Transgender Quotes

I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels. ~ Jan Morris

Ask anyone who's transgender. They'll tell you they're trapped in the wrong body. But me, I'm trapped in the wrong body because I'm trapped in a body. All bodies are the wrong body. ~ Tim Cannon

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 ~ Kate Bornstein

It might seem daunting to a congregation to have to learn about pronouns, or to designate a bathroom gender-neutral, or to have difficult conversations about what it means to affirm LGBTQ+ identities. But transgender people are not a burden for Christianity, or for the church. They come bearing gifts! ~ Austen Hartke

Many in the trans community are fed up with L.G.B.T. organizations that continue to erase trans identity or just give lip service to trans issues. We need our cisgender allies - gay and straight - to treat transgender lives as if they matter, and trans people need multiple seats at the tables in the organizations that say they're interested in L.G.B.T. equality; this absence has been painful since Stonewall. ~ Laverne Cox

When Dawn looked at Vic, she saw Vic exactly as he wanted to be seen. Whereas Vic's parents couldn't help seeing who he used to be, and so many friends and strangers couldn't help seeing who he didn't want to be anymore, Dawn only saw him. Call it a blur if you want, but Dawn didn't see a blur. She saw a very distinct, very clear person. ~ David Levithan

So it's actually way easier just to humor these men who grew up watching movies where the girl doesn't like the hero until he's been persistent enough to make her like him. This is the grease that keeps the gears of the heteronormativity machine spinning, obviously, but it's just easier to slip out of an awkward situation with an awkward guy than it is to call out the misogyny inherent in what he's doing. It's a tough spot to be in, but also this is coming from an angry dyke who's also trans and who, at one point, had society try to use her as a vessel for that kinda of misogyny. ~ Imogen Binnie

Our identities matter. They help make us who we are and shape our outlook. Existing in them is a radical act, one that requires, in many instances, courage, hard work, and determination. I am a better person because of the experiences and insights that I've had because I'm transgender. I'm a more compassionate person than I was before I accepted that part of my identity. ~ Sarah McBride

On 'Glee,' we often tackle the tough topics that young people face - in fact, my recurring character, Wade 'Unique' Adams, is a transgender teenager who finds herself navigating a lot of the same problems many young people face around the globe. ~ Alex Newell

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. ~ Leslie Feinberg

Nobody really wants to be a trans woman, i.e. nobody wakes up and goes whoa, maybe my life would be better if I transitioned, alienating most of my friends and my family, I wonder what'll happen at work, I'd love to spend all my money on hormones and surgeries, buying a new wardrobe that I don't even understand right now, probably become unlovable and then ending my short life in a bloody murder. ~ Imogen Binnie

Also, I had read a book called She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, written by a professor who had gone through transgender surgery, but it took this person well into his thirties to come to terms with the absolute necessity of having to do it. ~ Mercedes Ruehl

We dance. Sweet, downcast, through-the-lashes-glances bely every beating she got at thirteen, every lash of the tongue from her dad at fourteen, every heroin high that let her out for awhile, every hour and day she had to be tough.

She is so natural and soft. Her shoulders are down, hips loose and swinging as we close together. I swear I'm growing chest hair just looking at her. I've been a boy in public before, but I've never seen her like this. That's it exactly; I haven't seen her at all, except in glimpses, in half-confessional role-play sex. And here she is - pressed tight against my chest, hips grinding against my crotch to the bass bump of the music. Her thigh along mine is electric heaven. Two drag queens cannot decide whether we are breeders or in drag. I stroke my mascara-made mustache at them - but none of it matters with hands in suede and the way she smiles. ~ Various

You are an anomaly of a man," she said.

"Perhaps because I'm not a man at all." He sat closer now. The sheets wrinkled as he scooted himself toward her.

"Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling," she said..."Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn't decide what it wanted to be?"

