Gay ted talks

12 LGBTQI TED Talks that will fill you with Pride

These 12 TED talks celebrate the brave, the curious, the adventurous, the change makers, the everyday lives and the stories of LGBTI people all over the globe.

Here, Tom/Crystal talks about how to leave it behind. Since his diagnosis in 2009, Tan has chosen to live a life of purpose, sharing his message of self-acceptance and powerful life lessons with the world. I TED

In a moving, heartfelt and at times downright funny talk, writer Andrew Solomon gives a powerful call to action to forge meaning from our biggest struggles.

Who are you into?

What gender do you like to sleep with?

We are neurologically hardwired

to seek out people like ourselves.

We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enough

to 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 box

and 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 bigotry

and the social restrictions of a religiously-based upbringing.

Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinker

or a performance artist of some kind,

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 Walter

in 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 class

and grab me by the throat to check for an Adam's apple

or 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 stalls

so that it looked like I was peeing standing up.

At sleepovers I would have panic attacks

trying to break it to girls that they didn't want to kiss me

It's worth mentioning though

that I didn't hate my body or my genitalia.

I didn't feel like I was in the wrong body.

I felt like I was performing this elaborate act.

I wouldn't have qualified as transgender.

If my family, though, had been the kind of people to believe in therapy,

they probably would have diagnosed me

as something like gender dysmorphic

and put me on hormones to stave off puberty.

But in my particular case,

I just woke up one day when I was 14,

and I decided that I wanted to be a girl again.

Puberty had hit, and I had no idea what being a girl meant,

and I was ready to figure out who I actually was.

When a kid behaves like I did,

they don't exactly have to come out, right?

No one is exactly shocked.

But I wasn't asked to define myself by my parents.

When I was 15, and I called my father

to tell him that I had fallen in love,

it was the last thing on either of our minds

to discuss what the consequences were

of the fact that my first love was a girl.

Three years later, when I fell in love with a man,

neither of my parents batted an eyelash either.

See, it's one of the great blessings of my very unorthodox childhood

that I wasn't ever asked to define myself

as any one thing at any point.

I was just allowed to be me, growing and changing in every moment.

So four, almost five years ago,

Proposition 8, the great marriage equality debate,

was raising a lot of dust around this country.

And at the time, getting married wasn't really something

I spent a lot of time thinking about.

But I was struck by the fact that America,

a country with such a tarnished civil rights record,

could be repeating its mistakes so blatantly.

And I remember watching the discussion on television

and thinking how interesting it was

that the separation of church and state

was essentially drawing geographical boundaries throughout this country,

between places where people believed in it

and places where people didn't.

And then, that this discussion was drawing geographical boundaries around me.

If this was a war with two disparate sides,

I, by default, fell on team gay,

because I certainly wasn't 100 percent straight.

At the time I was just beginning to emerge

from this eight-year personal identity crisis zigzag

that saw me go from being a boy

to being this awkward girl that looked like a boy in girl's clothes

to the opposite extreme of this super skimpy,

over-compensating, boy-chasing girly-girl

to finally just a hesitant exploration of what I actually was,

who liked both boys and girls depending on the person.

I had spent a year photographing this new generation of girls, much like myself,

who fell kind of between-the-lines --

girls who skateboarded but did it in lacy underwear,

girls who had boys' haircuts but wore girly nail polish,

girls who had eyeshadow to match their scraped knees,

girls who liked girls and boys who all liked boys and girls

who all hated being boxed in to anything.

I loved these people, and I admired their freedom,

but I watched as the world outside of our utopian bubble

exploded into these raging debates

where pundits started likening our love to bestiality on national television.

And this powerful awareness rolled in over me

that I was a minority, and in my own home country,

based on one facet of my character.

I was legally and indisputably a second-class citizen.

I wave no flags in my own life.

But I was plagued by this question:

How could anyone vote to strip the rights

of the vast variety of people that I knew

based on one element of their character?

How could they say that we as a group

were not deserving of equal rights as somebody else?

Were we even a group?