Gender Non Conforming Quotes

Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.

Conformity requires us to minimize our differences for the greater good. We fear that if we don't conform, we will be abandoned, but there is no loneliness like having people only see you after you've erased yourself.

When I was really small I thought I’d do anything to change whatever was wrong with me. Now I didn’t want to change, I just wanted people to stop being mad at me all the time.

The scrutiny on our bodies distracts us from what's really going on here: control. The emphasis on our appearance distracts us from the real focus: power.

Some gender non-conforming people are nonbinary, and some are men and women. It depends on each person’s experience. Two people can look similar and be completely different genders. Gender is not what people look like to other people; it is what we know ourselves to be. No one else should be able to tell you who you are; that’s for you to decide.

Gender non-conforming people face considerable distress not because we have a disorder, but because of stigma and discrimination. There is nothing wrong with us, what is wrong is a world that punishes us for not being normatively masculine or feminine.

Gender non-conformity is seen as something immature, something we have to grow out of to become adults.

Arguments against gender non-conforming people are about maintaining power and control. Most can be grouped into four categories: dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope.

How are you supposed to be believed about the harm that you experience when people don't even believe that you exist? The assumption is that being a masculine man or a feminine woman is normal, and that being "us" is an accessory. Like if you remove our clothing, our makeup, and our pronouns, underneath the surface we are just men and women playing dress-up.

Gender non-conforming people are not opportunisitic; we are oppressed.

This repression is something we first did to ourselves. We know how to do it so well to other people because we were the first testing grounds. We silenced our own differences, subdued our creativity, and toned down our own gender non-conformity in order to fit in. We thought fitting in would give us security—but is it security when someone else living their life differently unsettles us to our very core?

Imagine everyone you encounter all day long telling you that you are not real and that there is something fundamentally wrong with you. Being constantly invalidated takes a toll: 40 percent of trans and gender non-conforming people have attempted suicide.

People judge gender non-conformity because they are insecure about their identities. If they weren’t, then gender variance wouldn’t be so heavily policed.

It's a surreal experience to have your personhood be reduced to a prop.

At a fundamental level, we are still having to argue for the very ability to exist. The truth is, I still cannot go outside without being afraid for my safety. There are few spaces where I do not experience harassment for the way I look.

We silenced our own differences, subdued our creativity, and toned down our own gender non-conformity in order to fit in.

If your organization is not formally committed to a policy of nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression or gender presentation in its employment practices, you should not expect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-nonconforming, queer, and/or questioning patients and families to feel safe seeking out your services.

The truth is, that we are in a state of emergency. In the past few years, we have seen an onslaught of legislation... targeting gender non-conforming people... Our communities are under attack. Regardless of whether these pieces of legislation pass, the fact that they're even being considered suggests just how disposable we are considered to be.

All the girls and women looked pretty much the same, so did all the boys and men. I couldn't find myself among the girls. I had never seen any adult woman who looked like I thought I would when I grew up. There were no women on television like the small woman reflected in this mirror, none on the streets. I knew. I was always searching.

When out in public, and are uncertain of a person's gender… stop worrying about it. It doesn't matter. They are a person.

The real crisis is not that gender non-conforming people exist, it's that we have been taught to believe in only two genders in the first place.

It is sad how often love and acceptance are conditional on how well we can conform. That even in the smallest acts of gender non-conformity, love can be lost.

So I get a little tired of having to swallow my lived experience to be force-fed someone else's what-ifs. I get tired of my safety coming second. I get tired of the realities of trans and gender non-conforming people's lives being overshadowed and ignored in favour of a boogey-man that might be lurking in the ladies' room. I get really tired of being mistaken for a monster. I get tired of swallowing all these bathroom stories and smiling politely. But the last thing I can do is allow myself to get angry. Because if I get angry, then I am seen as even more of a threat. Then it's all my fault, isn't it? Because then there is a man in the ladies' room, and for some reason, he's angry.

You were showing him your muscle?” I froze, wondering how much she had seen. She smiled. “Sometimes it’s better to let boys think they're stronger,” she told me.

Asking us to push away the very walls that are constantly crushing us into small, confined boxes is toxic.

It is deeply conservative to suggest that any sufficiently difficult woman from history -- say, one who rebelled against the constraints of femininity by dressing and acting in a masculine way -- must have been a man.

Does one need to deceive oneself, to understand self-deception! If not, then why do you deceive yourself, by conforming to the social labels, be it a religious label, a non-religious label, a nationalist label, an intellectual label, or a gender label.

The goal of white supremacy is to kill your sense of imagination, too. White supremacy cannot make sense of Black bodies, fat bodies, disabled bodies, dark-skinned bodies, trans bodies, gender non-conforming bodies—indeed any body that does not conform—without placing them within a hierarchy of value. White supremacy is the opposite of empathy.