"I think it doesn't matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not," he answered. ~ Rivers Solomon

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. ~ Kate Bornstein

We are spiritual beings having a human experience. We don't choose the experience but we do choose how we react to the experience we have. Choose to be positive, choose to be helpful, choose to be happy. ~ Paula Coffer

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 ... ~ Sarah Waters

I would rather sit next to a transgender person and discuss why every single one I've met smells like a bar in the daytime than listen to people tell my why I want to have children and that I just don't know it yet. I do know, because I'm me and my feelings are the ones in my head. I don't want to have kids, and it's not a device to get attention or have conversations about it. I simply find children incredibly immature and, more often than not, dumb. ~ Chelsea Handler

Everybody's got a pas. " he said. "That dosen't mean you can't have a future ~ Meredith Russo

I'm quite certain now that I'm male and always have been, but I was told otherwise for so long that I accepted I couldn't be. ~ Ana Mardoll

When my friend told her drug dealer that she was transgender, he immediately started using the correct pronouns for her and her parents don't so there's an issue there. ~ Unknown

Have you ever accidentally swallowed a piece of celery without chewing? The feeling of its weight lodged in your throat, scraping its way down. You think you're gonna choke, but your throat takes over and digests it, and it takes all the wind out of you. You need to lie down, catch your breath, maybe even take a nap.
That's how it feels to come out each time. ~ Aimee Herman

Transgender people are not Mal-functional humans. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

The work begins by each of us recognizing that cis people are not more valuable or legitimate and that trans people who blend as cis are not more valuable or legitimate. We must recognize, discuss, and dismantle this hierarchy that polices bodies and values certain ones over others. ~ Janet Mock

A "matriarchal world" does not mean matrilineal or that one queen shall rule the world. It simply means "a world in which a Mother's Heart leads all social institutions, corporations, and governments." All humans-men, women, or transgender-can embody a mother's heart if they so choose. We are destined for extinction as a human race unless a mother's heart assumes leadership of the world. ~ Ananda Karunesh

The term "FTM-Butch Border War" just sounds like an alien land of yore. How is it that the gravitational pull of my beard and low-voice should hold [my lesbian friend's] masculinity in deferential orbit? That when standing side-by-side we are supposedly read in comparison, rendering her unalterably more feminine - shorthand, in patriarchal societies, for "lesser than"?

Masculinity has more than enough space to spare. But sometimes its flesh-and-blood vessels act as if we have to wound each other for it, like dogs fighting over too few scraps. Anyway, [she] and I know without speaking that in reality, right here and right now in our present moment, that she and I are two different sides of the same coin; two keys sung for the same tune."

- from "Snapshots: "Sharing Space with Women," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014 ~ Mitch Kellaway

Scott looked at George as if his sibling made sense to him for the first time. George had never been gladder to have an older brother. ~ Alex Gino

Between 'Orange' with Laverne, the show 'Transparent,' and Caitlyn Jenner, obviously we're in the middle of something enormous - a transgender movement. I'm just proud to be alive during this massive shift in the world. ~ Ruby Rose

Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh. This truth, which is banal enough, unravels time and the face, holds up a mirror to me in which I cannot see myself without being overcome by a profound sadness that undermines one's whole being. The mirror has become the route through which my body reaches that state, in which it is crushed into the ground, digs a temporary grave, and allows itself to be drawn by the living roots that swarm beneath the stones. It is flattened beneath the weight of that immense sadness which few people have the privilege of knowing. So I avoid mirrors. ~ Tahar Ben Jelloun

In our own time, academic history has grown unbelievably diverse,
even to the point of ridicule by conservatives, who may not appreciate that
it is a sign of a culture's strength, and not its weakness, that it can devote
resources to the study of early American midwives, or transgender people
in the nineteenth century, or the emergence of new forms of urban slang.
In part, these new types of history are just good, if sophisticated, fun. It
can be fascinating and deeply rewarding to read about other human beings
who have had lives radically different from (or similar to) one's own. But
these new histories also tell stories that have long gone untold, and perhaps
not for any good reason. Perhaps these histories may rouse political
theory from its slumbers, and show it that there are more things in heaven
and earth than are dreamt of in its philosophy. ~ Jason Kuznicki

