Human beings start putting each other into boxesthe second that they see each other --Is that person dangerous? Are they attractive?Are they a potential mate? Are they a potential networking opportunity?We do this little interrogation when we meet peopleto make a mental resume for them.What's your name? Where are you from?How old are you? What do you do?


Then we get more personal with it.Have you ever had any diseases?Have you ever been divorced?Does your breath smell bad while you're answering my interrogation right now?What are you into? Who are you into?What gender do you like to sleep with?I get it.We are neurologically hardwiredto seek out people like ourselves.

We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enoughto know what acceptance feels like.We bond together based on anything that we can --music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on.We seek out environments that reinforce our personal choices.

Sometimes, though, just the question "what do you do?"can feel like somebody's opening a tiny little boxand asking you to squeeze yourself inside of it.Because the categories, I've found, are too limiting.The boxes are too narrow.And this can get really dangerous.So here's a disclaimer about me, though,before we get too deep into this.I grew up in a very sheltered environment.I was raised in downtown Manhattan in the early 1980s,two blocks from the epicenter of punk music.

I was shielded from the pains of bigotryand the social restrictions of a religiously-based upbringing.Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinkeror a performance artist of some kind,you were the weirdo.It was an unorthodox upbringing,but as a kid on the streets of New York,you learn how to trust your own instincts,you learn how to go with your own ideas.

So when I was six, I decided that I wanted to be a boy.I went to school one day and the kids wouldn't let me play basketball with them.They said they wouldn't let girls play.So I went home, and I shaved my head,and I came back the next day and I said, "I'm a boy."I mean, who knows, right?When you're six, maybe you can do that.I didn't want anyone to know that I was a girl, and they didn't.
I kept up the charade for eight years.

So this is me when I was 11.I was playing a kid named Walterin a movie called "Julian Po."I was a little street tough that followed Christian Slater around and badgered him.See, I was also a child actor,which doubled up the layers of the performance of my identity,because no one knew that I was actually a girl really playing a boy.
In fact, no one in my life knew that I was a girl --not my teachers at school, not my friends,not the directors that I worked with.Kids would often come up to me in classand grab me by the throat to check for an Adam's appleor grab my crotch to check what I was working with.When I would go to the bathroom, I would turn my shoes around in the stallsso that it looked like I was peeing standing up.At sleepovers I would have panic attackstrying to break it to girls that they didn't want to kiss mewithout outing myself.