Before you read this article, I would like you to do me a favor. It's nothing major; you don't even have to get up to do it. Take a look at the picture of me above the article.

What do you see? Someone with a haircut you might not particularly like? Someone with a very nice looking jacket and where do you get one? Is that a guy or a girl?

I'm going to tell you three things: I rather like my haircut; my mother bought that jacket at a thrift store; and that snapshot you just looked at is a person.

I do have a reason for pointing this out to you. There are some, and maybe yourself included, who look at me and say "That's a pretty girl." Well, I do hate to break it to you, but that is a man in that little circle.

That man is me.

There is also a chance that you recognize this photo. If you heard anything about a bill targeting transgender students in the state of South Dakota (The bill stated that transgender student cannot use the bathroom with which they identify, but rather the bathroom of their assigned birth sex) and saw that there was a kid speaking out against that piece of legislation, you have seen me. During the whole month of February, I was willingly outed by national news outlets. Opinions flew, a transgender mafia was born, and I received some fame. That picture I asked you to look at? The photo was taken by a New York Times photographer by the name of Brian Lehmann. He had me stand in the middle of the street during rush hour in downtown Sioux Falls to take that picture.

If you look at the picture of me in my little avatar, the circle of me, you might recognize that as well. One of my senior pictures, the one the ended up in my high school yearbook, circulated through an international audience. The transgender teen battles the evil bathroom bill! Well, I think you hear about me from me, without the media spin.

My name is Thomas Wayne Lewis and I am a transgender male.

Now, I know what some of you are saying. "You don't look like a trans person," or "You don't look like a guy," or the one that really irks me on a daily basis: "Are you confused?"

I will agree with the second statement and that is about it. If you see my whole body, it becomes very obvious that I have more of a female body shape. My voice is nowhere near as deep as I would like it to be. That being said, I am perfectly content with who I am. I do not know what the standards are to look like a trans person, but I can tell you with the utmost certainty that I am male. I am not confused about who I am as a person and who I wish to be in the future. I find that this scares people, making their own uncertainties solid in their head.

Despite all of these things, I wish to point out that this picture I asked you to view contains a person. A human being. Someone who has hopes and dreams, anxiety, cats, and an alarming amount of opinions. I will be attending my first year of college in Nebraska, majoring in Russian. You do not need to be a man or a woman to do that. You just need to be a person to attain your goals and I intend to do that to my best ability.

Another one of my goals is to show you, the reader, snapshots of my life as I transition. I have noticed that people see trans people, mostly trans women, after they have transitioned. I haven't even started my transition with hormone therapy and a double mastectomy. What I want you to take away from this is that even a trans person is a person, whether they are pre, mid, or post-transition.

I live as my own person, as a human being, and I plan to keep it that way.