Brittany Novotny, who mounted a bid for
Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern's seat, has reached out to
troubled gay teens.
In a new It Gets Better video, Novotny
says she recognized she was living in the wrong body at a very early
age.
“One day when I was in third grade, a
boy I went to school with in Moore, Oklahoma came to school using a
new word he had come up with: transsexual,” she says. “I was one
of the targets of this new word.”
“I remember going to bed as a kid and
praying at night for God to make me wake up as a little girl. I just
knew there had been a big mistake.”
Novotny adds that she tried to bury her
feelings in high school, but after college she was ready to accept
her reality.
“I graduated law school in 2005 and
almost immediately I set out to complete my gender transition.”
“Now, I'm 30 years old. I have my
own law practice in Oklahoma, City. And I was Oklahoma's first
openly transgender political candidate.” (The video is embedded in
the right panel of this page.)
The
It Gets Better Project encourages troubled gay teens to hang in
there and not cave in to bullies, because life gets better. The
project was the idea of sex advice columnist (Savage Love) and
gay rights activist Dan Savage.
Lawmakers who have created a
video include President
Barack Obama, Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton, Britain's
Conservative Party leader David Cameron and Speaker
of the House Nancy Pelosi.