The trousers were miles too long, even when Peter cuffed the legs. The socks bagged in the ankles, and the shirt and sweater were equally large. But when Peter finally managed to get the collars to lie right and glanced at the reflection he'd carved out of the dust on James's mirror, a shock went through him.
This was the face which had haunted him all his life, the one he had looked in the eye on the day he left the Darling house for the last time. The hair, messy and short, enthusiastically curling without the weight of his old braid to drag it down. The stubborn chin. The clear, sharp, sullen eyes full of everything he had never been allowed to be.
Peter ran his hands over himself slowly, breathing tentatively, feeling the weight of his chest under his shirt. He had given this body up. He had thought it belonged to Wendy, to the girl he wasn't. He had let his family make him believe that the only way he would ever be a boy was to be born again in a different shape, leaving everything of his body and history behind.
He breathed out and settled in the feeling of being himself, of being something whole. ~ Austin Chant

And I found in my study that history is cyclic, and everywhere in the world you find this pattern in ancient times: that as a culture begins to decline, you have an efflorescence of transgender phenomena. That is a symptom of cultural collapse. ~ Camille Paglia

I'm not trying to be a spokeswoman for the transgender community; I just want to be looked at as a living, breathing, happy human being. ~ Candis Cayne

I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of woman and wake with the same. I don't foresee no time where this ain't true no more. ~ Sebastian Barry

Don't misunderstand. I am not here bashing people who are homosexuals, who are lesbians, who are bisexual, who are transgender. We need to have profound compassion for people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life and sexual identity disorders. ~ Michele Bachmann

When did you know you were a girl? When did I know I was a boy?" he said. "I knew my whole life. I can't tell you exactly when, but it wasn't like I was ten and realized, 'Oh gee, I must be a boy!' What people fail to realize is they made that decision way earlier than that. It just happened that their gender identity and their anatomy matched. ~ Jaime A. Seba

All surgery and no makeup make Jack a dull girl. ~ Brian Spellman

It's not a light matter to me. I've fought for so long to hold on to what I believe in. People call me weird or disgusting...but this is who I am! This is how I feel most like myself! ~ Hiro Fujiwara

The current transgender movement is composed of a great number of factions, divided by those old favorites of class, race, age, language, region, and nationality. ~ Kate Bornstein

When we look at stories of renaming in the Bible, we often find that a character is handed a new name they never asked for. While I'm sure Abraham treasured the new name and promise God gave him, and while Peter probably felt honored in the moment Jesus proclaimed him the bedrock of the church, not everybody comes by their new name so easily. Some people have to fight for it. ~ Austen Hartke

It's not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one's sex. Gendered self-consciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature. ~ Denise Riley

Effective immediately, transgender Americans may serve openly, and they can no longer be discharged or otherwise separated from the military just for being transgender. ~ Ashton Carter

If one does not make an ego out of gender, one would still know whether one is a man or a woman, gay, straight, bisexual, transgender - whatever else we may think of. But those identities need to fit very loosely and be worn very lightly. All sense of privilege or deprivation that has developed around one's gender identity, all rigidity regarding proper roles and behaviors for the various genders, must be cut through. ~ Rita M. Gross

My general view is that best actor best suited to role should get the job. Obviously when it comes to colour and issues of ethnicity the choice is clear. But I do not believe you have to be transgender or have undergone sex reassignment surgery to be able play a character who has.Acting is acting after all. ~ Stephen Fry

You know, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender - people are people. ~ Judith Light

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. ~ Andrew Solomon

Some critics of trans people have told us that we shouldn't feel this pain of being denied the legitimacy of our own selves; gender is, of course, just a social construct. I wonder if these people also tell widows not to bother grieving their husbands, because marriage is also just another social construct. ~ C.N. Lester

I'm a woman. And I'm a man. That's how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn't do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself. ~ Jeanette Winterson

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 ~ Carol Queen

After three hours, I come back to the waiting room. It is a cosmetic surgery office, so a little like a hotel lobby, underheated and expensively decorated, with candy in little dishes, emerald-green plush chairs, and upscale fashion magazines artfully displayed against the wall.
A young woman comes in, frantic to get a pimple "zapped" before she sees her family over the holidays. An older woman comes in with her daughter for a follow-up visit to a face-lift. She is wearing a scarf and dark glasses. The nurse examines her bruises right out in the waiting room.
And you are in the operating room having your body and your gender legally altered. I feel like laughing, but I know it makes me sound like a lunatic. ~ Joan Nestle

Everybody deserves a shot at playing sports. It shouldn't matter in the least if that person is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Building community through healthy and inclusive activities should be one of the main focuses behind athletics, and that isn't possible if you exclude LGBT individuals, especially our youth. ~ Mardy Fish

This is the thing I learned from loving a transgender boy who took years to say his own name: that waiting with someone, existing in that quiet, wondering space with them when they need it, is worth all the words we have in us. ~ Anna-Marie McLemore

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." ~ Oprah Winfrey

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. ~ Leslie Feinberg

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? ~ Kate Bornstein

Passing is one of the few words in the transgender lexicon that's not a medical-legacy word. We did ever so much better with this one: it's a racist-legacy word, a legacy of the time when Africans were kidnapped from their homeland to be enslaved in the Americas. If you're not familiar with this, a hierarchy of race developed in which the lighter your skin was, the more attractive and intelligent you were considered, and someone quite light-skinned could sometimes pass for white and live in white society. ~ S. Bear Bergman

Do you dwell on everyone's junk when you meet them? Like, all you do all day long is think about dicks and janes? Is that your thing, Bailey? You can't stop thinking about what's in everyone's pants? ~ Brie Spangler

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. ~ Leslie Feinberg

I, faggot Wenqing Kang, Ph. D. in History from UC Santa Cruz, do solemnly swear that homosexual relationships between men are more enjoyable and more harmonious than heterosexual relationships. ~ Bill Gaede

I know what I am. I know that I've chosen to identify as a transgender woman, and that I am - by and large - happy with where I am in this world. I'm far from perfect, and I could give you a list as long as my arms of the things I'd love to change. Nevertheless, I am still here, and I am still me, and no one can change that without my permission.
-Gwendolyn Ann Smith, We're All Someone's Freak ~ Kate Bornstein S. Bear Bergman

You can change a body, but you can't change a soul. The heart wants what it wants. ~ Chris Colfer

Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I'll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political." It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities." This tendency has often been satirised - the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs - but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.
Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or envi ~ Christopher Hitchens

I am not trapped in the wrong body; I am trapped in a world that makes very little space for bodies like mine. ~ Ivan E. Coyote

Every single American - gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgender - every single American deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our society. It's a pretty simple proposition. ~ Barack Obama

Sorry to disappoint you, parents - but when your kids come out as gay, bi or transgender, it is not about you. ~ Christina Engela

I watched those women get eaten alive. And as a result of my witnessing that at a super fucking vulnerable moment for me, I internalized the message that a trans lesbian is just not an okay thing to be if you wanna be tolerated or respected by anybody other than a handful of communists. So I began my transition with essentially no role model of a widely respected and admired trans lesbian. And it doesn't help that most forms of transphobia are harsher on gay trans women than they are on straight trans women. Like take this trope that trans women are men who transition to creep on women in bathrooms. In response to that, it feels really good to be able to say, I'm not even attracted to women. I'm just a petite heterosexual biogirl. I'm surely not some kind of six foot monster who likes women. Ugh, shame! Shame! It does make me feel like a monster sometimes, like a mutant that has no place in society. And this shame has actually made it more difficult for me to accept that I'm a gay woman, than it was for me to come out as trans in the first place. It's like I made a kind of subconscious bargain where I traded my sexual orientation for my gender identity. So I finally transitioned only to spend the next couple years living with a different kind of denial. And that denial got pretty deep and pretty dark.

This is painful and incriminating to admit, but not all of my shame came from external bigotry. Some of it came from my own judgment and disgust toward things I saw ~ Natalie Wynn

No one really knows why people are born transgender, but there are a few medical theories. The most talked-about one is that a hormonal imbalance during pregnancy might cause it. Some doctors believe it might be a brain structure thing. It's even possible that it's genetic. No one knows for sure, but whatever the reason, it's real and no one's fault. ~ Jazz Jennings

The whole transgender movement idea is happening in waves around the world. Some areas of the world are further along politically than others. The economy has a lot to do with that, as does moral or religious climate. ~ Kate Bornstein

She lives always dressed as a woman and she whores as a woman. I would never think she was a man. I can't really see the man in her. Most of the time I absolutely know but she has none of the qualities of female impersonators that I can recognize. have gone into restaurants with her and every man in the place has turned around to look at her and made all kinds of hoots and whistles. And it was her, it wasn't me. ~ Diane Arbus

I am rather disturbed by the fact that so many people - who are neither medical professionals nor trans themselves - would want to hear all of the gory details regarding transsexual physical transformations, or would feel that they have any right to ask us about the state of our genitals. ~ Julia Serano

It (Pose Fx) is incredible in showing how pop culture can be so important in affirming people and experiences, and being deliberate and unapologetic about centring people and those whose voices continue to be marginalised because of their gender, age and class. ~ Tlaleng Mofokeng

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. ~ Leslie Feinberg

I really don't understand how parents can talk about gay couples' PDA as a problem or a transgender teen's suicide and not the fact that too many of our kids are being murdered in the schools and on the streets. ~ Steven Petrow

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

Compromise is often necessary [in politics], but entire marginalized identities are not expendable chess pieces. ~ Sarah McBride

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. ~ C.N. Lester

That night I looked Stephanie [Burt] up online and started reading more about her work...I kept encountering a striking factoid...: she's often cited as the most influential poetry critic of her generation. And she's openly trans. This is not the world I was taught I would grow into when I was a young trans child -- the one where transgender people are heard, are brilliant, are influential, are even the best. At anything. Being trans, I'd learned subliminally, was supposed to keep you from being that -- even if you loved your trans self, and even if some other trans people and a few allies did too, the world at large would keep your potential tamped down."

- from "Surface Difficulty: An Adventure in Reading Trans Poetry," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014 ~ Mitch Kellaway

When the Majority of jokes made at the expense of trans people center on "men wearing dresses" or "men who want their penises cut off" that is not transphobia- it is trans-misogyny. When the majority of violence and sexual assaults omitted against trans people is directed at trans women, that is not transphobia- it is trans-misogyny. ~ Julia Serano

The conservative ideology sees LGBT rights as an affront to the traditional way of life, for some reason. We are attacked as phonies, pretenders, even perverts, just for being who we are. There are people who wish for us to go back into the shadows, the closet, never to return.

Many of these people who wish to deny us our very legitimacy, who denounce us as mentally ill deviants, spend an hour each week paying homage to an ever-present, yet non-interventionist man in the sky. They go to courts across the land to defend their right to praise that uncorroborated deity at the expense of other people's civil liberties. To them, we the living, the transgender people who walk the earth, are fake, but the man up there, He is real. ~ Ian Thomas Malone

I can't help but marvel at the resiliency of trans people who sacrifice so much to be seen and accepted as they are. Despite those sacrifices, trans people are still wrongly viewed as being confused. It takes determination and clear, thought-out conviction, not confusion, to give up many of the privileges that Genie did to be visibly herself, though her experiences varied from my own. ~ Janet Mock

At the beginning of each year, we have conceptual meetings. How are we going to challenge ourselves this year? So we suggested a transsexual or transgender. And to be honest, I am shocked they let us do it. ~ Jai Rodriguez

I am a huge fan of the transgender community. ~ Kesha

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. ~ Robin Caldwell

I always enjoyed doing transgender songs. ~ Patti Smith

Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic to girls and very harmful to their mental health. It is, perhaps, not surprising, therefore, that there seem to be some girls baling out and seeking to upgrade their status. ~ Sheila Jeffreys

The Washington Post speaking out against state legislation that he believed would let businesses deny services to gay, lesbian and transgender people. [Tim] Cook himself came out as gay in the pages of Bloomberg Businessweek. ~ Laura Sydell

That I was a boy, but it was not as simple as me wanting to be called he. That I liked being called he and him. But that I would've liked being called she and her sometimes, too, if it didn't let everyone settle into the assumption that I was a girl. I had never been a girl, would never be a girl... ~ Anna-Marie McLemore

Patience seems to be something that every transgender person needs in abundance. ~ Nicola Jane Chase

When we are surrounded by such diversity - in nature, in culture, in human spirit - how can we stand not to acknowledge it? ~ C.N. Lester

I'm conflicted. On one hand, I don't want to say that because you were a man and now you're a woman, you can't be in a women's fashion show. But I feel it's a dicey issue. The fact of the matter is, when you are transgender - if you go, say, male to female - you're not having your pelvis broken and having it expanded surgically. You still have the anatomical bone structure of a man. ~ Tim Gunn

I followed the trail out of the room, invigorated by the possibility of reinventing my own body. The meaning was mine, as long as I was with those who had the vision and vocabulary to understand my creation. ~ Nick Krieger

At the State of the Union address last night, President Obama made history by using the words transgender, lesbian, and bisexual in that speech. It was the part of the speech where he was just reading Craigslist personals. ~ Conan O'Brien

If you are a woman, if you're a person of colour, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are a person od 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. You know when you look in the mirror and you think 'oh, I'm so fat, I'm so old, I'm so ugly', don't you know, that's not your authentic self? But that is billions upon billions of dollars of advertising, magazines, movies, billboards, all geared to make you feel shitty about yourself so that you will take your hard earned money and spend it at the mall on some turn-around creme that doesn't turn around shit.

When you don't have self-esteem you will hesitate before you do anything in your life. You will hesitate to go for the job you really wanna go for, you will hesitate to ask for a raise, you will hesitate to call yourself an American, you will hesitate to report a rape, you will hesitate to defend yourself when you are discriminated against because of your race, your sexuality, your size, your gender. You will hesitate to vote, you will hesitate to dream. For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution and our revolution is long overdue. ~ Margaret Cho

I thought of going the rest of my life pretending I sprang to life from nothing at sixteen years old and felt my cheeks flush with shame and anger. I was so tired of cowering. I was so tired of hiding. I wanted to tell the truth, to say it out loud. ~ Meredith Russo

The hardest part has been learning how to take myself seriously when the entire world is constantly telling me that femininity is always inferior to masculinity ~ Julia Serano

Everyone has people in their lives that are gay, lesbian or transgender or bisexual. They may not want to admit it, but I guarantee they know somebody. ~ Billie Jean King

Being transgender guarantees you will upset someone. People get upset with transgender people who choose to inhabit a third gender space rather than "pick a side." Some get upset at transgender people who do not eschew their birth histories. Others get up in arms with those who opted out of surgical options, instead living with their original equipment. Ire is raised at those who transition, then transition again when they decide that their initial change was not the right answer for them. Heck, some get their dander up simply because this or that transgender person simply is not "trying hard enough" to be a particular gender, whatever that means. Some are irked that the Logo program RuPaul's Drag Race shows a version of transgender life different from their own. Meanwhile, all around are those who have decided they aren't comfortable with the lot of us, because we dared to change from one gender expression or identity to some other. ~ Kate Bornstein

I never would have been able to tell!" I was finally able to put my finger on it, and it's something that anyone who is meeting a transgender person for the first time should keep in mind. Saying you "never would have known" is actually very rude. Being surprised that a person looks like the gender they are just reinforces a stereotype that transgender people aren't usually attractive or able to pass, and worse, the stereotype that physical appearances even matter. A person's true essence comes from within! I ~ Jazz Jennings

The thing is, we can't be in right relationship to each other if we can't see each other. We can't be fully present in any relationship if we're walling off part of ourselves or hiding beneath a mask. ~ Austen Hartke

She figured out that she was such a mess not because she was trans, but because being trans is so stigmatized. If you could leave civilization for a year, like live in an abandoned shopping mall out in the desert giving yourself injections of estrogen, working on your voice, figuring out how to dress yourself all over again and meditating eight hours a day on gendered socialization, and then get bottom surgery as a reward, it would be pretty easy to transition. ~ Imogen Binnie