Trans Quotes

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

“I'm not ashamed to dress "like a woman" because I don't think it's shameful to be a woman.”
― Iggy Pop, Dum Dum Boys: Iggy Pop by Mikael Jansson

“So here it is. My friends call me he, or they. The government and most of my family call me she. The media calls me she, because I don’t trust them enough to request that they do anything else. My lovers call me sweetheart. Or baby. Somewhere in all of that I find myself.”
― ivan coyote

“If you’re in doubt as to whether or not a question is inappropriate, here’s a helpful tip. Ask yourself if you would feel comfortable asking that question to a cisgender person. Generally speaking we as a society don’t around asking people about their private parts. They’re called private for a reason.”
― Ian Thomas Malone, The Transgender Manifesto

“I found power in accepting the truth of who I am. It may not be a truth that others can accept, but I cannot live any other way. How would it be to live a lie every minute of your life?”
― Alison Goodman, Eon: Dragoneye Reborn

“...I really did "choose" to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.”
― Jennifer Finney Boylan, She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders

“Do not stare at me unless you are willing to see me.' ...'Look at me,” he says. “Look at this body. My body. Or stop looking. Deny it, and deny me.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Dark and Deepest Red

“Look," Aracely said. "I know what you're going through."

"No you don't." Sam sat up. "I still have to live like this. Nothing is gonna fix me. There's no water that's gonna make me into something else."

"And I'd start from where you are if it meant what happened that night didn't have to happen," Aracely said. "We don't get to become who we are for nothing. It costs something. You're fighting for every little piece of yourself. And maybe I got all of me at once but I lost everything else. Don't you dare think there's any water in the world that makes this easy.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours

“She had genuinely started to believe that if people could see her onstage as Charlotte, maybe they would see that she was a girl offstage too.”
― Alex Gino, Melissa

“SK: What causes a person to be transgender?

MS: I think the question should be flipped around: What’s the cause for assuming that one’s gender identity has to be the one that you are born with? When I first came into this job, I was much more comfortable about people’s sexuality than I was with people’s gender identity. But when you hear the same stories over and over again, from people from all over the world, you start realizing that transgender is not an anomaly. It’s a part of the spectrum of people’s realities. Then you stop wondering about the cause and you start realizing it’s a part of reality.”
― Susan Kuklin, Beyond Magenta: Transgender and Nonbinary Teens Speak Out

“It's actually a very old archetype that trans girl stories get put into: this sort of tragic, plucky-little-orphan character who is just supposed to suffer through everything and wait, and if you're good and brave and patient (and white and rich) enough, then you get the big reward...which is that you get to be just like everybody else who is white and rich and boring. And then you marry the prince or the football player and live boringly ever after.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“When Ryan's pickup appears within the snowfall, Avery's heart becomes the opposite of snowfall-that strange, windblown moment when you look and see the snow is actually drifting upward. Snowrise. When Avery sees Ryan pulling into his driveway, his heart is snowrise.”
― David Levithan, Ryan and Avery

“Queremos apoderarnos del género, redefinir nuestros cuerpos y crear redes libres y abiertas donde poder desarrollarnos, donde cualquiera pueda construir sus mecanismos de seguridad contra las presiones de género. No somos víctimas, nuestras heridas de guerra nos sirven como escudo... Nos presentamos no como terroristas, sino como piratas, trapecistas, guerrilleros, RESISTENTES del género… Defendemos la duda, creemos en el «volver atrás» médico como un seguir hacia delante, pensamos que ningún proceso de construcción debe tacharse de IRREVERSIBLE. Queremos visibilizar la belleza de la androginia. Creemos en el derecho a quitarse las vendas para respirar y el de no quitárselas nunca, en el derecho a operarse con buenos cirujanos y no con CARNICEROS, en el libre acceso a los tratamientos hormonales sin necesidad de certificados psiquiátricos, en el derecho a auto-hormonarse.
Reivindicamos el vivir sin pedir permiso... Ponemos en duda el protocolo médico español que desde hace años establece unas pautas absurdas y tránsfobas para cualquier ciudadano que desea tomar hormonas de su «sexo» contrario. No creemos en las disforias de género, ni en los trastornos de identidad, no creemos en la locura de la gente, sino en la locura del sistema. No nos clasificamos por sexos, nosotros somos todos diferentes independientemente de nuestros genitales, nuestras hormonas, nuestros labios, ojos, manos... No creemos en los papeles, en el sexo legal, no necesitamos papeles, ni menciones de sexo en el DNI, creemos en la libre circulación de hormonas (que, de hecho, ya existe..). No queremos más psiquiatras, ni libro de psiquiatras/ psicólogos, no queremos más «Test de la Vida Real»... No queremos que nos traten como enfermos mentales..., porque no lo somos... ¡y así es cómo nos llevan tratando desde hace mucho tiempo! Creemos en el activismo, en la constancia, en la visibilidad, en la libertad, en la resistencia...
GUERRILLA TRAVOLAKA”
― Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era

