I’ve always been a physical person, but team sports were fraught with gender problems since grade school. Over the years, I’ve discovered the joys of outdoor adventure, spending almost as much time with animals as with humans. First, I rode horses, traveling alongside a team and wagon and rounding up cows on ranches in western South Dakota. These days my wife and I spend our time living and camping with a team of dogs in Alaska, Canada and the upper Midwest.

It’s a big deal to be a trans person out in the public square who is able to act rather than simply being acted upon. In appearing on “Naked and Afraid,” I want to show what I can accomplish, without having to deal with people questioning my credentials. I want to show what trans people can accomplish. With new laws restricting access to bathrooms, locker rooms and shelters, physical attacks on trans people on the rise, according to advocacy groups, and federal legislation threatening safeguards for the transgender rights that do exist, I want to shout: “Just leave us alone!”

But first, I have to survive.

My possessions include a heavy survival knife; a magnesium bar and fire starter rod; a wedding band; some cord I made from twisted strings of plant fiber; a mosquito net with a few holes burned in it; several underripe tree nuts; and a hollowed out drinking gourd that’s rotting, but still usable.

I don’t have a compass, or clothes, or shoes, or anything to entertain myself with in the dark. If I had a smartphone I would probably be using it to play the puzzle game Two Dots, as I would if I were in line at Target.

When I told friends I was going on “Naked and Afraid,” they worried I’d be rendered a caricature. Isn’t reality television all about confining formulas? I told them it’s here, stripped down for this naked TV show, that I can be real. That my experience growing up as a trans person was the fictional performance.