Trans Acceptance Quotes

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?

We’re not broken. We’re not in the wrong bodies. We’re not inadequate. We’re not lesser. We’re not unwanted. We’re not fraudulent. We’re not undesirable. That’s all just a set of lies we tell to soothe the experience of the prisons we put ourselves in.

When you've never felt like you really belonged somewhere, it's almost impossible to know what it will feel like to finally feel at home.

THIS IS WHAT A MAN LOOKS LIKE. HE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE AESTHETICALLY PLEASING; HE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE MUSCULAR; HE DESERVES NOT TO BE PHOTOSHOPPED. HE IS HUMAN, AND HE HAS BLEMISHES. HERE HE STANDS, VISIBLE. HE SEES YOU ALL, COUNTLESS INVISIBLE OTHERS LIKE HIM. THIS BODY IS ACCEPTABLE — PUBESCENT, AWKWARD, MARRED. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE INVISIBLE. WE ARE ALL GOOD ENOUGH. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH OUR BODIES.

I find myself making excuses for this kind of bullying behavior. Not everyone has been to college, learned trans 101, studied queer theory... But this is unfair to myself and other trans people. I've come to realize that understanding me isn't a matter of being an intellectual. Likewise, one doesn't have to be a radical to respect my feelings. Decent people consider how their comments affect others.

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.

My only one! In your last letter "My head aches my heart is stunned!" you say. "If they hang you, if I lose you;" you say; "I can't live!" You'll live my dearest wife, like a black smoke in the wind my memory will vanish; you'll live, the red-haired sister of my heart at most one year it lasts in the twentieth century the grief of death.. Death a dead body swinging on a rope. My heart doesn't accept such a death.. But be sure that, my love, if some pitiable gypsy's hairy black spider like hand slips the rope around my neck, to see the fear in my blue eyes they'll look in vain at Nâzım! And I, in the twilight of my last morning, shall see my friends and you, and carry only the grief of an unfinished song to the soil... My wife! Good hearted, golden coloured, with eyes sweeter than honey, my bee; why did I write you that they want to hang me, the trial is in the first step and they don't pluck like a turnip the head of a man. Come, forget them all. These are so far away probabilities. If you have some money buy me a flannel underwear, my sciatica is acting up. And don't forget that always there should be good thoughts in the mind of a prisoner's wife.

The women of colour on that show made it clear to Dolezal that trans-racialism was not acceptable because a person who had grown up white could not understand what a person who had grown up black could feel like. They could not have had the same experiences.7 This was the point that the second-wave feminists were making at the same time about the transsexuals. But an argument that had worked with race had not worked for women.

Accepted social gender roles and expectations are so entrenched in our culture that most people cannot imagine any other way. As a result, individuals fitting neatly into these expectations rarely if ever question what gender really means. They have never had to, because the system has worked for them.

...we all live our lives with multiple identities intersecting with one another, creating a mix of privileges and challenges that all people carry with us. Race, gender, economic background, religion, immigration status, family acceptance, and so much more create a complex matrix that sometimes erects obstacles but other times ensures support in overcoming barriers put in your way.

Their anger results from ‘envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them’, he has tweeted. ‘They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.

And if a trans* person comes to your church, they should be welcomed with open arms and accepted. Not just accepted, but embraced, delighted in, listened to, learned from, honored, loved, cared for, and shown the heavenly kindness saturated with compassion.

When disclosure occurs for a trans woman, whether by choice or by another person, she is often accused of deception because, as the widely accepted misconception goes, trans women are not 'real' women (meaning cis women); therefore, the behavior (whether rejection, verbal abuse, or sever violence) is warranted. The violence that trans women face at the hands of heterosexual cis men can go unchecked and uncharted because society blames trans women for the brutality they face. Similar to arguments around rape, the argument goes that 'she brought it upon herself.

They [heterosexual cis women] are accepted in the straight mainstream way more readily than I [trans woman] will ever be. But they are marginalized in their day-to-day lives because they are feminine. To argue that they are reinforcing the binary, or the patriarchy or the hegemonic gender system, because they are conventional feminine (as opposed to subversively feminine) essentially implies that they are enabling their own oppression. This is just another variation of the claim that rapists make when they insinuate that the woman in question was 'asking for it' because of what she was wearing or how she behaved.

Non-fat, hetero-presenting men (often white and surreptitiously bolstered by their participation in academia) still continue to steal from fat, queer, disabled, trans, and/or bodies of color, insisting that they get to be the gatekeepers of who gets to accept their body. That they understand the headlines we’re all too familiar with better than we do. That they, and they alone, are the rightful rulers of a safe space that was built to escape their domination in the first place. Because having the rest of the world available to them simply isn’t enough; they want our designated areas too, and they’ll use our verbiage against us when necessary to convince us that we should be ashamed for being selfish by demanding the right to exist while feeling worthy of respect.

