Quote by Jackie Hill Perry

“I wanted to turn toward someone full of testosterone and beg him to be strong for us. To gather up all the stuff God gave him for a time such as this and protect us. I couldn’t protect her, or me. And I knew it. Knowing it irked me, quietly. It was such an inconvenient time for my conscience to remind me of reality. Why couldn’t it just let me keep eating dust and calling it food? These clothes, these women, these dreams, this voice, her submission to it, this heavy walk that made my mother cringe, weren’t they the truth? Didn’t they mean I had successfully transformed? Couldn’t I be what I wanted to be? Between me and God, in the secrecy of my conscience, my being a woman felt inescapably real. As much as I’d believed I could, when in the presence of a man made to be one, I knew there was a natural distinction between the two of us that even the heaviness of my voice couldn’t undo. In the other room, his voice still shook the walls. The louder it got, the more I remembered my first name.”

Quote by Jackie Hill Perry