When you have very lax parents, you tend to get more conservative kids.

I think Bhutanese food - long dissed by every food writer out there - has gotten a bum rap.

I go to Japan every November on vacation, and the one thing I never return home without is yuba, which is the thin skin that forms atop boiling soy milk. You skim it off and either eat it fresh or dry it.

I took a 51 day trip through Asia; 12 countries and 26 cities. I traveled for 51 days. So, it was everywhere from Sri Lanka and that all the way to Japan, where we ended it.

I live in Soho in lower New York; there's tons and tons of tourists right outside my door step, obviously. Most of them are European, and all of them have guidebooks. I never see anyone looking at a phone.

When we think of India, most of us are in fact thinking of Rajasthan, that large splotch of dun-colored desert in the country's northwest which, from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, was ruled by a succession of maharajas whose sense of color, opulence, and splendor created the most enduring images of India in the West.

Even before it opened its retail arm, Beigh was renowned among pashmina cognoscenti for the quality and complexity of the work produced in its workshop, a large, airy, sunlit rectangle of a room directly across from its second-floor shop.

Kashmir, the 86,000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination.

The original Grand Tour would generally begin in Belgium or the Netherlands before moving through Paris, Geneva, Spain, Italy, and perhaps Greece.

I wanted to see how flavors, spices, and grains traveled back and forth along the Silk Road and were interpreted by a multitude of cultures' palates.

Those of us lucky enough to fall in love with Asia know that it's an affair that's as long as it is resonant.

I have only a few really enviable skills, but packing - condensing just the right amount of stuff into a single bag, whether the trip is for a weekend or, as in this case, seven weeks - is one of them.

The speed limit on most of Maui's highways is forty miles per hour, but my mother never went above thirty.

Although both of us were raised on Oahu, in Honolulu, my mother has always had fond memories of Maui; this was, after all, where she and my father, then penniless yet oddly optimistic newlyweds, honeymooned in 1969.

The first thing many tourists see in Hawaii is concrete - a long dreary stretch of it through landscapes dominated by sad, cheap apartment buildings and almost entirely denuded of plant life.

It's a funny thing about cities: Some have brief, bright moments of cultural and political dominance, decades- or centuries-long spells when they seem the center of their particular nation, or region, or empire... only to later fall into obscurity and disrepair, never to regain their former glory.

Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them.

Unlike Milan, Italy's banking capital, or Rome, its religious center, Florence was the place where the rich went to buy goods that would showcase how wealthy they were.

Between their rise in the thirteenth century and their sudden fall in the seventeenth, when the line abruptly ended, the Medicis produced three popes, two queens, and many Florentine rulers, and they supported the work of Galileo, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Botticelli - a veritable parade of geniuses.

Anyone who has been to India - specifically Rajasthan, the rich and kingly region in the country's northwest - knows that when it comes to adornment, Indians do not think like other people.

Jaipur, like Florence or Kyoto, other artisan-rich cities to which it roughly compares, has always been known for its craftsmanship.

Hong Kong has plenty of superlative hotels, amazing food, and cool shopping.

Of course, no one has enough time to see every shop that Mumbai has: That would take more lifetimes than even the gods could offer.

In Mumbai, the air is saltier. The sea is roilier. The traffic is snarlier. The pinks are pinker. The ostentation is crazier.

When I saw that Laverne Cox was on the cover of 'Time' magazine, I totally lost it. It was a coup for the girls!

I want to start the trans mafia one day.

I admire actresses who are willing to jettison the easy route toward exposure and commercial success as an actor in favor or a slow burn, choosing projects carefully, and building an artistic practice over time that feels specific to who they are as artists.

Sexuality is who you want to be with. Gender identity is who you want to be in the world.

I liked playing video games because I felt like I was inside of the story in a way that I didn't feel when I was just watching something. Any chance I could get to step into the shoes of another person, I would take. I couldn't get enough of stories.

Fashion gave me my start, and that will always be my home. I'll always be so grateful for all my collaborators and friends I've made there, but I'm so excited to dive head first into just being a working actor.

If we didn't desensitize ourselves in some way, every day would feel like its own tragedy.

I don't want to say that women who do use makeup or get breast implants or have fake nails are insecure. They're entitled to that, and they should do that if that's what they want to do. But for me, there are no answers. It's just a matter of preference and choice and fetish.

I see a Reiki healer from time to time. She sits on my bed, and I lie in her lap. She puts her hands on me for about 45 minutes, and she reads my energy. Whenever I'm having a hard time, I call her. I also go to weekly therapy, and that has been invaluable. Also, getting on medication for my 'neural atypicalities,' I guess we might call them.

I live in a little studio apartment, so I try to keep the space super clean at all times.

When you're a teenager, everything is amplified because everything is a first. The first time you feel othered, the first time you feel rejected, the first time you fall in love... it's the first time, so it's so vivid, and everything feels like the whole world almost, because it is your whole world; your world is small when you're a teenager.

I keep a very cold apartment - I tend to crank my AC just about as low as it can go. I sleep with a big, warm comforter, even during the summer, and just burrow underneath it.

I've gone from the edgy girl to the girl you call for H&M and L'Oreal, which is something neither I nor the myriad agencies that rejected me when I tried to get signed could have predicted.

I got the Fire Stick as a gift at the Amazon Emmys after-party in 2015, and because I haven't lived in a house with cable television since I lived with my parents as a child, I've just streamed everything. I can afford cable. I have a television. But I only stream things.

Leaving the house in a pair of flip-flops in Manhattan is disgusting to me, no shade.

I used to think I was a gay man with this idea of a muse in my head, like a woman that I thought was inspirational or aspirational. But the woman was actually me.

I like shows for atmosphere. I don't know, I think a plot-driven show is so boring and masc4masc and gross.

I'm grateful to be in school developing my practice as an actor. In that process, it's difficult to say that you've definitively 'learned' something.

I think people get stuck in a cycle with social media sometimes and don't know how to make adjustments that are personal.

I had family who exposed me to all sorts of different media involving actors - films, theatrical productions touring through Boston. My grandparents, particularly my mother's parents, were huge fans of all the arts, and they took me to these shows and exhibits at a very young age, so I was just immersed in it.

My desire to be an actor or a model precedes my identity.

I think that often my work is obscured by my gender identity.

I could have hidden in Boston and lived at home for three years, gone through my transition, taken voice lessons to make my voice more feminine, gotten gender reassignment surgery, and spent time to complete my transition, but I didn't want to wait. I wanted to be in the world.

People make fun of me because I've been known to eat lunch things for breakfast. I'll eat a good salad. I'll maybe have some tempeh or kale in there. I try to make breakfast a lavish meal because, one, my body tells me to, and, two, that's what carries me through the day.

Brands like RMS Beauty and Kat Burki are my skincare heroes.

When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I 'do things in front of people.' I don't know why I do what I do. I've tried working behind the scenes. I felt left out!