9-1-1: Lone Star's Brian Michael Smith Opens Up About His Personal Trans Journey

Brian Michael Smith is opening up about his transgender journey, in honor of Trans Visibility Week.

The 40-year-old 9-1-1: Lone Star actor spoke to Entertainment Weekly, sharing how his jounrey in the 1990s and 2000s is vastly different than today.

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Brian recalled that when his trans journey truly took off, he was just “19, I was in college in the middle of Ohio and I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

“This was very early internet days, you know. I was still using, like, AOL to find people and message them. I had to ask Jeeves a bunch of questions [to get] answers,” he added. “It was really hard to get information. But once I did, there was something really illuminating about that. I discovered a lot of new language. I’d never even heard the word transgender before. There were a lot of slurs [and] derogatory terms that we don’t use now. Having a word that really spoke to my experience really helped me come to acceptance of who I was.”

He also shared that hormones weren’t accessible to him at that time because he was an athlete.

“I was cutting my hair the way I wanted to cut it, wearing the clothes I wanted to do, but I kind of felt like I was in between,” Brian says. However, “once I got into my mid-twenties and I was able to access medical care, I was able to start hormone therapy and I was able to see myself expressed on the outside and really be inside my body for the first time — be visibly seen and taken into the world as myself, as Brian.”

“I didn’t see it for myself for a long time, and now it’s like, ‘Well, I can be that for somebody else,’ and I feel equipped to do it,” Brian adds. “I had the privilege of choice.”

He continued, “I know there are a lot of my trans and non-binary siblings who don’t have the choice. They have to disclose every time they walk out of their house. They have to deal with the world in a different way than I can because of how I appear. [But we've all] been trans the whole time. I never was a woman who became a man. I was me the whole time. And just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean that we’re not real.”

Brian also shared his concerns regarding how legislation in other states apart from California that may affect the ability of transgender individuals to obtain crucial medications.

“My medication I’ve been using for 20 years is covered by my insurance,” he noted. “What happens if people respond the way that Walgreens responded with Plan B, where they said, ‘We’re just not going to cover this. We’re not going to carry it.’ I feel very destabilized, and it’s really heartbreaking to see.”

Brian was recently spotted out at the premiere of co-star Rob Lowe‘s new Netflix series, Unstable.