I'm the youngest of four siblings and the baby of the family. My family just treated me like anyone else growing up. They taught me that everyone has a special and unique trait about them, and that mine is that I have a girl brain and a boy body.

I've always known exactly who I am, but growing up has always been a struggle. I've even been called an 'it.'

I wish everything was gender neutral. I wish we weren't separated by boundaries like pink and blue and little things like that. I wish we could choose how we express ourselves without hate.

Being transgender isn't a medical transition. It's a process of learning to love yourself for who you are.

I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy - you name it - and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?

My childhood dream was to study mechanical engineering. After reading 'The Mysterious Island' - which I read 25 times as a boy - I thought that was the best thing a person could do. The engineer in the book knows mechanics and physics, and he creates a whole way of life on the island out of nothing. I wanted to be like that.

There's a fundamental question that everyone has to answer: What fraction of your life do you spend in service to your fellow man? It's not something that science helps you answer at all. It's one of these questions like, Who are you gong to marry? Science doesn't really help you with the question.

Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce.