This is a love letter because you don't hear it often enough, especially during the holidays. This is a love letter because even though you don't believe it all the time, you belong in this world.

This is a love letter to every young lesbian who's been told she's not a real girl until she has sex with a man. This is a love letter to every boy who's been beaten for not being manly, and to every muscular gay guy who has looked on in terrified silence. This is a love letter to the teenage drag queens who get kicked out of their houses and end up tricking on the streets. This is a love letter to all the gay kids who think about dying and sometimes succeed because the world doesn't prize their lives.

This is a love letter to the queer students who live courageously in the dorms, the ones who've told me the horror stories: the students whom certain teachers trash in class, the students on whom pranks are played and whose door decorations are ripped down, the students who risk bodily harm and the disdain of the a homophobic, gender-policing world in order to claim their birthright as human beings.

This is a love letter to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and Trans kids who are growing up in families or religions that don't recognize and appreciate the diversity of human life. This is a love letter to the LGBT adults like Mel White who persist, knocking gently and not-so-gently on the doors of their familial and spiritual homes, saying, "We know we have a place at this table, under this roof; we belong in this synagogue, this mosque, this church."

This is a love letter to butch lesbians and flaming gay men, a love letter for every moment of your life when you've braved living with integrity, looking the world in the eye. This is a love letter to dykes like Lea Delaria who walk with that special swagger, and to gay boys like Jack on "Will and Grace" who walk with the special swish.

This is a love letter to Brandon Teena, who lived his too-short life with reckless abandon because he didn't know his own value and possibility. This is a love letter to tell the female-to-male and male-to-female people out there that your life matters, that your survival means a richer and better world.

This is a love letter to the women and men, the drag queens and kings, who risked arrest at Stonewall in 1969 when they fought against police. This is a love letter to all those who frequented the small gay bars in Jackson; Miss. in Bend, Ore; in Des Moines, Iowa, who survived police raids, brutality and humiliation in order to find more of your own kind. This is a love letter to the butch women and gay men raped by police over many long years of oppression.

This is a love letter to those on the front lines of gender and sexuality, especially Trans people I know and cherish: Jayson, Gunner, and the Gender Puzzlers. I love your emotional, intellectual and physical selves. I love your shy and bold voices. I love the lines of your faces,your cheekbones. I love your eyes, full of fear and hope and honesty.

I love your mouths, above which hair might be cultivated or plucked. I love your necks, graceful and taut or solid and protected. I love your shoulders, thickened by testosterone or toned and thinned by training. I love your chests, the scars of mastectomies, the proud new breasts, the fine, gentle hearts that beat beneath.

I love your hands -- the hands that some claim show your former gender assignment, the hands that work in factories and in hospitals, the hands that carry my UPS packages, the hands that hold chalk, the hands that hold babies. I love your pre-operative bodies, your post-operative bodies, your glorious and beautiful, diverse and marvelous bodies.