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.

This is part of the reason why I feel weird about introducing pronouns when people meet each other in groups; it creates this expectation that each of our genders should be mapped and appropriately invoked at any time, that I'm safer if someone can say exactly what I am, and that I would be harmed if my gender ever confused anyone (or confused me). I'd rather be misgendered than be "accepted" by an establishment that's making some kind of ominous bio/political truth claim about what my transness is. I don't want a trans utopia where there's 200 genders on the census box. I don't want a trans utopia where instagram asks me my pronouns and my sex assigned at birth and then targets marketing at me. I don't want cis people to make money using images of bodies like mine.

Being trans is fine, it's the world that's the problem. And that's what people don't seem to get. There are loads of us as well. Whether you make room for us or not, whether you accept us or not, whether you include us or not, we're still going to be here. And us existing doesn't take anything away from you or make your life more difficult. Making space for me doesn't mean you have to give up your seat.

Sometimes ‘reality’ is used to debunk as childish or unknowledgeable points of view that actually are holding out a more radical possibility of equality or freedom or democracy or justice.… It reminds me of parents who say, ‘Oh, you’re gay…’ or ‘Oh, you’re trans—well, of course I accept you, but it’s going to be a very hard life.’ Instead of saying, ‘This is a new world, and we are going to build it together…

It has been over forty years since the Gay Liberation Front first took trans seriously, but the gay men who wore those shirts with the polo players or alligator emblems didn't want trans people as the representation of their community. Their revisionist history has been accepted into popular culture because they were the ones with connections to publishers, the influence, as well as the money and time to sit back and write about what "really" happened.

Facing myself in the mirror is like that. If I never cut my hair, if I don't acknowledge that I've never allowed anyone to really know me, I can pretend that a perfect road awaits me. I can pretend there's some medicine that will magically allow me to see myself. But going down that road might mean discovering that there is no magic strong enough to bring me into harmony. Breaking the illusion means acknowledging the parts of myself that will never be visible.

At the very least, it’s clear the decision to use sex-incongruent language of any sort should normally be a free choice. It’s not acceptable on the part of any organisation to coercively require this on pain of sanction. Trying to encourage social norms of politeness in a company or institution, including encouraging people to use preferred pronouns where sex isn’t relevant, is one thing; having HR departments threaten people with accusations of ‘transphobia’ and ‘hate speech’ if they don’t is quite another. As a trans person, having your preferred pronouns or other sex-incongruent terms used by others is a courtesy on their part and not a right on yours.

The final indication of a crony belief is that nothing important is allowed to ride on it. To show this is true of gender-identity ideology, I offer the following thought experiment. Picture a person who insists transwomen are women in every circumstance. If transwomen commit crimes, they belong in women's prisons; if they play sports, they belong on women's teams. If they are attracted to women, lesbians must regard them as potential sexual partners. Such a person will accept no distinction between sex and gender. Transwomen differ from 'cis women' only in having been mistakenly 'assigned male at birth'. Now, what will our true believer do if they need a gestational surrogate?

What same-sex marriage, women's franchise and the end of segregation all have in common is that they extend the rights of a privileged group to everyone. And when people hear the phrase 'trans rights', they assume something similar is being demanded - that trans people be enabled to live without discrimination, harassment and violence, and to express themselves as they wish. Such goals are worthy ones, but they are not what mainstream transactivism is about. What campaigners mean by 'trans rights' is gender self-identification: that trans people be treated in every circumstance as members of the sex they identify with, rather than the sex they actually are. This is not a human right at all. It is a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single-sex spaces, services and activities. And in its requirement that everyone else accept trans peoples' subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws. All this explains the speed. When you want new laws, you can focus on lobbying, rather than the painstaking business of building broad-based coalitions. And when those laws will take away other people's rights, it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness - it is imperative to keep the public in the dark.

An Aside   To break with this routine I have written this manuscript in a way that challenges my reader to explore on the edge of language instead of drowning in devices intending to take for granted meanings and draw false assumptions burdened by planted biases. In your face are thrown one lie after another that defy what is actually seen and offer nothing of balance to either perspective or clarity on a daily basis... yet, it seems natural to you. Because there is no power to your sense of expectation. None. You are boxed into what is possible and what is not, even unsure of the shape of the earth. Led into debates over something as idiotic as that while you balk at having neighbors from elsewhere. So enormous is this Universe and yet you would limit its possibility to produce any of the wonders on some tiny grain of sand found on a beach in comparison. From written history anomalies have been spied and reported accomplishing what nothing today can. Trans Lunar Phenomena, recorded hundreds of years with thousands of reports demonstrate intelligent presence on the moon while nothing of this is factored into your narrow credulity. When one emerges who can answer resolution to so many anomaly, predicts events with accuracy, and offers what is needed to help you survive a planet crippled to the point of extinction, you cannot quit your routine of acquired preference for the mundane suited to a boxed-in comfort zone long enough to check him out. The few above this are too few. I feel quite privileged to have found four. Others are awakening yet still not shown to be at a point of no return to stifling group thought. If you are, then show me. Show me you are aware we near the point where nothing is left to lose. Where resolute action need not be possessed of fear. I will say this, unified consciousness would have no trouble with accepting this challenge I throw at your feet, but then conditions so favorable to enslavement here may be your problem and not that solely attributable to split consciousness. I am willing to engage with you to the very end of hope to find out. Wake up to the signs and ramifications of the trends set I have touched upon. Help awaits a world ready to receive it.

