“Would you consider being on Caitlyn Jenner’s reality show?” Jen asks me over the phone. It had only been a few months since my best friend Jen Richards and I vacated our Chicago apartment for opposite coasts. Jen moved to L.A. with our dog Mia and I moved to D.C. We were scheduled to see each other next in May to film a new media series she co-wrote with Laura Zak called, Her Story. Jen wrote a part tailored for me as, “a driven, top attorney who projects an image of composure and success, while tending to mask her vulnerability with her ambition.” My friend was telling my story as well as her own to challenge our ideas and assumptions about being women and being trans. Jen’s intersectional perspective would prove to the most valuable asset to “I Am Cait”, and the reason I eventually said yes to appearing on the show. Jen and I talked about the opportunity it would give me to talk about why I started TransTech, and the work we’re doing providing trans people with solutions and opportunities to save themselves from drowning in the debt of transition. Being trans comes at a high cost, but being black and trans can cost you your life.

Every hour of every day for me is occupied with juggling the challenges of building a social enterprise that addresses the unemployment epidemic in the trans community without the access to a big budget or donors with deep pockets. I often hear Renée Zellweger in my head from Jerry Maguire shouting, “Do you know (she) is working for you for free?! And she’s broke! Broke, broke, broke!” As the founding CEO, I write checks weekly to trans and gender non conforming workers, yet I still am not able to draw a salary for myself. I get by mostly on speaking engagements, but as soon as I try to pay myself, I end up having to give it back to the business to cover operating expenses or other unplanned costs.

I left my salaried job one year ago, aware of many of the challenges I would soon face, but I have yet to fully speak on why I really left my job to launch TransTech Social Enterprises. I badly wanted to speak out, but could not afford anything that would feed the angry black woman narrative so I cried in silence instead. For months, I floated by on a life raft made of food stamps and support from friends like Jen Richards who covered the rent until I could pay her back and Precious Davis, a friend and fellow educator and activist who told me to take the time to heal and listened to me cry out loud.

Before saying yes to appearing on I am Cait, I finally watched the Diane Sawyer interview. I was moved by the interview and Caitlyn’s apparent earnestness and believed her when she said, “I want to do this right”. I agreed to come to San Francisco to meet and talk with Caitlyn on camera with a few other trans women of color and folks from HRC. As the CEO of TransTech, I have been developing a partnership with HRC who has given me private office space in D.C. to not only expand our mission in connecting the trans community to more resources and employment opportunities, but also to repair a bridge that had been burned between the trans community and HRC, which has long been thought of as a “White Man’s club.”

“I Am Cait” would air in 123 countries and 24 different languages. Technology has flattened a world where trans people are demanding their rights in the U.S. and abroad. TransTech Social Enterprises is here to empower, educate, and employ them no matter where they are. I could not turn down an opportunity for global exposure that our efforts alone might not have ever afforded us.

Caitlyn and the crew traveled to San Francisco to meet with me and HRC Staff. In the scene leading up to our conversation, Jen Richards warned Caitlyn that the women she was about to meet are, “survivors of violence because they are trans, but we don’t want to reduce them to these traumas.” However, in the very next scene that is exactly what happens. Jen goes on to say, “They are so much more than these things that they suffered,” but from the editing the viewers at home would never know that Laya is an incredibly talented Muralist and Artist, that Chandi works with trans women of color directly helping them navigate a myriad of challenges in Los Angeles, and that I founded a tech social enterprise focused on educating, employing, and empowering trans people to become their own heroes and authors of their own success stories. All these things were discussed but not depicted on “I Am Cait.”