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From very early on in my childhood - four, five years old - I felt alien to the human race. I felt very comfortable with thinking I was from another planet, because I felt disconnected - I was very tall and skinny, and I didn't look like anybody else, I didn't even look like any member of my family.

I think of my gender as a part of my complex humanity.

I even felt like I liked guys better than women - that men were relevant and women weren't. It took me a while to realize I'd been socialized to have a slighting view of my own gender.

I always felt like the male from the time I was a child. There wasn't much feminine about me.

I always say I never felt 'latched' to a gender. I just kind of always felt like myself, and I never felt like I had to do certain things or be a certain way to fit into a certain mold.

When I realised that I had feelings for men as well as women, at first I was worried and frightened, and there was a certain amount of 'Who am I? Am I a criminal?' and so on. It took me a long time to come to terms with myself. Those were painful years - painful then and painful to look back on.

I felt alienated at school, and I never did well with girls.

When I was born, there was a very isolated idea of what it meant to be a man or a woman, and you belonged to one gender or the other.

I was a very, I think, lonely kid, very introspective. I felt very much at odds with my environment and my culture... Probably a genetic flaw. I can't really explain it.

I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.