Antonia "Toni" D'orsay is the current Chair of the Board for This Is H.O.W., an all transgender halfway house founded by Regina Gazelle in 2005 after ten years of struggling and hardship. A former resident and House Manager for TIH, she is an optimistic and forward looking woman who has become intimately involved with her community as an outspoken advocate.

Toni spends the bulk of her time dealing on an individual basis with transfolk who need a shoulder to cry on or a bit of encouragement, where her focus of creating a personally empowering environment enables people to step out of what she calls a sense of victimhood and into an awareness of self.

She fills the rest of her time working with several organizations, including TransMentors International, Inc. (TMII) where she sits on the board of directors, and her own TransEmpowerment Advocates organization (TEA). It is through TEA that she operates a support group and has developed a series of workshops for empowering transpeople that she offers at a cost that barely covers the food provided.

Her overall goal is to establish an infrastructure for a transcommunity, from ensuring that state and local services are available, to education on transhistory, life skills, and independent living.

She started her transition at the age of 41 on October 10th, 2006, and in the course of the time since has been evicted, denied employment, denied housing, and consistently works toward making sure that no other transperson ever goes through what she did.

Her vision is simple: create systems and tools for transfolk to help themselves, effecting change through their own community service, by following a methodology pioneered by groups such as the NAACP and Chicanos por la causa. Multiethnic herself, she is a fierce and potent advocate who understands the positions and mindsets of those who would deny rights and services to transfolk, and is familiar with the means by which the major organizations rose to power.

She has recently announced she will be running for public office, starting in late 2010, in order to be elected in 2012.