of LGBT people stepping forth and saying “This is who I am.”

It really is amazing how simply being a supportive father, sister, aunt, grandmother, friend, roommate, co-worker, etc. can matter. It made all the difference for me.

At first glance I’m pretty unremarkable. I’m a middle-aged woman, and a single parent to a 22-year-old son. I was divorced after a marriage of almost 20 years. I have a successful career as an IT consultant for Fortune 500 companies. I havetwo dogs, I rent a home, I enjoy photography and music, and I live paycheck to paycheck just like millions of other Americans.

The thing that makes me unique is that I’m transsexual. More specifically, I’m a transsexual woman. My path to womanhood was admittedly “untraditional” and arguably a bit more difficult than most, but somehow that seems to make it all the more valuable to me. That single fact about me doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone else. It doesn’t make me more or less worthy of basic human rights. It doesn’t define me. Unfortunately, there is a world of people that choose to disagree.

Some labels become defining labels in that they trump all the others. Somehow, the moment that others learn about my unique pedigree all those other important facts about me and my life seem to get called into question, or forgotten altogether. Even more disturbing, however, is the fact that to acknowledge that single fact about myself is to forfeit basic human rights that most take for granted in this country. Suddenly, I can be fired from my job for no reason related to job performance. I can be denied housing, and health insurance. I can become the target of harassment or violence at the hands of those who choose to hate and may very well get away with it. How can that possibly happen in this day and age? Simple. Prejudice, Ignorance, Discrimination — all are alive and well in the 21st century and those who challenge gender norms often pay a horrific price because of it.

I, like many transgender people, simply want to livemy life and to be left alone. I consider my transgender journey to be a pursuit of self-fulfillment and happiness more than a journey specifically about gender. In that context, it’s a much more universally human journey than many seem to want to acknowledge in that my gender is simply the pathway, not the destination itself. Still, I refuse to live my life trapped by fear of discovery or satisfied with the table scraps that others would force me and people like me to accept. I refuse to reduce the scope of my life to fit the comfort levels of others, or to accept that other people’s fears somehow require me to expect less out of my own life.

How does all of this happen? It starts the minute you’re born. I doubt that many people stop to consider that the single-most defining moment of their lives happens just a few minutes after birth. After a simple visual inspection of a newborn’s genitals the doctor will make a seemingly obvious pronouncement that this child is a boy baby or a girl baby. At that moment, the child unknowingly inherits a suffocating burden comprised of all expectations, roles, and obligations associated with their assigned gender. Any number of life paths open up to the child. Any number of opportunities become available. Any number realities become possible. Sadly, at the same time, any number of other doors close, and other life paths become unavailable.

To be transgender is to reclaim gender-based rights and opportunities forfeited at birth. It is to acknowledge that our human conditions don’t always lend themselves to a rigid binary, and to question things that few rarely question. The fact that the answers to our questioning may lead us to unconventional territory doesn’t make them any less valid. It simply makes them more difficult to accept. None of us chose to be the way we are. All any of us can choose is what we do about it.

It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this that our culture is uncomfortable with anything that is perceived to challenge even the simplest of sexuality or gender norms. Society is not kind to those who cannot or will not fit into the neat, little binary boxes of “man” and “woman” that it has defined. In an effort to restore its comfort level it severely punishes those that it identifies as gender transgressors. The GLBT community bears the brunt of these harsh, sometimes fatal, realities.

Over the course of the last decade society has become more comfortable and accepting of GLB lives. They are featured in mainstream television. They have become part of the fabric of our society. They have slowly come out of the shadows to demand recognition. It has been a difficult journey, but as with any marginalized group the march towardsEquality and respect is one where rights are demanded and taken, not given freely. Unfortunately, transgender and gender variant people are not as far along in that journey and are only now finding their voices and are demanding to be heard.

Many transgender people continue to live in the darkest corners of the closet where stigmas of mental illness, moral corruption, weakness of character, and other destructive shackles are sometimes impossible to escape. Part of our journey is the realization that none of these things is inherent in being transgender and, in fact, that ours is a journey more characterized by courage, dedication, and authenticity than by pathology. Many of us have been working to correct outdated stereotypes about who and what we are, but progress is admittedly slow.