Seong-Ja is an ordinary, happy girl who has high school issues and growing pains just like any other teenage girl, and she should get to be just that: a happy trans girl with a normal life and a loving family that doesn’t treat her or her trans-ness as a burden or an oddity. A happy trans girl whose nature and existence are accepted as ubiquitously normal, instead of treating her like an embarrassing spectacle who constantly has to be explained to her detriment and humiliation. A happy trans girl whose existence, too, isn’t used as a teaching tool for cis folk—and who doesn’t require the performance of trans pain that some people seem to think is necessary to ever empathize with trans people or characters

Yet, in most of the world, US power was hegemonic more than coercive. The United States’ offer to serve as policeman of the world has been accepted by a majority of the world since 1945, and by almost the entire world after 1991. Many countries look to the US military’s command of the commons (the world’s airspace and seas as well as outer space) to ensure global order and to protect them from nearby regional powers that, in the absence of American military dominance, could dominate or invade their neighbors. Thus, communist Vietnam, after decades of fighting and millions of deaths to free itself from US domination, eagerly signed up for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and is considering allowing the United States to base warships at Cam Ranh Bay to deflect Chinese power—and of course each and every Eastern European country begged for admission to NATO and the EU, just as Western European governments positioned themselves after World War II within a geopolitical and economic structure designed and controlled by the United States in return for protection from the USSR. American aid through the Marshall Plan came after the recipient governments had already cast their lot with the United States.

The wanting of children seems to be an accepted universal fact for women everywhere. Not to play the trans exception card, but I'm sorry, it's not the same for transsexuals. It's not considered natural when I say that my biological clock is ticking, because I'm not granted a biological clock in the first place. I ache when I see other moms with kids. I'm so jealous. It's a jealousy of my body, like hunger. I want children near me. I want that same validation that other moms have. That feeling of womanhood placed in a family. That validation is fine for cis women, but it gets treated as perverted for me. Like, the only reason 'a man in a dress' would want to be near kids is not a good one. Let's come out and admit it: Everyone acts like moms are real women and real women become moms. Women who never have kids get treated like silly whores, obsessed with themselves, lacking some basic capacity to love.

The existence of trans people presents a threat to one of the central tenets of the white-supremacist, capitalist state - that we all need to just accept our place within its violent system.

Sorry-looking and unlovely, with a dull coat that has all the appearance of having been clumsily patched, the sponger is generally of medium build, as though he feared that he might occupy more space if he grew bigger and find it even harder to win a place in the world of dogs and men. He is preeminently humble, servile and discreet. He refuses to be snubbed; his skin is impervious to insults; he accepts a kick with an air of compunction.

If we accept the concept of "cis" women, we're accepting that the class of 'woman' can be mixed sex.

Transgender people should be accepted as they are, but not as the sex they are not.

Transition is a fundamental right that all trans people, of all ages, should have access to. But I believe that transition, ideally, should be offered to us as one option of many for bodily autonomy and self-expression. It should not be something that we have to do to make ourselves more acceptable to others, or to hide our transness from the world.

As long as I am subjected to this unconsented reading of my body, I will desire nothing more than facelessness. I think of Christiane, whose father insists she wears the mask around the house so she gets used to it rather than taking it upon himself to accept and celebrate her face as is. It is violent to ask trans people to mask ourselves so it is easier for others to “understand” us, and this is not understanding at all. An effort to understand trans people looks like giving us space to tell our own stories to outnumber the stories that highlight trans tragedy and monstrosity, so that we may see many versions of ourselves reflected in the world. The power in a reflection is not in the simple fact of seeing a physical replication of ourselves but of knowing that there is more of us beyond that. That we are both here and there, expanding past the signifiers of our bodies.

