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I learned a lot more about transgender people. It's not a choice, but a physiological condition that has to do with the size of the hypothalamus part of the brain.

Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.

The current approach that psychiatry takes almost ignores social worlds in which mental health problems arise and tries to become highly biomedical like other branches of medicine such as cardiology or oncology. But psychiatry has to be far more embedded in people's personal and social worlds.

I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.

We don't want to promote any system that treats the fact that an individual is LGBT as a personality disorder. And anything that perpetuates that perception is harmful - not only to that member of the community but the entire community.

Also, I had read a book called She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, written by a professor who had gone through transgender surgery, but it took this person well into his thirties to come to terms with the absolute necessity of having to do it.

I want to break down some of the stigma associated with mental illness.

Mental health needs a great deal of attention. It's the final taboo and it needs to be faced and dealt with.

I thought, transgender people are much worse off than I am. That's why they're willing to risk everything to be who they are. But the older I got, the harder it got to stay in my body.

Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.