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Transgender Quotes

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Transgender Quotes

“Because I am, just as you are you. We don’t always get to pick who we are, Shelly Wynn, but we can choose to celebrate it.”

“In the final image, he is sitting atop the horse. We have not witnessed a victory or a conquering, but a love scene, a man who knows innately how connection happens, how we traverse emotional distance, how we calm one another's fears. Similarly, toward the end of the film, Brady goes to visit Lane. He is wearing his cowboy hat, green rodeo shirt, jeans, and a bandanna tied around his neck as if he's ready to go riding. With the help of the nurses at the rehab facility, he dresses Lane in boots, jeans, and his old maroon-striped rodeo shirt. Brady puts Lane's cowboy hat atop his head: "We don't want you to get a sunburn," he says. With great difficulty, they ease Lane over a saddle propped up on parallel bars. Brady holds the reins as if he is the horse and takes Lane riding again. "You're loping off into the distance," he says as Lane struggles to stay upright. Lane's head falls and Brady cajoles it back up with the patience of a parent teaching a child to ride a bike. Together they are in a rehab facility loping, smiling, tilting, riding, Brady talking softly, lovingly. Brady's man talk soothes me. I have been the horse and I have been Lane, broken through a transition, learning to allow my body to feel pressure, to be cajoled to walk two steps forward, to trust someone enough to help me imagine what it would be like to lope along in my cowboy hat protecting me from sunburn, to learn what it means to talk like a man.”

“Like a man, I am oblivious to the stakes of the diagnosis and to Lynette's rage taking on new proportions. I don't think I would have responded any differently pretransition. I didn't feel like a woman then. In the rare moments I have thought about my female anatomy, it's only to consider how to make it disappear. I yearned for my mother's breast cancer to be the genetic kind so I could have a preventive double mastectomy, and was disappointed when she called me gleefully to tell me it wasn't. I don't anticipate Lynette's rage coming at me, and I make a terrible joke: "Maybe the doctor would do a twofer," I say as we leave the surgeon's office. I would love to get rid of the body parts she is clinging to. I don't have a clue what it feels like to inhabit her body even though in a biology classroom way our bodies still have plenty in common. Binaries mean everything and nothing in these moments. The binary of what remains of our shared women's anatomy still does not allow me to inhabit what Lynette feels like as a woman losing her uterus. The binary that makes me a man in this situation brings a truth home to Lynette's body that we thought we had faced but hadn't.”

“A lot of people in the community really advocate for people being out, owning who they are, and spreading awareness. If I was out all the time, I would feel more dysphoric than if I'm just able to live my life as a guy and not have to worry. I don't think it's a selfish thing to want to live a life that would make you happier. The whole reason I transitioned was so that I could be happier. In the end, it's everyone's own life. You've got to live it the way you want.”

“Most people are in the dark about what is being demanded by transactivists. They understand the call for ‘trans rights’ to mean compassionate concessions that enable a suffering minority to live full lives, in safety and dignity. I, alongside every critic of gender-identity ideology I have spoken to for this book, am right behind this. Most, including me, also favour bodily autonomy for adults. A liberal, secular society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on everyone else.”

“If you are a woman, if you're a person of color, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are a person of intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world. And it's going to be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere. Especially women's and gay men's culture. It's all about how you have to look a certain way, or else you're worthless... For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution, and our revolution is long overdue.”

“I do have things I would like to see adopted on behalf of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people: they include the right to marry the individual of our choice; the right to serve in the military to defend our country; and the right to a job based solely on our own qualifications. I acknowledge that this is an agenda, but I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people's rights to get married, join the army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform.”

“To those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual,or transgender-let me say- you are not alone. You're struggle, for the end to violence and discrimination, is a shared struggle. Today, I stand with you. And I call upon all countries and people, to stand with you too.A historic shift is underway. We must tackle the violence, decriminalize consensual same sex relationships and end discrimination. We must educate the public. I call on this council and people of conscience to make this happen.The time has come.”

“All women have a complicated relationship to beauty, but as a transgender woman it's a bit more complicated. There's a lot of pressure to appear feminine. When I was younger, I was most insecure about my size, my angular features, my feet, my hands . At the end of the day, it's about being comfortable in your own skin, and being able to walk down the street and not have people question your gender - and, for me, being perceived as a woman.”

“Everybody deserves fair treatment, equal treatment in the eyes of the law and the state. And that includes gays, lesbians, transgender persons. I am not a fan of discrimination and bullying of anybody on the basis of race, on the basis of religion, on the basis of sexual orientation or gender. This is actually part and parcel of the agenda that's also going to be front and centre, and that is how are we treating women and girls.”

“I was in a conversation and someone said: "You know, we were talking about the whole issue of transgender and how it has become so accepted now, and somebody said, 'You know the Oprah show, I think has had a big impact.'" I said, I don't think so. We did several transgender [shows], but we didn't do as much for transgender as I did for, say, abused kids or battered women. And they said, "But no, you started the conversation. You started the conversation and the conversation has led us to here."”

“I am transgender, so 'he' is not appropriate and 'she' is problematic. I haven't been one to wage war with society to force people to address me a certain way. I let people make that decision for themselves. I don't identify as a man, so 'he' is silly in a way. Being called 'she' as a trans person, trans in the sense that I'm trans, is to be honoured in an aspect of yourself.”

“The transgender movement even divides itself up by gender, as many folks stick with their same trans-genders (female-to-male or male-to-female). Additionally, the movement gets strangely subdivided among, for example, male cross-dressers, sissy boys, butch women, femme dykes, drag kings, drag queens, transvestites, intersexed, transsexuals (post-op, pre-op, and non-op).”

“Just across the ocean in, say Kenya or Tanzania, a two-gender system is vital for the survival of most of the folks who live there. Men do men's work, women do women's work, and so it all gets done and the jackals can't get into the hut and eat grandpa. So, the future of the transgender movement is like the future of all human rights movements: whatever the state of things in your area now, with some work it all gets a little bit better all the time, even if it is sometimes three steps ahead and two steps back.”

“My own take on the word "transgender" is that it's an umbrella term for anyone who breaks any rules, laws, guidelines or protocol of gender. So, to really be an ally, it's important that you recognize and embrace your own transgender nature. Really, I haven't met a single person who doesn't break some rule of gender. In other words, we will assimilate you. Resistance is futile.”

“Both bisexuality and transgender are fluid notions of identity, while lesbian and gay are fixed identities. Some people believe that means there should be two movements: LG and BT. But then what're ya gonna do about SM players? And intersexed folks who want their own I in the alphabet soup of sex and gender related politics?”

“I get a singular comment that's very revealing: "I didn't know what to expect." Every time I hear that I think it's really just code for, "I wasn't sure I'd be comfortable with you in this role," which I understand coming from Oscar Bluth and Hank Kingsley and whatever. But I think there's a degree of, "Oh, okay, this is how it is." Then almost always people tell me that they love it and then people start talking to me about their families, whether it's transgender issues or not.”