For marginalized communities, the concept of Entitlement as it relates to rights is critically important. The belief that you as an individual, or as a member of a marginalized group, are worthy of receiving basic human rights is a critical component of actually demanding to receive them, or more importantly, of standing up to take them. The process of moving out of the shadow of shame into the light of promise is far more difficult than it sounds, but it is one that is characterized by gradual recognition that you actually deserve the same rights as everyone else. In a word, you deserve Equality.

The transgender community is a cross-section of society itself. We are not sad, sorry, pathetic, confused people looking for pity or scorn. We are not ashamed of the fact that we’re different and, in fact, are learning more and more to appreciate that in ourselves. We are learning that dignity and self-respect are not automatically forfeited by being transgender, and that nobody can take those things from us unless we give them away.

The transgender community is maturing at a rapid pace. It has demonstrated its resiliency and is demanding its rightful place at the table of Equality. The barriers of discomfort and ignorance still remain, but there are those of us who have dedicated our lives to lowering them. How? Through education. By humanizing ourselves. By telling our stories. By sharing our challenges. By rolling up our sleeves and doing the heavy lifting that cultural change requires. By making friends and allies who realize, as we do, that there is no such thing as levels of Equality. There is Equality, and there is something less.

Many of us face a daily assault of indignities on our personhood. We continue to face challenges in workplaces, schools, places of worship, and in broader society. We struggle with isolation as we lose friends and family who chose to distance themselves from us. We struggle with issues related to health care, personal documentation, support for our youth, and harassment and violence against us. The challenges we face by not necessarily fitting into a neat little box continue to make life far more difficult than it needs to be for many of us. That needs to change.

Pride month is a time to celebrate who and what we are. It is recognition of the broad tapestry of the human condition, and a time when difference is appreciated, not a source of shame. Many of us are participating in Pride for the first time, and I expect more and more of us will be joining in the coming years. And, when full equality for ALL our brothers and sisters becomes a reality, we will be there to share in the celebration. That will be a day many of us never imagined we’d see. That’s what makes it a day worth spending a lifetime to achieve.

Christopher Durang is an acclaimed playwright whose works, including Beyond Therapy and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, have been produced on and off-Broadway, around the country and abroad. In his contribution to the ACLU's online symposium in celebration of LGBT Pride, Christopher reflects on his experience coming out of the closet and how one can find acceptance in the most unexpected of places.

In April I was given an award at the William Inge Playwriting Festival in Independence, Kansas. And in my acceptance speech I had the “normal” opportunity to thank and acknowledge my partner of 22 years, John Augustine. And to feel the approval and acceptance of the large audience listening to my acknowledging our relationship.

Of course, I am in theatre, where people tend to be accepting, and which is one of the areas a bit ahead of the curve of general societal change.

Though really enormous change has happened.

And receiving this award, and feeling the affection for me and for my partner from the audience of theatre professionals, college students and local Independence residents (almost entirely straight), I was struck by the acceptance I was receiving in juxtaposition to what was experienced by the man in whose name this honor was given.

William Inge was a famous and successful playwright in the 1950s. His name was usually said in the same breath as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. (And as a child interested in theatre, I very much knew who he was.) His plays were successful hits, as well as critically praised. In a row he wrote Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic (winning the Pulitzer Prize), Bus Stop, and Dark at the Top of the Stairs. He also won an Oscar for his original screenplay for Splendor in the Grass. He was also gay, and closeted, certainly in his conservative home town of Independence, Kansas. He also committed suicide in 1973, at the age of 60.

At his death, he was feeling despondent about his writing, but listening to his biographer Ralph Voss discuss his life while I was at the Festival, it’s hard not to think that his conflicted feelings about being gay didn’t help his feelings of despair. He befriended Tennessee Williams early in both of their writing careers. But as Voss said, Inge did not seek out the relationships that Williams did, nor the “filling the loneliness” one night stands either. It sounds like society and his family’s and his town’s views on homosexuality were ingrained in him.

