Transgender Quotes

All surgery and no makeup make Jack a dull girl.

Anna's voice wasn't a beautiful voice - rough edged and sorrowful, a bit used, somehow male and female at once. Yet it had more vibrancy to it than most Danish voices, which were often thin and white and too pretty to trigger a shiver. Anna's voice had the heat of the south; it warmed Einar, as if her throat were red with coals.

No one has the right to demand that your body be something other than what it is.

Rejecting your gay or transgender child won't make them straight. It will only mean you will lose them.

What was the point of being himself if he had to be alone?

You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more “female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.

What is the bedrock on which all of our diverse trans populations can build solidarity? The commitment to be the best fighters against each other's oppression. As our activist network grows into marches and rallies of hundreds of thousands, we will hammer out language that demonstrates the sum total of our movement as well as its component communities.Unity depends on respect for diversity, no matter what tools of language are ultimately used. This is a very early stage for trans peoples with such diverse histories and blends of cultures to form community. Perhaps we don't have to strive to be one community. In reality, there isn't one women's, or lesbian, gay, bi community. What is realistic is the goal to build a coalition between our many strong communities in order to form a movement capable of defending all our lives.

The best way to avoid being confused about Bruce Jenner is get your head out of his bedroom and closet, and then think about all of the things you've been hiding and been miserable about. So what he made his announcement via media. Books, music, movies, business launches are announced in the same manner. Just focus on the feeling of finally disclosing something that enables you to be free and to live as authentically as possible. And then imagine what it's like to own your truth, tell it your way, thus taking away anyone else's ability to spin it their way or use it against you. If you can do any of the above, you will no longer be confused.

It's time to undo Rahim.

Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry against transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies. Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other's differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation.

One Saturday morning walking to the farmers' market with my lover she tells me she needs to look like a man on the street. She hates binding her breasts. Hates having breasts, hates not passing. I press her. I ask her, but what do you feel like when you're naked in bed with me? Do you like your body then? She is quiet. Later she tells me she had a dream. Her mother brought home a bottle of medicine from the hospital for her. The doctor says she has to take it. The medicine is testosterone.On Shabbat I remember to pray for enough space inside of me to hold all the darkness of the night and all the sunlight of the day. I pray for enough space for transformations as miraculous as the shift from day to night.Later when that lover has changed his name and an ex-boyfriend has come out to me as a lesbian I go to visit my best friend's sister-turned-brother-turned-sister-again and she tells me about the blessing of having many names and using them all at once.

If you voted for a man who said "Grab em by the pussy," you have zero room to claim to protect anyone in bathrooms.

While there is no shame in being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or intersex - or even straight (but not narrow) - there is most certainly shame and dishonor in being a homophobe, a transphobe and a bigot.

It is offensive that so many people feel that it is okay to publicly refer to transsexuals as being “pre-op” or “post-op” when it would so clearly be degrading and demeaning to regularly describe all boys and men as being either “circumcised” or “uncircumcised.

Me? I had no dreams. No longings. Dreams only set you up for disappointment. Plus, you had to have a life to have dreams of a better life.

Most people who are would each not be in love with their partner, if they did not have the kind of genitals they have.

While railing against the manufactured prerequisites of womanhood or manhood, we need to avoid manufacturing our own prerequisites. The non-operative journey and the objection to it illustrate just one area in which we need to open our thinking to other journeys while expecting that others respect our own. - Mercedes Allen

Accepted social gender roles and expectations are so entrenched in our culture that most people cannot imagine any other way. As a result, individuals fitting neatly into these expectations rarely if ever question what gender really means. They have never had to, because the system has worked for them.

I have heard an argument that transgender people oppress transsexual people because we are trying to tear down the categories of male and female. But isn't this the same reactionary argument used against transmen and transwomen by those who argue that any challenges to assigned birth sex threaten the categories of man and woman? Transgender people are not dismantling the categories of man and woman. We are opening up a world of possibilities in addition. Each of us has a right to our identities. To claim one group of downtrodden people is oppressing another by their self-identification is to swing your guns away from those who really do oppress us, and to aim them at those who are already under siege.

We assume that anything that is new to us is new to human society as a whole, and that if we don’t see it reflected in history textbooks and in recent memory then it cannot have existed for long.

John [the father] kept saying, "You have a penis. That means you’re a boy." One day, Shannon noticed that her son had been in the bathroom an awfully long time and pushed the door open. "He had a pair of my best, sharpest sewing scissors poised, ready to cut. Penis in the scissors. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'This doesn’t belong here. So I’m going to cut it off.' I said, 'You can’t do that.' He said, 'Why not?' I said, 'Because if you ever want to have girl parts, they need that to make them.' I pulled that one right out of my ass. He handed me the scissors and said, 'Okay.

If we start preemptively cutting out parts of who we are because they’re ‘not feminist enough’, then we’ve failed before we’ve begun.

The whole point of my gender transition was to free myself up. If something feels good, I'm not going to stop doing it because it doesn't fit someone else's notion of what a man is. -David Harrison

She scissored the curls away, and - toms, grow easily sentimental over their haircuts, but I remember this sensation very vividly - it was not like she was cutting hair, it was as if I had a pair of wings beneath my shoulder-blades, that the flesh had all grown over, and she was slicing free...