Richard Thunder

My name is Richard Bourelly,

I spent my pre-teen and teenage years hooked on television and various forums and social networks dedicated to anime and manga; it was the only way I could detach myself from the real world and - especially with the internet - behave how I wanted and present myself directly as a boy, without having to explain anything to anyone.

I started my transition path at the end of my fourth year of high school and, around the same time, I also started doing activism and fighting for the rights of transgender people. A year later, once I started hormone therapy, I also started a YouTube channel - Richard Thunder - with the aim of helping other people and "giving back" to the trans community on YouTube the help I had gotten from them during my teenage years.

One of my wishes is to be able to help as many people as possible, especially minors, and this is one of the motivations that led me to want to do "grown up" research on our community.