Gender Identity Quotes

“So now I'm thinking about it. I'm imagining sitting down with my parents and actually saying, "I'm gay." And you know what? It makes me a little mad. I mean, straight guys don't have to sit their parents down and tell them they like girls.”
― Michael Thomas Ford, Suicide Notes

“Feminism is itself a challenge. Feminism is a challenge to the way things are in the world. It is by definition an oppositional movement, because it’s trying to accomplish something. I’ve never felt like feminism was a consciousness raising effort in isolation. Everything about feminism is about getting something in the world to get better for women, and to get the world to be less stupid on gender bifurcation terms. I think that feminism over time gets better, or it gets better and worse and better and worse at achieving the goals that it’s trying to achieve, but the overall mission stays the same. I guess I don’t think of it as feminism versus anti-feminism; I sort of think of it as feminism versus the world. I don’t think of it as a competition; there’s no winning. In feminism, you’re always trying to make stuff better. It’s opposition to which you cannot attribute a tally.”
― Rachel Maddow

“... it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“It's easy to fictionalize an issue when you're not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.”
― Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

“It is not possible to preserve one's identity by adjusting for any length of time to a frame of reference that is in itself destructive to it. It is very hard indeed for a human being to sustain such an 'inner' split - conforming outwardly to one reality, while trying to maintain inwardly the value it denies.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“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, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“At some point during my research, I came across the term "gender fluid." Reading those words was a revelation. It was like someone tore a layer of gauze off the mirror, and I could see myself clearly for the first time. There was a name for what I was. It was a thing. Gender fluid.

Sitting there in front of my computer--like I am right now--I knew I would never be the same. I could never go back to seeing it the old way; I could never go back to not knowing what I was.

But did that glorious moment of revelation really change anything? I don't know. Sometimes, I don't think so. I may have a name for what I am now--but I'm just as confused and out of place as I was before. And if today is any indication, I'm still playing out that scene in the toy store--trying to pick the thing that will cause the least amount of drama. And not having much success.”
― Jeff Garvin, Symptoms of Being Human

“As for why... I didn't want to admit that I was female. It wasn't that I wanted to be a boy, more like I hated the whole idea of belonging to a gender... That somehow before I was ''me'' I was a ''woman'', like I was scared of being overly defined by those expectations, I guess...”
― Kabi Nagata, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

“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, Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender

“Some day, my son, you are going to learn that the two greatest joys of being a man are beating the hell out of someone and getting the hell beaten out of you, good night.”
― Richard Price, I Wanderers

“Whenever she imagined her child, grown up without interference from a judgemental world, she imagined its male and female halves as complementing each other, and as being secretly, almost magically powerful.”
― Kathleen Winter, Annabel

“Because transsexuals have lost their physical “members” does not mean that they have lost their ability to penetrate women—women’s mind, women’s space, women’s sexuality. Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women so that they seem noninvasive.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“Finally, and I think most important, there are more male-to-constructed-female transsexuals because men are socialized to fetishize and objectify. The same socialization that enables men to objectify women in rape, pornography, and “drag” enables them to objectify their own bodies.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“The sex of a person lies more in his mind than in his body, or to express myself in more medical terms, it lies more in the brain than in the genitals.”
― Magnus Hirschfeld

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

“This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies - it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“[John] Money spent the rest of his childhood in a predominantly female household in consistent poverty. His childhood instilled in him a dislike of religious dogma and sexual prudery as well as a deep class-consciousness alongside his ambition to transcend his meager beginning, Science would become his religion.”
― Sandra Eder, How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea

“She was running for all those ordinary, fragile souls whose bodies had been shamed like hers. In them, she had found herself. And so she ran for them, for those who, like her, had found comfort only in cut-out posters of clownfish. Now they had a different poster they could dream about: an athlete, an international star, her body neither fully boy nor fully girl, but simply the body of Johanna Venter, Girl Wonder.”
― J A Croome, The Sand People: a collection of magical realism and other stories

“Sarah Nan takes me by the wrist and pulls me away. 'Lizzie, you were talking to a boy!'

'It's no big deal,' I tell her. Maybe it was--because it didn't feel like talking to a boy. It felt like talking to a person.”
― Karen Wilfrid, Just Lizzie

“For as David explains, when seven-year-old Brenda daydreamed of an ideal future, she saw herself as a twenty-one-year-old male with a mustache, a sports car, and surrounded by admiring friends. "He was someone I wanted to be," David says today, reflecting on those childhood fantasies”
― John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

“I don't”
― Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer: A Memoir

“He was so used to men's usage
and had so rejected women's ways
that little was lacking for him to be a man.
Whatever one could see was certainly male!
But there's more to this than meets the eye -
the he's a she beneath the clothes.”
― Heldris de Cornualles, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance

“Go to a chamber and learn to sew!
That's what Nature's usage wants of you!
You are not Silentius!"
and he replied, "I never heard that before!
Not Silentius? Who am I then?
Silentius is my name, I think,
or I am other than who I was.
But this I know well, upon my oath,
that I cannot be anybody else!
Therefore, I am Silentius,
as I see it, or I am no one.”
― Heldris de Cornualles, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance

“I was trying to make life easy for myself,
but I have a mouth too hard for kisses,
and arms too rough for embraces.
One could easily make a fool of me
in any game played under the covers,
for I'm a young man, not a girl.”
― Heldris de Cornualles, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance

“May life around us rage and thunder, I shall at last enter the battle of life as a person with equal rights, a strong will, and a glad heart.”
― N.O. Body, Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years

“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 am a woman entombed in the body of a man.”
― Jennie June, Autobiography of an Androgyne

“An androgyne, even when living out his nature, can attain the same ethical and religious heights as any other individual.”
― Jennie June, Autobiography of an Androgyne

“I am like someone who is building a bridge. But it is no ordinary bridge. On one bank I stand ...... That is the present and there I have already driven in the first poles. And from this bank I am going to build my bridge, floating in space toward the other bank that I often see not at all and otherwise only see as in a fog. Only now and then I see it quite clearly in my dreams. And then I do not know if this bank means the past or the future. This question then awakes in me: Have I only had a past or have I not had any past at all, or do I only have a future and no past?”
― Lili Elbe, Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change