If it hadn't been for the world wide web, I may have never realized I'm trans. And even if I did find out, I would have known next to nothing about how to transition. Without net neutrality, there wouldn't have been a world wide web in the first place. And without the collective of trans people like me who've managed to discover ourselves, who've managed to organize, who've managed to fight for our rights, mostly through connecting and getting together online, the trans rights movement could not exist in its current form. It would be weaker, less sustained, less populated with a diversity of voices. It's possible, even likely, that without net neutrality, the current trans movement in America wouldn't exist at all.

For trans people and their loved ones who have navigated gender transition in the current age of increased trans awareness, it's hard to imagine what it was like trying to find resources online in 2000, when stirrings about my own dissatisfaction with my gender first entered my consciousness. There was no social media then, no Facebook groups, not even Myspace or Friendster. Sitting in my bedroom where I thought of myself as a gay man, a web search on Altavista led me to a website and chat room called TGForum.

I didn't personally know any trans women before TGForum. I'd read articles and seen talk show episodes, so I knew about women like Caroline Cossey, Christine Jorgensen, and Renée Richards, all of them describing how they've felt they were meant to be a girl since they were kids, that this feeling had tortured them most of their lives.

But I never had that sense of thwarted destiny, nor did I wake up from nightmares that I had a male body and to the bigger nightmare that I actually did. I was okay, just dissatisfied in a way I couldn't name — like a bud in the dark, unaware that there was light, or that there were even such things as flowers.

When I spoke to actual trans women in TGForum, I learned that many of them didn't think or feel the way I thought they were supposed to. There were those who'd lived for years as women but didn't want reassignment surgery; those who shacked up with other trans women; those who lived their entire lives post-transition without anyone knowing, even their own husbands. And even if I wasn't like many of them, the fact that so many kinds existed meant that maybe I could exist too.

It was a self-identified shemale named Stacy who advised me over chat that, whatever I felt about myself or my identity, I needed to tell one “approved” story to get past the medical gatekeepers for hormones, testosterone blockers, or any kind of surgery. Being transgender, like being gay before it, was still defined as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association in 2000. We couldn't get trans-related medical care unless we agreed we had a disease that needed to be cured, and that our only desire was to look and act like “normal” women — not like Stacy who got breast implants but had no intention of losing her penis.

It was a girl named Gwen, pretty with auburn hair and an oval face in her avatar picture, who gave me pointers on how to be more femme for my therapist interview, and encouraged me by telling me I was beautiful enough to go stealth like her, whose own boyfriend didn't know she was trans. She taught me to look and act like a GG — that's what we called cis women back then, genetic girls — and walk into that therapist's office looking as passable as possible, because that was the only way he would write me an approval letter, my ticket out of no-hormones jail.