Of course, he was born in 1913. (Williams in 1911.) And I was born in 1949. Though in my teen years, gay stuff still seemed as condemned as it did in Inge’s youth. And when I was at college, no one was open about being gay, and “coming out” wasn’t even a phrase at the time.

And I remember seeing a psychologist my sophomore year in college because I had been depressed. (I didn’t know at the time, but I was depressed because I had looked at the way my family’s struggle with alcoholism stopped any problem from ever being solved. I started to view the world that way. Very overwhelming to move ahead when you feel every action is doomed.)

Anyway, I met this therapist my mother had heard of, and in my meeting with him, I acknowledged that I had just had my first full gay experience at college. And he said, “I’m not surprised,” meaning I think that he felt I seemed softer than Sugar Ray Robinson, and thus my being gay was a likely guess. Though he then went on to tell me that no homosexual could ever be happy. His name was “Mr. Stadech,” but “Stadech” was pronounced “static.” He indeed filled my head with a lot of static.

But I was so much luckier than the talented Mr. Inge. I eventually sought out another therapist back at Harvard where they offered free psychological counseling. (Which was offered if you passed the “are you troubled enough?” interview given by a social worker; which I did, lol. My social worker said “You’re depressed!” Which I hadn’t realized).

Anyway, I’m almost embarrassed to say that I went to the therapist with the desire to be straight, I said. I liked women as companions, and I thought I’d be doomed to unhappiness because I didn’t know any happy homosexuals, and the church, and society and Mr. Static said you were doomed to be unhappy and neurotic if you “gave in” to this.

Wow, I lucked out with the psychologist I found at Harvard. He was close to my age…he was in training, in his late 20s. He was married and straight. He dutifully counseled me on trying to be straight. But after I had had a couple of “slips,” and in the middle of a session where I was beating myself up over having a crush on this quiet young guy I was getting to know in the dining hall, he interrupted my anger at myself and said: “Well for whatever reason, you are blocked in your feelings for women. But isn’t it better that you have feelings for someone rather than no one?”

My harangue against myself stopped cold. I was struck with his logic, and also the very important logic that human connection, including sexuality, is of value, period. It’s better than being some shut down, bitter person sitting up in a tower, no? The fact it was a straight man saying this to me, in 1970, carried enormous weight. It seemed logical. And it was also kind and empathetic of him to be open to that reasoning.

(His comment in a way reminds me of the great Tennessee Williams saying in Night of the Iguana: “Nothing human disgusts me, Mr. Shannon, unless it’s unkind, violent.”)

In 1971 I went to Yale School of Drama. I never “came out,” but in the world of theatre at least if you didn’t date women, and tended to hang out with the same guy all the time, they just assumed you were gay. And theywere, frankly, accepting of it. Later I got better at just admitting it.

And so I didn’t shut myself off from relationships or sexuality. Life has its ups and downs. But at least I wasn’t solitary and isolated out of shame and “static.”

And I thought of this when I acknowledged my partner in front of a full theatre in the home town of William Inge, winning an honor named for him. He deserved to be happier than he was.

But thanks to everyone over the decades who has been honest and fought for acceptance, those of us who followed have been happier. And still more acceptance and right to happiness, and to love who we want — these will continue to follow.

Tedra Osell blogs at Bitch Ph.D., where she muses on feminism, motherhood, academia and more. In her contribution to the ACLU's online symposium in celebration of LGBT Pride, Tedra discusses how LGBT people and their relationships have strengthened her relationships, marriage and family.

I think I pretty much owe my straight-suburban-married-housewife-with-one kid-life to the gays.

Reason one: my husband and I met when I was 18. We went to different colleges. The only way I would agree to "date" him was if he would agree that we could date other people. The more so since he was uber Catholic (and you know what that means), and I was gonna be damned if I was gonna swear off sex for a long-distance relationship at the age of 18.

Not that non-exclusive l-d relationships are *entirely* the province of homos. But you have to admit that the idea of having a Serious Relationship with someone while being free to fuck around with other someone is a li'l more commonly associated with gay (men, especially) than it is with straight couples.

Reason two: when I graduated from college and moved in with my husband-to-be, he happened to be in Saudi Arabia fighting Gulf War I. His coworker who helped me move into his apartment? Gay. (Later he came out under "don't ask, don't tell," and lost his job, which sucked.)

Reason three: when we finally decided to get married (after years of back and forth asking-and-refusing, then the other person asking-and-being-refused), my agreement was conditional on the idea that, if either of us ever cheated, that would be a shitty reason to divorce. No way was I going to promise never to have sex with anyone else again. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my being able to contemplate this sort of thing had a lot to do with the way that some aspects of GLBT culture helped all of us start rethinking what consitituted committment, what constituted marriage, what relationships were based on. And, as ambivalent as I was about marriage—just before the ceremony, both of us dressed in our wedding finery, I asked my soon-to-be husband, "I can still back out of this, right?" He knew that the right answer was "yes"—I would never have gotten into it if I hadn't felt like the rules weren't negotiable.

Reason four: after four years of separation, during which he worked in Omaha and I attended graduate school in Seattle, he was transferred to the Pac NW. When he left the military and we started thinking about maybe sort of having kids, again I looked around at the new ways that people were having kids—we lived on Capitol Hill, Seattle's Big Gay neighborhood—before taking a deep breath and saying, okay, yes, maybe we can do this.

Reason five: the best pregnancy book I read was Dan Savage's The Kid. I'm totally not kidding about this (and once, when I saw him having dinner in my favorite restaurant, I went over and told him that myself, and thanked him). He did the research for me on drinking and pregnancy (yes, you can drink without dooming your baby to brain damage). Given that pregnancy books these days are all about What You Mustn't Do (seriously, have a look at What to Expect When You're Expecting someday. And then burn it.), that one thing was huge, and helped buttress my general feeling that I wasn't gonna worry too damn much about anything.

Reason six: The OB/GYN who I picked (after searching around for quite some time to find someone who wasn't into lecturing me)? And who delivered my child? Is now, according to Wikipedia, the "rock star" of transgender surgery. I found out towards the end of my pregnancy, in fact, that she was herself a MTF transsexual, but I had no idea that she'd made sexual reassignment surgery her primary work until last week. While visiting my boyfriend of three years (and yes, I'm still married) I happened across this article, in which she points out that

One thing that still burns brighter than any other issue within the GLB community is marriage equality. What is important is that the trans phenomenon undoes any and all objections to marriage equality, no matter how the issue is argued.

What I know is that, before I found out that she'd had SRS, I'd noticed the pictures of her daughters on the wall of her office and complimented her on how much they resembled her (especially the youngest). And that when I found out my main thought was that she'd had an excellent surgeon. Now apparently she *is* an excellent surgeon.

Reason seven: when my husband and I moved to Canada to take my first teaching job, our best friends, with whom we swapped childcare once a week so that we and they could go out once in a while and try to stay sane? Were a lesbian couple. With two (now three) kids. Not only did they swap babysitting with us, but they parented like us, they were there for us, they were my best friends during what was (due to seasonal depression) the hardest, darkest time of my life. And, of course, they helped my son, by giving him other kids to play with, other adults who understood and accepted him.

They helped me explain to my son that some kids have one mama, some have two, some have a mama and a papa, etc. And that what matters is that every kid have a parent, or parents, who loves and takes care of them. On the night when they got pregnant with kid number three, we got a sudden call—can one of you come babysit immediately so that we can get pregnant? M's ovulating!—I got to explain to my son, who was four, Where Babies Come From, and artificial insemination, and sperm donors. In the course of the discussion, he pointed out that we use the words "parent," "mother," and "father" to mean both biological parents *and* the people who raise and take care of you. In short, he realized at four what I, at forty, still have trouble articulating: that the biology of reproduction is related to, but not the same as, the facts of human feeling.

My point? Is basically a simple one, so obvious that it shouldn't need saying. But since it does, here it is: gay relationships, gay marriages, the whole GLBT ball of wax have been nothing but good for this straight chick, her straight marriage, and her straight suburban family. The gays and trannies have helped me not be afraid of marriage or motherhood. They've helped me realize that I can have those things without losing myself. And they've been there at every goddamn step of the way, helping and supporting my straight marriage, my straight pregnancy, my straight mamahood.

Surely we straights can be as decent.