“We are made to subvert and skirt around structures that are built to exclude us, and it is exhausting work.”
― Kalani Adolpho (editor) , Stephen G. Krueger (editor) , Krista McCracken (editor)

“you've drawn every line there could be while we wait for a circle”
― Yaffa As, Blood Orange

“we know it ends in flame because those with power were never taught to relinquish / we wait for them to / we forget you can't give up what wasn't yours to begin with”
― Yaffa As, Blood Orange

“Perhaps if I have sex enough I´ll convince myself I enjoy it?" (Regarding not being able to have penetrative intercourse)”
― Elliot Page, Pageboy

“Honestly who fucking knows what my sexuality is… gay if I do, gay if I don’t.”
― Carta Monir, Napkin

“If we have to worry about following any prescribed path in order to be ourselves — no matter who prescribes it: the trans community, the medical establishment, or the non-trans assumptions of stereotypical (and therefore socially validated) gender behavior—we are only setting ourselves up to be judged by an arbitrary standard that can be changed at any time by those to whom we've delegated authority over our own authenticity.”
― Jamison Green, Becoming a Visible Man

“That was the thing about restorative justice. It allowed you to hold two things in your head at the same time -- that butt-slapping was funny, and also that it wasn't. That asking permissions to touch somebody was funny, but that you really didn't want to be touched by somebody who didn't ask. That the girls wanted Jeff to dial back the ass-smacking thing, but they still like joking around with him. That the whole thing wasn't a big deal, and that it kinds of was. That was what community was. All those layers of understanding.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“Suicide prevention, then, can't simply be about keeping NDNs in the world if it remains saturated by that which dulls the sensation of aliveness for those who are queer and/or trans and/or two-spirit.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“Inscribed to Nature’s Step-Children — the sexually abnormal by birth — in the hope that their lives may be rendered more tolerable through the publication of this Autobiography.”
― Jennie June, Autobiography of an Androgyne

“How can one explain why a six-year-old boy (the author) should class himself as a girl, give himself a girl’s name, fight against his parents’ course of bringing him up as a boy, and grieve because he could not be brought up as a girl, except on the assumption that the cells of his brain were identical with the cells of a girl’s brain and fundamentally different from those of a normal boy?”
― Jennie June, Autobiography of an Androgyne

“Practically it is all right, but medico-legally it is wrong, to make the genitals the universal criterion in the determination of sex. Medico-legally, sex should be determined by the psychical constitution rather than by the physical form. There are thousands of physical females who feel themselves to be men and have the mental traits of men, and there are thousands of physical males who feel themselves to be women and have the mental traits of a woman. Should any blame be attached to such individuals when they conduct themselves according to their psychical sex?”
― Jennie June, Autobiography of an Androgyne

“I have been doomed to be a girl who must pass her earthly existence in a male body. How dreadful it is to a young woman to have a slight growth of hair on lip or cheeks ! Only one mark of the male ! How much more dreadful for a young woman to possess almost all the male anatomy as I do ! How I have bewailed my fate!”
― Jennie June, Autobiography of an Androgyne

“I trust that the publication of my life story will contribute to a correct estimate of androgvnism on the part of scientists, the molders of public opinion, and the lawmakers, and to a more kindly treatment by society of those born with this curse. It is only expressing half the truth to say that they are more to be pitied than scorned. They are wholly to be pitied.”
― Jennie June, Autobiography of an Androgyne

“Being openly queer can feel intimidating. But every day just by being yourself you inspire the people around you. You don't have to be an influencer to influence!”
― Theo Parish, Homebody

“how do you tell your mom that she got your body wrong when she made you?”
― Chris Bergeron, Valide

“Binders have become my protective layer, my second skin, my shield that makes me feel safe and more myself.”
― Tobly McSmith, Stay Gold

“The emergence of trans-exclusionary radical feminism [TERF] in the 1970s, with its own version of trans panic, is only one of many trans-misogynistic echoes in recent history. TERFs... didn't invent trans misogyny, nor did they put a particularly novel spin in it...portrayal of trans femininity as violent and depressed could have been lifted from the British denunciation of hijras in the 1870s, or from Nazi propaganda about transvestites in the 1930s... Recent work by historians has cat doubt in his popular TERF beliefs ever were outside a few loud agitators... If anything, TERFs, whether in the 1970s or in their contemporary "gender-critical" guise, are better understood as conventional boosters of statist and racist political institutions... TERFs, like the right-wing evangelicals or white supremacists who agree with them politically, are not the lynchpin to trans misogyny; rather, they are at best one of its latest manifestations.”
― Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny