Trans Man Quotes

“Being transgender is who you are, and the pain is what the outside does to you. The pain is what happens when you and the world go at each other's throats.”
― Andrew Joseph White, Hell Followed With Us

“I'm done begging for a scrap of respect-I am done with those who enact suffering, and I am done with the sons of bitches who stand back and let it happen.”
― Andrew Joseph White, Hell Followed With Us

“I finally said, "Let's put it this way: I'd rather lose you than stop my shots.""You mean that chemical is more important to you than I am?""No, I am more important to me than you are.”
― Louis Graydon Sullivan, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan

“A big fear of mine is that I will die before the gender professionals acknowledge that someone like me exists, and then I really won't exist to prove them wrong.”
― Louis Graydon Sullivan, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan

“It really hasn't hit me that I am about to die. I see the grief around me, but inside I feel serene and a certain kind of peace. My whole life I've wanted to be a gay man and it's kind of an honor to die from the gay men's disease.”
― Louis Graydon Sullivan, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan

“Bein transgender is who you are, and the pain is what the outside does to you. The pain is what happens when you and the world go at each other's throats.”
― Andrew Joseph White, Hell Followed With Us

“My opened shirt blew in the wind—The sun tanning my stomach—Feeling lean and alive and beautiful—Saying I am a man—Saying I love men.”
― Louis Graydon Sullivan

“I don't even know if there was anyone that's ever felt as I do.. how they coped, what they did...how do I find out what someone like me does?”
― Louis Graydon Sullivan, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan

“Gifts Iphis promised when she was a maid
transformed into a boy he gladly paid.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“In a lot of ways I think the problem is I spend too much time seeing myself though other people's eyes and not really being in my body and enjoying myself and relaxing in my image.”
― Ellis Martin, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan

“It's not that I've changed, but that everyone else has changed toward me, just because they think I'm male now. And I feel less self-conscious because of that.

I haven't changed inside at all.”
― Ellis Martin, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan

“Is sex reassignment surgery moral/right? ''If a patient came to you and wanted you to remove his normal left eye or his right hand,
would you do that, just because he asked you to?''
A patient who comes in with such a request is, on the face of it, acutely psychotic. Transsexuals are not psychotic. Further, transsexuals do not want a useful organ removed, reducing their efficiency; but they want a more or less (to them) useless sexual
equipment altered so that a more or less useful (to them) equipment will result.”
― Louis Graydon Sullivan, Information for the Female-to-Male Cross Dresser and Transsexual

“I don't even know if there was anyone that's ever felt as I do.. how they coped, what they did...how do I find out what someone like me does?”
― Ellis Martin, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan

“Sometimes I worry (and I know I worry too much, too seriously) that I will have the same self-doubts and uneasiness as a man as I have a woman. I worry that I will fail to find the happiness I think I will. But as I wash myself and prepare for this surgery, when I buy my new shirts and look at my breasts and think they are sexy (!), I know I'll come out of this a better person.”
― Ellis Martin, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan

“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

“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.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“In an interview I did with the incredible drag performer Taylor Mac, he describes his dazzling stage manifestation this way,
"On stage the drag isn't a costume, but something I'm exposing about myself; it's what I look like on the inside." Drag is how he makes his invisible self visible.

I am interested in this idea of an invisible self. I have always said that I walked around invisible for fifty years and that now what could not be seen on the inside is finally alive on the outside. Yes, the outside is a kind of costume but it reflects an inner knowing.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“His bridge partner of ten years arrives and brings him a pamphlet on holistic approaches to treating cancer. Has he met my dad —Jimmy Dean sausage's biggest buyer? The bridge partner asks me how my kids are doing. He thinks I'm my brother Christian. I tell him my daughter is becoming an accomplished hair stylist and colorist, which my niece is. Two more bridge players come up and ask to pray over Dad. I start to imagine a Christian rock group named the Fundamentalist Bridge Play-ers. Then his most foul-mouthed friend, who he has played golf with for years, stops by. He’s been born again since his wife died a year ago. He tells my dad, "We have to get you right with God," and forces us all to hold hands and pray over my dad around his hospital bed. Another friend comes and brings him Ensure. My dad has said a thousand times that he can't eat, but he is knocking down those Ensures. This guy asks me, "Is your sister Polly coming?" "We are coming in shifts," I say.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“His bridge partner of ten years arrives and brings him a pamphlet on holistic approaches to treating cancer. Has he met my dad —Jimmy Dean sausage's biggest buyer? The bridge partner asks me how my kids are doing. He thinks I'm my brother Christian. I tell him my daughter is becoming an accomplished hair stylist and colorist, which my niece is. Two more bridge players come up and ask to pray over Dad. I start to imagine a Christian rock group named the Fundamentalist Bridge Players. Then his most foul-mouthed friend, who he has played golf with for years, stops by. He’s been born again since his wife died a year ago. He tells my dad, "We have to get you right with God," and forces us all to hold hands and pray over my dad around his hospital bed. Another friend comes and brings him Ensure. My dad has said a thousand times that he can't eat, but he is knocking down those Ensures. This guy asks me, "Is your sister Polly coming?" "We are coming in shifts," I say.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“The first time he went crazy was at a girls' slumber party at Sandy Biondo's house in the third grade. It was his inaugural overnight in a crowded sea of Barbie sleeping bags. Giggling and baking cupcakes, doing each other's makeup in the bathroom upstairs, and staying up until 3:00 A.M. As she lay in his plain, light blue sleeping bag, his heart began to race uncontrollably. She felt the racing pulse in her neck, something she would do a thousand more times in her fifty years of crippling anxiety. She had never felt his heart beat so hard. His stomach began to churn and she ran into the bathroom to vomit. Her first panic attack and his first attempt to escape. Her last slumber party.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“As a woman, I would have rather been bipolar, something I could take medication for, than been treated like a woman - something I could not control.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“I think it's hard for people to understand what I mean when I say "I'm a guy's guy." I am in one way "becoming" a man and in another way I have always been one and I'm trying out all the ways to understand how I want to live that out, good and bad. Becoming a white man visibly is like a newly found superpower-like when Spider-Man suddenly realizes he can scale the sides of buildings but doesn't quite know how to control his own power and smashes up against a concrete wall on his first several attempts. He flails until he eventually knows how to use his power for good.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“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.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition