When Neo Sandja left his friends at an Atlanta bar one night in 2010, he believed he was saying goodbye to them for good. He had made up his mind to take his own life.

“I didn’t know how I was going to do it,” he says, “but I knew I wasn’t going home.”

The week before, Sandja, 30, had been stressed over how to tell his father back home in the Congo that he was transgender. He couldn’t eat or sleep, and in the lead-up to writing the coming-out email, he became almost delusional. He was depressed and knew that his father, who was supporting him financially, would not take the news well. He was right: When he broke the news, his father would hear nothing of it.

“‘You’re going to butcher your body,’” Sandja remembers him writing in an email. “‘If you decide to do this, you will be dead to me. If people ask me about you, I will tell them you’re dead.’”

Sandja's eyes were blurry from a long night of drinking. Walking on the side of the road in the pitch black, he saw a car speeding toward him. This was his chance, he thought. For him, nothing he did could change his father’s feelings toward him — and he didn’t want to live in a world in which his father didn’t accept him.

He jumped in front of the car. It was a split second, he says, that lasted forever. The car screeched. “I thought for a second that I was probably dead,” Sandja says.

Instead, the car stopped about an inch short of hitting him. He remembers the people and the lights around him at the time, but everything was mute. Days before the second FTM Fitness Conference, Sandja remains in disbelief over that night.

“The car was literally right there,” he says. “I got scared for a second because it was a police car. I thought, ‘I’m not dead, but I’m going to jail.’”

Now he can laugh about it in the basement of his home in Decatur, Georgia, but it took him years to get to this point.

Last year, after a long string of Facebook messages among Sandja and others interested in trans fitness, the idea for FTM Fit Con came into being. But planning the event was overwhelming, and up until a day before the first competition, Sandja questioned whether he could pull it off. Then he received a note from another trans man. The writer had been ready to kill himself until he stumbled on Sandja’s blog about fitness and transitioning. That was when Sandja realized that the competition was about more than bodybuilding; it was about helping people develop new identities.