Damien (Demicia Ann) Montoya was born as a healthy girl on July 10, 1992.

But it wasn’t long before Montoya realized there was something wrong with his body.

As a child, he never liked skirts, dresses, or Barbie dolls. He wanted to wear T-shirts and basketball shorts.

Likewise, he always wanted to “participate in sports, build with Legos and play dinosaurs” unlike other girl-children of his age.

“It’s not that I was a little girl who just wanted to be a boy,” Montoya writes in HuffPost Personal.

“Every single cell in my body was telling me that I was a boy. I would have vivid dreams that this were true, only to wake up and stare in the mirror in disbelief.”

Having had no options, he had to repress such feelings for a long time.

Although Montoya “came out to my family and friends as a lesbian” a year before high school but “the truth is: I was still in denial.”

After completing high school, he went for an undergraduate degree in pre-veterinary studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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Here, Montoya met members of the LGBTQIA+ community, including a couple of transgender men who were in different stages of their gender transitioning.

“One of them was very open about his transition, and I admired him immediately, bombarding him with questions about the process,” he says.

“In 2011, by the fall of my sophomore year, I knew what I had to do: I had to come out, again.”

It was when he decided to turn from Demicia to Damien. When he revealed his intentions to transition to male, he received a harsh reaction from his parents, especially his father who “took a couple of years to come to terms with my transition.”

The initial period of his transition was very awkward because he “would get misgendered a lot” and “people would use my old name or ‘she/her’ pronouns.”

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But it changed when he started hormone replacement therapy.

“As the hormones set in, my voice deepened, I put on more muscle mass, and I started to grow facial hair. Within a year or two, I was no longer misgendered and I began to truly feel like who I was supposed to be: a man.”

The university’s insurance covered his surgery and he underwent a successful transition.

“It felt great, and I lived what the community calls ‘stealth’ where I didn’t tell anyone about my past. I just wanted to live a ‘normal’ male life, without the constant questions and judgment,” Montoya writes.

After graduating from college in 2014, he landed a job as an animal care technician for a university.

Everything was going great at his job except that he wasn’t feeling himself at the workplace. So, six years after his transition, Montoya “decided to come out again, this time publicly as an openly transgender male.”

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First, he shared his story on Instagram. Contrary to his expectations, he received an overwhelming response of love and support from people across the globe who told him how inspiring his story was.

Now came the next and more difficult step for Montoya – revealing the truth about his past at the workplace where no one had a clue that he was transgender.

He was afraid that his co-workers would treat him differently after knowing his truth, and it would lessen his chances of a promotion. But he had made up his mind.

Montoya sought help from the Diversity and Inclusion Office in thinking about how to come out to his department of around 70 people. They decided to reveal the news via a presentation about ‘Being Authentic at Work’ in one of their quarterly department meetings.

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“I was nervous, voice shaky and palms sweating,” he says of the presentation. “I was expecting the room to break out in hushed whispers when I was done, eyes darting around the room.

“But I got through my presentation, and at the end, the department stood for a standing ovation.

“I expected to get bombarded with questions, but to my pleasant surprise, it was like nothing had changed. I still have the respect of my direct reports and no one gives me a second look in the locker rooms.”

Montoya says he decided to come out publicly at his job because he wanted “to be the role model that I didn’t have growing up.”

“I want to be a resource to help other people who may be struggling with their identities, to show them there is hope,” he says.