American writer, performer and activist Kate Bornstein was BOTD in 1948. Born in New Jersey to a middle-class Jewish family, they were assigned male at birth. They studied theatre at Brown University, developing depression and anorexia in response to their gender dysphoria. Exempted from the draft for the Vietnam War, they joined the Church of Scientology, drawn to L. Ron Hubbard’s notion that the soul has no gender. They married a woman and had a daughter, relocating to New York where they ran Scientology recruitment events, and began presenting in female dress. They finally left Scientology in 1982 after being branded a “suppressive person” by church officials, losing all contact with their daughter. Settling in San Francisco, they began writing for the Bay Area Reporter. In 1986, they underwent gender reassignment surgery, initially presenting as a lesbian woman but later identifying as non-binary and trans. In 1989, they wrote the theatre piece Hidden: A Gender, contrasting their own experience with the 19th century intersex writer Herculine Barbin, played by Justin Vivian Bond. They achieved wider recognition with their 1994 book Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, one of the first mainstream discussions about identifying as neither male nor female. A critic of respectability politics, Bornstein has embraced the label “tranny”, a term generally considered to be a transphobic slur, and wrote about their experience as a sexual submissive for a lesbian couple in their 2012 memoir A Queer and Pleasant Danger. Bornstein has also addressed suicide prevention in the LGBTQ community, writing Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws. They made their Broadway debut in 2018 in the play Straight White Men. Bornstein lives in New York with their partner, sex therapist Barbara Carrellas.