I do not and cannot know your exact lived experience, or how you feel in this moment. But I do know what it feels like to be othered, to be subjected to the opinions and judgments of those who don’t understand your truth. To know that your rights often rest in the hands of those who may not see or value your full, authentic self. I know what it feels like to live with the awareness that, no matter how hard you've fought for the rights you have, there are those who might try to have them erased or disregarded, or reversed. I know that it’s frightening and painful and that it can change you to stand in that uncertain space. I see you. I honor every part of your beautiful reality and the expression of your true self, in this body you were born into and the one you have claimed through courage and perseverance, battle after battle. Your life, lived on your terms, in alignment with the pulse of truth within you, is a testament to your strength. You blaze a trail for all of us. No one can diminish your fire, your impact, or the truth of your existence.

When I was small, I wanted to be a boy. No, it was more than that–I thought that I had to be a boy. I understand that there are children who refuse to identify with the sex on their birth certificate because they are trans, but I’ve never thought that was the case with me. It was more that the assumption everywhere, in the early seventies, seemed to be that women were lesser beings than men, and girls lesser beings than boys, that they did lesser things and lived lesser lives, and I did not see why I should accept those lesser conditions. There was a whole world out there for me to observe and explore and think about, and I had no interest in interrupting my activities so that the world could look at me and judge whether I was pretty or nice or good–whether, in other words, I was becoming a girl. Why on earth would I want to be one of those? Why would I, when I was so much more interested in looking than in being looked at?

ac·cept   v. [trans.] 1 consent to receive (a thing offered): he accepted a pen as a present.    agree to undertake (an offered position or responsibility).  give an affirmative answer to (an offer or proposal); say yes to: he would accept their offer and see what happened | [intrans.] Tim offered Brian a lift home and he accepted.  DATED say yes to a proposal of marriage from (a man): Ronald is a good match and she ought to accept him.  receive as adequate, valid, or suitable: the college accepted her as a student;credit cards are widely accepted.  regard favorably or with approval; welcome: the Harvard literati never accepted him as one of them.  agree to meet (a draft or bill of exchange) by signing it.  (of a thing) be designed to allow (something) to be inserted or applied: vending machines that accepted 100-yen coins for cans of beer.

In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.” In this view, gender is less an identity than a caste position. Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society; even if he chooses to live as a woman—and accept a correspondingly subordinate social position—the fact that he has a choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really like. By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement.

Well, when we’re looking at political processes and we think about classically political left, kind of perspectives that have more to do with the orientation of the collective and the whole and political right that have more to do with the individual and sovereignty. On the right, do we want people who are more self-responsible, who are more sovereign, and who are more empowered? And do we want to give more power to people who are doing a better job? All of that makes perfect sense. Left perspective. Do we want to create situations that actually influence the individuals in the situations to do better – social systems, education, healthcare? Does the environment affect the individual? You can really think of it as: does the environment affect the individual while understanding evolutionary theory that individuals are really formed by their environment? Of course. With humans that are niche creators do the individuals affect their environment? Of course. If you hold either of those as the only perspective, obviously, you’re just missing so much which is that the individual is affecting the whole. The whole, is in turn affecting the individuals, and how do we create systems that have virtuous cycles between empowering individuals and creating better social systems that have the effect of creating humans that are not dependent on the social systems, but that are more sovereign and can in turn create better social systems? And whether we’re thinking about a political issue like that, or we’re looking at a psychological issue like the orientation of being and enjoying reality as is and accepting ourselves and others as is, and doing and becoming which is adding to life, adding to ourselves, seeking to improve ourselves, how do we hold these together? They don’t just have to be held as a paradox or holding one or flip-flopping. There’s a way that when understanding how they related to each other – so in that example - if I understand the nature of a person as a noun that is static then it seems like accepting them the way they are unconditionally, removes the basis for growth. But if I understand that the person is a dynamic process, that they’re actually a verb, that intrinsic to what they are in the moment is desire and impulse to grow and become. And like that, loving someone unconditionally involves wanting for them their own self-actualization and there’s no dichotomy between accepting someone, ourselves, as is, or the world, and seeking to help it grow, advance, and express. So it’s a very simple process of saying the ability to take multiple perspectives, to see the partial truth in them, and then to be able to seam them together into something that isn’t a perspective. It’s a trans-perspective capacity to hold the relationship between many perspectives in a way that can inform our choice-making is fundamental to navigating reality.

Recently, many Western cultures have made progress accepting nonbinary and trans folks (with some obvious major setbacks). I’ve noticed that this acceptance often comes from a reinforcement of gender, which I find worrisome. You should be able to be a man who wears dresses and lipstick and still be a man. Clothing is genderless. Makeup is genderless. So, too, is painting one’s nails. While you can (and should) absolutely identify as nonbinary if the identity speaks to you, you can also be an “effeminate” man and still be just that, a man—and a straight man at that! Everything that falls outside the super narrow confines of “masculinity” isn’t automatically queer. I think if we allowed men to be more “effeminate” without quickly labeling them as queer, we’d have significantly less homophobia/ queerphobia.

I think that what causes people to be transgender is having an enlightened view of the world. Trans people are people who can imagine different possibilities, who can question the things that others simply accept as being unquestionably true, and who have the strength of character to act on their convictions even without support from other people.

We live in a society of rationalization, not rationality. We just believe random stuff, and there's not really a logical explanation for a lot of it, but we rationalize it somehow. To be blunt, can anyone explain to me how the trans movement makes any sense? Logically, I've never gotten a real answer to that question. Whenever I ask people for an answer, they just say we should accept whatever people believe, but that's not rational. [...] The thing with crazy people is they don't put a sign on themselves saying "I'm crazy."  Crazy people are completely assured that they are correct in their ideas and that everyone else is completely wrong. [...] If we had a crazy society, we would never know; if you're worried about being crazy, you are probably not crazy. 

It’s not that I don’t want to wear my femme clothes to work; it’s that I know as soon as I do, my entire nonbinary identity will be disregarded. I won’t be seen as “trans enough”—my clothes will give people permission to treat me like a woman or feel entitled to use the wrong pronouns. Even people who claim to be accepting of nonbinary gender still expect that our expression must deviate from the norms associated with our sex assigned at birth.

It has to be our choice to talk or not talk about being trans, and - whether we talk about it or not - we still need to be recognized as whole, complex people. Our lives are truncated when we are seen only through the stereotypes of others, and we waste so much time struggling against those constraints. Whether it's on the front pages of in the workplace 'being trans' is never the most interesting thing about us. Accept it as one crucial part and then, please, keep listening.

So I joined the robotics team, which was the only team that accepted members regardless of their level of skill. Though I knew nothing about electronics or the construction of robots, the community was welcoming. It was full of charming misfits and geeks, an acceptable and even cool thing to be at the Bronx High School of Science.

He was accepting who he was. And he knew, as much as it hurt, that he would have to leave many people in his life to make that happen. They were his friends and family, they cared, but they didn’t love him. They loved her. And he was tired of being her.

Even today I am still questioning who I am. I think it’s important for me to accept that I am constantly changing and shifting form,

Horseman is the haunting sequel to the 1820 novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving and takes place two decades after the events that unfolded in the original. We are introduced to 14-year-old trans boy Bente “Ben” Van Brunt, who has been raised by his idiosyncratic grandparents - lively Brom “Bones” Van Brunt and prim Kristina Van Tassel - in the small town of Sleepy Hollow, New York, where gossip and rumour run rife and people are exceedingly closed-minded. He has lived with them on their farm ever since he was orphaned when his parents, Bendix and Fenna, died in suspicious and enigmatic circumstances. Ben and his only friend, Sander, head into the woodland one Autumn day to play a game known as Sleepy Hollow Boys, but they are both a little startled when they witness a group of men they recognise from the village discussing the headless, handless body of a local boy that has just been found. But this isn't the end; it is only the beginning. From that moment on, Ben feels an otherworldly presence following him wherever he ventures, and one day while scanning his grandfather’s fields he catches a fleeting glimpse of a weird creature seemingly sucking blood from a victim. An evil of an altogether different nature. But Ben knows this is not the elusive Horseman who has been the primary focus of folkloric tales in the area for many years because he can both feel and hear his presence. However, unlike others who fear the Headless Horseman, Ben can hear whispers in the woods at the end of a forbidden path, and he has visions of the Horseman who says he is there to protect him. Ben soon discovers connections between the recent murders and the death of his parents and realises he has been shaded from the truth about them his whole life. Thus begins a journey to unravel the mystery and establish his identity in the process. This is an enthralling and compulsively readable piece of horror fiction building on Irvings’ solid ground. Evoking such feelings as horror, terror, dread and claustrophobic oppressiveness, this tale invites you to immerse yourself in its sinister, creepy and disturbing narrative. The staggering beauty of the remote village location is juxtaposed with the darkness of the demons and devilish spirits that lurk there, and the village residents aren't exactly welcoming to outsiders or accepting of anyone different from their norm. What I love the most is that it is subtle and full of nuance, instead of the usual cheap thrills with which the genre is often pervaded, meaning the feeling of sheer panic creeps up on you when you least expect, and you come to the sudden realisation that the story has managed to get under your skin, into your psyche and even into your dreams (or should that be nightmares?) Published at a time when the nights are closing in and the light diminishes ever more rapidly, not to mention with Halloween around the corner, this is the perfect autumnal read for the spooky season full of both supernatural and real-world horrors. It begins innocuously enough to lull you into a false sense of security but soon becomes bleak and hauntingly atmospheric as well as frightening before descending into true nightmare-inducing territory. A chilling and eerie romp, and a story full of superstition, secrets, folklore and old wives’ tales and with messages about love, loss, belonging, family, grief, being unapologetically you and becoming more accepting and tolerant of those who are different. Highly recommended.

What we find in our hearts may not be what we wanted to hear and might be difficult to accept… but our hearts will never lead us wrong. Your heart can’t betray you.

I join thousands of parents globally in advocating for our daughters to accept their natural bodies and for the cessation of the harmful notion that only a “new one” will bring happiness.

Many families have been emotionally blackmailed and told that they will lose their kids to suicide if they don’t agree to participate in the affirmation model. This threat is an unsubstantiated claim. When parents tap into the experiences of detransitioners, they learn that mental health often crumbles after transition. If it doesn’t work out so well on the other side, then what? It is a no-win situation for parents.

As a mom, I feel compelled to ask questions. Why are girls demanding the drug testosterone in skyrocketing numbers? Why are so many young girls and women getting mastectomies? What is happening when the young woman’s scarred mastectomy chest is glorified? Why is there a new industry profiting from removing any traces of femininity of our daughters? Why is this drastic medicalized trend rushed, creating a destructive trans train that roars fast and furious, ignoring the whole person, their history, and their family?

People with wombs have always known that bodies and consciousness are cyclical, tied to a rhythm that is larger than the individual. The cycle is twenty-eight days, full moon to full moon. Moon sounds like a name or a noun. But let us remember that moon is a gerund. Always moving. Always moon-ing. It is time to give the masculine back its lunar knowledge. Wombs swell, yearn, mulch, and release in twenty-eight days. But a womb is not just an organ. It is an invitation that anyone of any physicality and any gender expression can accept. It is an invitation to dance inside change for twenty-eight days. To practice softness for a cycle. The masculine has a womb, too. A moon. All it need do is look up at the night sky. What is lunar wisdom? Even on a new moon night, the moon is still present: replete and whole, while also void and occluded. This is a completion that holds loss tenderly inside its body. It is neatly summed up by Octavia Butler’s powerful words: “God is change.”1 The moon is every gender, every sexuality, mostly both, always trans: waxing and waning. The moon only ever flirts with fullness or emptiness for a brief, tenuous moment before slipping into change. Here is our blended, androgynous Dionysus. Wine-drunk, love-swollen, wind-swept, in ecstatic union with the holy, the moon encourages us to dissolve our edges rather than affirm them. Lunar knowledge keeps us limber. Keeps us resilient. Awe, whether somatic or spiritual, transforms us. The alternative to patriarchy and sky gods is not equal and opposite. It is not a patriarchy with a woman seated on a throne. The Sacred Masculine isn’t a horned warrior bowing down to his impassive empress. The divine, although it includes us, is mostly inhuman. Mutable. Mostly green. Often microscopic. And it is everything in between. Interstitial and relational. The light and the dark. Moonlight on moving water. The lunar bowl where we all mix and love and change.

They give a lot of lip service to ‘diversity’ and open-mindedness—and most of them follow through—but there’s always this little, loudmouthed subset telling you how to behave and what to say. It starts out ‘all for one, and one for all,’ but by the end, somebody’s drawing lines in the sand, telling you to choose a side. You can’t be gay or bi or trans if you don’t vote a certain way, act a certain way, follow some ridiculous set of rules. They all want you to be a round little peg in a round fucking hole. They want you to pick a box and a label so they know just where to put you, rather than accepting that we’re all separate, unique people, and that our stories are all valid, no matter whether we fit in the box or not.

If the rise in gender dysphoria is due to social acceptance, where are the hordes of eager, newly identified trans, nonbinary, gender-fluid adults in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies? Why do we see only teens and young adults coming out with their friends after binging on social media?

There is no shortage of people who want to hide the truth, dear Ari, and not a single one of them is of any consequence to me. In a decade, there will be another witch or wizard or magician or mundane person who comes across me and, instead of accepting a very real part of themselves, decides it's better to hide it away.

I would much rather be rejected for who I am than accepted for who I am not.

I feel the same thing I felt in the club in Bushwick: that sense not of shedding my body, as I almost did on the basketball court, but of growing into it the way a vine unfurls itself to inhabit a broken fence. I rub the soft, body places on the back of my skull. The remnants of moonflower leaves are laced into the black rings of hair on the floor. I have been the ghost of myself, but this has never been about waiting to be raptured out of my own body. If I am a fox-hearted boy, then so be it. Call me king of the foxes, king of untamable, unreadable things.

If self-hatred was hammered into you when you were young, Major wants you to know that you're important - that being an outsider helps you develop skin that's both tough and pliable in social situations. You are a stronger person because of the shit you've gone through.

Every savage can dance,' declared Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. His antagonist's riposte now seems odd—'I doubt not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr Darcy.' 'Science' is among the most slippery words in the English language, because although it has been in use for hundreds of years, its meanings constantly shift and are impossible to pin down. That plural (meanings) was deliberate. In the early nineteenth century, when Austen casually mentioned the science of dancing, other writers were still using 'science' for the mediaeval subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Long afterwards, 'science' could still mean any scholarly discipline, because the modern distinction between the Arts and Sciences had not yet solidified. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin listed five subjects he thought worthwhile studying at university—the Sciences of Morals, History, Grammar, Music, and Painting—none of which feature on modern scientific syllabuses. All of them, Ruskin declared, were more intellectually demanding than chemistry, electricity, or geology. However skilfully Mr Darcy performed his science of dancing, Austen could never have called him a scientist. That word, now so common, was not even invented until twenty years later, in 1833, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was holding its third annual meeting. As the conference delegates joked about needing an umbrella term to cover their diverse interests, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected 'philosopher', and William Whewell—one of Babbage's allies, a Cambridge mathematical astronomer—suggested 'scientist' instead. The new word was very slow to catch on. Many Victorians insisted on keeping older expressions, such as 'man of science', or 'naturalist', or 'experimental philosopher'. Even men now seen as the nineteenth century's most eminent scientists—Darwin, Faraday, Lord Kelvin—refused to use the new term for describing themselves. Why, they demanded, should anyone bother to invent such an ugly word when perfectly adequate expressions already existed? Mistakenly, critics accused 'scientist' of being an American import, a trans-Atlantic neologism—one eminent geologist declared it was better to die 'than bestialize our tongue by such barbarisms'. The debate was still raging sixty years after Whewell first introduced the idea, and it was only in the early twentieth century that 'scientist' was fully accepted.

I have a dream - that one day, black people won't be black - white people won't be white - brown people won't be brown - gay people won't be gay - straight people won't be straight - women won't be women - men won't be men - the trans won't be trans - believers won't be believers and non-believers won't be non-believers - instead, we all will be just human.

For these girls, trans identification offers freedom from anxiety’s relentless pursuit; it satisfies the deepest need for acceptance, the thrill of transgression, the seductive lilt of belonging.

Sometimes “reality” is used to debunk as childish or unknowledgeable points of view that actually are holding out a more radical possibility of equality or freedom or democracy or justice.... It reminds me of parents who say, “Oh, you’re gay...” or “Oh, you’re trans—well, of course I accept you, but it’s going to be a very hard life.” Instead of saying, “This is a new world, and we are going to build it together...

Until the last decade or so, sex (or gender) and chromosomes were recognized to be among the most fundamental hardware issues in our species. Whether we were born as a man or a woman was one of the main, unchangeable hardware issues of our lives. Having accepted this hardware we then all found ways – both men and women – to learn how to operate the relevant aspects of our lives. So absolutely everything not just within the sexes but between them became scrambled when the argument became entrenched that this most fundamental hardware issue of all was in fact a matter of software. The claim was made, and a couple of decades later it was embedded and suddenly everybody was meant to believe that sex was not biologically fixed but merely a matter of ‘reiterated social performances’. The claim put a bomb under the feminist cause with completely predictable consequences for another problem we’ll come to with ‘trans’. It left feminism with almost no defences against men arguing that they could become women. But the whole attempt to turn hardware into software has caused – and is continuing to cause – more pain than almost any other issue for men and women alike. It is at the foundation of the current madness.

Sex is only one part of life, it is only one expression of companionship, it is something that needs to be accepted and fought for in order to live a life of human dignity. Gender expression or gender identity is also a matter of a person’s choice. Laws that criminalize gender identity and sexual orientation have no place in a democracy and must be struck down. Everyone must join hands to fight for equal rights for all of us to live in a just society.

Digital natives and millennials seem more at ease with gender fluidity. In the last year or two, we have seen high-profile moves towards trans awareness and acceptance. Young men, particularly well-educated, metropolitan guys, seem a lot less afraid of appearing gay. Maybe the Department of Masculinity is losing its grip. Like those once unassailable high-street chains which suddenly go bust, maybe the Department will one day reach a tipping point where no one will buy its wares any more. As with many real stores, maybe the Internet is helping to break the Department’s monopoly. Young men are shopping around for alternative visions of the masculine role that fit how they feel. In the future, I hope young men can easily adopt a plurality of masculinities as easily as shopping for a coat.

Most of us, cis or trans, want to change or alter a part of our body. I've never met a human being who accepts their body exactly as it is. We all make alterations with our clothing, makeup, hair styles and colour, cosmetic procedures, body hair, muscle mass, and so much more.

Life is seldom perfect, and everyone knows the sometime necessity of a compromise. But if we accept the necessity—the desirability—of offering up the lives of others to improve our own, then we have already lost.