All over the world in many cultures you’ll find gender non-conforming people – those who are traditionally third gender or gender-fluid or even agender. In some of these cultures, they are not only recognized, but also revered and honored, or treated as spiritual beings. In Hawaii, one can find the mahu, those who are biologically male or female, but having a gender identity between or encompassing both masculine and feminine, and whose social role is sacred. Some Native American people are two-spirit, while South Asia has their third gender called the hijra. Other cultures recognizing a third gender are Nigeria (yan daudu) , Samoa (fa’afafine), Thailand (kathoey), Mexico (muxe), and Tonga (fakaleiti). In yet other cultures, it is socially acceptable that some third genders are those who were assigned male, but live and behave as feminine and those who were born assigned female but live and behave as masculine.

Instead, theories of gender freedom, self-determination, and fluidity allow transgender people to express their gender non-conforming identities freely and fully.10

While society perpetuates the norm that sex determines gender, transgender individuals turn this theory on its head. Transsexual people seeking sex reassignment surgeries are actually basing their sex on their gender identity. Gender serves as a signifier of sex and sexual orientation. Thus, when someone discriminates against a woman, it is rarely because she has a vagina or XX chromosomes—these are not readily apparent. The discrimination occurs because of the woman's public gender or gender performance. Sex discrimination is often truly a reaction to gender transgressions or gender non-conformity as defined by U.S. society.

Fat womxn can be feminine. But it isn’t the be all and end all. We can be other things too. We can be alternative. We can be androgynous. We can be gender non-conforming and non-binary. We can be butch. We can be casual. We can be all these things and STILL have the right to exist and feel socially acceptable within society.

When gender non-conforming people cross paths with sexually confused and repressed people, shit hits the fan.

To be an original human, you must die to all labels. This death brings the real vitality in life. Now one may ask, how can one achieve it? And there is the problem of the so-called modern humans. They all want somebody to tell them, how to achieve something. Here is a fact, calculus can be taught, quantum physics can be taught, molecular biology can be taught, but not freedom of mind. And why do you need a path in the first place? If there is a bottle labeled poison, on the shelf, you don't just bring it down and drink the poison to know whether it will kill you. Likewise, once you really see the poisonous implications of the socio-culturally passed on labels, you simply tear them apart - throw them away as far as possible. Does one need to deceive oneself, to understand self-deception! If not, then why do you deceive yourself, by conforming to the social labels, be it a religious label, a non-religious label, a nationalist label, an intellectual label, or a gender label. You are a human - that's it.

Could these groundbreaking and often unsung activists have imagined that only forty years later the 'official' gay rights agenda would be largely pro-police, pro-prisons, and pro-war - exactly the forces they worked so hard to resist? Just a few decades later, the most visible and well-funded arms of the 'LGBT movement' look much more like a corporate strategizing session than a grassroots social justice movement. There are countless examples of this dramatic shift in priorities. What emerged as a fight against racist, anti-poor, and anti-queer police violence now works hand in hand with local and federal law enforcement agencies - district attorneys are asked to speak at trans rallies, cops march in Gay Pride parades. The agendas of prosecutors - those who lock up our family, friends, and lovers - and many queer and trans organizations are becomingly increasingly similar, with sentence- and police-enhancing legislation at the top of the priority list. Hate crimes legislation is tacked on to multi-billion dollar 'defense' bills to support US military domination in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Despite the rhetoric of an 'LGBT community,' transgender and gender-non-conforming people are our 'lead' organizations - most recently in the 2007 gutting of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of gender identity protections. And as the rate of people (particularly poor queer and trans people of color) without steady jobs, housing, or healthcare continues to rise, and health and social services continue to be cut, those dubbed the leaders of the 'LGBT movement' insist that marriage rights are the way to redress the inequalities in our communities.

The current socio-political climate, exacerbated by the media's addiction to falsifying our existence, has meant that being trans/non-binary/gender non-conforming in the twenty-first century feels like constantly trying to prove your existence... When we have to venture into the world, where we aren't heard, or listened to, it can feel like we are shouting against the wind.

The reality that many gender non-conforming people cannot go outside without fear of being attacked is unacceptable.

Trans and gender non-conforming people have stood by lesbians throughout the gay rights movement. We now need to support them as they fight for their equality.

Transgender theory can be traced to postmodern theoretical ancestors. Again, a radical social and linguistic constructivism is its basis. According to transgender theory, gender – or even, as the story currently goes, “sexual difference” itself – is determined not by chromosomes, anatomy, hormones, or physiology. Such words can only be used ironically or with derision in a Gender Studies or Women’s Studies classroom. Instead, gender (or even sex difference) is determined by beliefs about sometimes inconveniently “non-conforming” phenomena, and ultimately, by language, by names. Within transgender theory, empirical sex difference or sex has become insignificant and “problematic” at one and the same time.