In a new podcast interview, singer-songwriter Shea Diamond states that transgender people are denied the ability to dream.

Diamond, 42, ran away from home at age 14. She knew from an early age that she identified as a woman. She spent 10 years in a men's prison for robbing a convenience store to pay for gender affirmation surgery. She wrote her transgender anthem “I Am Her” while in prison.

Appearing on the LGBTQ&A podcast, Diamond said that she had thoughts of suicide as a teenager.

"You've got to understand my experience before I got incarcerated,” Diamond said. “You've got to understand, nobody wants a trans child. I was a trans child. Nobody wants a trans child. And this is not to demonize my parents. It's not. Because we don't know the things that we know now.”

“A lot of us killed ourselves because of the experience that we had in our households. And I was one of the ones who was going to. I was going to. At 14-years-old, I was going to end my life. I was not going to write 'I Am Her,' to live the tale, to say that. But I had to be stronger than all the doubt I had in my heart and my mind. I had to be stronger than all the ridicule, all the harassment, all the neglect that happened in my life."

“Nothing has changed since the days of Sylvia and Marsha,” she said, referring to pioneering transgender activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

(Related: Documentary on transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson premieres on Netflix.)

“We've lost the ability to dream because people have taken that away from us. They've told us that because we're queer, because we're black, because we're trans, because we're gay, because we're fat, that we can't obtain this dream. And so that's been embedded in our minds.”

Diamond added that it's hard for her to fully trust her success.

“I just don't feel like we're respected as human beings, so how can we be respected in art? It has to be, maybe they're ridiculing me. Maybe I'm the butt of the jokes. Maybe reality is going to smack us back in the face,” she said.