Most people are good, no doubt, but when we are faced with issues we haven't yet thought about or interacted with, we often look to one another for how we should respond. Our behavior models for others the acceptable reaction; acceptance creates an expectation, while rejection provides an excuse.

What is important though, is that these catastrophes can be described inde- pendently of the physical substrate that may instantiate them: “One of the basic postulates of my model is that there are coherent systems of catastrophes (chre- ods) organized in archetypes and that these structures exist as abstract algebraic entities independent of any substrate.”⁵³ This allows Thom to make some surprising claims for his studies in morpho- genesis. He insists that we must “accept the idea that a sequence of stable trans- formations of our space-time could be directed or programmed by an organizing center consisting of an algebraic structure outside space-time itself.”⁵⁴

I believe trans women are women. I do not believe that hate speech and shaming speech are acceptable. Those things are the enemy of rational discourse. Treat even those with whom you disagree with the dignity you expect yourself.

The black, the white, the brown, the red, the yellow, the hetero, the homo, the trans, the poor, the rich, the literate, the illiterate, the weak, the strong – all are my sisters and brothers. My life is their life.

With the logic o f Real-as-impossible you h ave this notion of the unattainable object - the l ogic of desire, whe r e desire is structured around a pr imordial void. I would argue that the no tion of drive that i s present here c annot be read in these transcendentalist term s : that is to s ay, i n terms of an a priori loss where empiric a l obje cts never coincide with das Ding, the Thing. The vulgar example that I wo uld give here is the following. Let us s ay you are in love with a woma n . and that y o u a r e obsessed wi t h her vagin a . You do all the p o s ­ sible things : y o u p enetrate it, ki s s it, whatever - i t' s your problem; I won ' t go into tha t . Now, from a trans c endental­ ist perspective the idea is that this is a typical illusi o n : you think the vagina is the Thing itself, but really it's not, and you should accept the gap between the void o f the Thing and the contingent object filling it up. But when you are in such an intense s exual love relationship, I don ' t think the idea can be that the vagina is j ust an ersatz for the impo s s ibl e Thing. N o, I think that it is this p arti cul a r object, but that this obj ect is strangely split. There is a s elf- distance - you know it is the vagi n a , but you get never e n ough - the split is within the object itself The split is no t b etween the e mpirica l reality and the impossible Thing. No, it is rather that the vagina is both itself and, at the s ame time, something e l s e

We have all heard the sceptics who warn that serious action to fight climate change and energy scarcity will lead us into decades of hardship and sacrifice. When it comes to cities, they are absolutely wrong. In fact, sustainability and the good life can be by-products of the very same interventions. Alex Boston, the Golder planner who advises dozens of cities on climate and energy, doesn’t even ask civic leaders about their greenhouse gas reduction aspirations when they first start talking. ‘We ask, “What are your core community priorities?”’ says Boston. ‘People don’t talk about climate change. They say they want economic development, livability, mobility, housing affordability, taxes, all stuff that relates to happiness.’ These are just the concerns that have caused us to delay action on climate change. But Boston insists that by focusing on the relationship between energy, efficiency and the things that make life better, cities can succeed where scary data, scientists, logic and conscience have failed. The happy city plan is an energy plan. It is a climate plan. It is a belt-tightening plan for cash-strapped cities. It is also an economic plan, a jobs plan and a corrective for weak systems. It is a plan for resilience. THE GREEN SURPRISE Consider the by-product of the happy city project in Bogotá. Enrique Peñalosa told me that he did not feel the urgency of the global environmental crisis when he was elected mayor. His urban transformation was not motivated by a concern for spotted owls or melting glaciers or soon-to-be-flooded residents of villages on some distant coral atoll. Still, a funny thing happened near the end of his term. After making Bogotá easier, cleaner, more beautiful and more fair, the mayor and his city started winning accolades from environmental organizations. In 2000 Peñalosa and Eric Britton were called to Sweden to accept the Stockholm Challenge Award for the Environment, for pulling 850,000 vehicles off the street during the world’s biggest car-free day. Then the TransMilenio bus system was lauded for producing massive reductions in Bogotá’s carbon dioxide emissions.fn1, 3 It was the first transport system to be accredited under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism – meaning that Bogotá could actually sell carbon credits to polluters in rich countries. For its public space transformations under mayors Peñalosa, Antanas Mockus and their successor, Luis Garzón, the city won the Golden Lion prize from the prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale. For its bicycle routes, its new parks, its Ciclovía, its upside-down roads and that hugely popular car-free day, Bogotá was held up as a shining example of green urbanism. Not one of its programmes was directed at the crisis of climate change, but the city offered tangible proof of the connection between urban design, experience and the carbon energy system. It suggested that the green city, the low-carbon city and the happy city might be exactly the same destination.