Trans Affirming Quotes

Abolition is not some disstant future but something we create in every moment when we say no to the traps of empire and yes to the nourishing possibilities dreamed of and practiced by our ancestors and friends. Every time we insist on accessible and affirming health care, safe and quality education, meaningful and secure employment, loving and healing relationships, and being our full and whole selves, we are doing abolition. Abolition is about breaking down things that oppress and building up things that nourish. Abolition is the practice of transformation in the here and now and the ever after.

None of us know how long we have, but we do have a choice in whether we love or hate. And every day that we rob people of the ability to live their lives to the fullest, we are undermining the most precious gift we are given as humans. [... E]ach time we ask anyone—whether they are transgender, Black, an immigrant, Muslim, Native American, gay, or a woman—to sit by and let an extended conversation take place about whether they deserve to be respected and affirmed in who they are, we are asking people to watch their one life pass by without dignity or fairness. That is too much to ask of anyone.

The best way I can describe [being transgender] for myself [...] is a constant feeling of homesickness. An unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that only goes away when I can be seen and affirmed in the gender I've always felt myself to be. And unlike homesickness with location, which eventually diminishes as you get used to the new home, this homesickness only grows with time and separation.

I am against the rush to medicalize our children and young people to present as the opposite sex when they are confused or when other conditions such as autism are misattributed as trans.

As I said to that state representative in Delaware who had admonished us for moving the trans equality bill too quickly, each time we ask anyone - whether they are transgender, Black, an immigrant, Muslim, Native American, gay, or a woman - to sit by and let an extended conversation take place about whether they deserve to be respected and affirmed in who they are, we are asking people to watch their own life pass by without dignity or fairness. That is too much to ask of anyone.

Camus writes that in the midst of the plague, as the citizens of Oran are dying in droves, Dr. Rieux affirms himself in his work. What do you do have control over? And what is beyond your control? As Camus's protagonist, Dr. Rieux offers an answer: when the world is coming apart, you do your job.

Even though I am extremely lucky, this narrative where trans people have to feel lucky for these crumbs-that we fought hard for and still fight for-is perverse and manipulative. Here is the thing-I almost did not make it, the permanent emptiness, a mystery I would never solve. Incessant, without language, a depth of despair...I should not have to grovel with gratitude. Am I grateful? Fuck, yeah! But everyone should have access to gender-affirming health care and lifesaving health care. It just should be.

Everyone involved in our children’s transition failed to adequately address or treat the full range of each child’s complex personality and history. The affirmation care model and those involved in it also failed to preserve the precious parent-child bond.

There's far too much focus on dysphoria, on the pain and trauma of the trans experience, and it's time to change that narrative. We should not have to probe that we are lacking joy in our gender to get the gender-affirming care that we need. We deserve care, period.

Only allowing affirmation indicates that a child’s feelings are facts, and we believe that feelings, which are often transient, are not facts. One may hold respect and empathy for those suffering from gender confusion and still say no to a destructive ideology that advocates the medicalization of kids.

Despite the ubiquity of government-organized trans pageants in the Philippines, trans people themselves are not politically recognized. We are culturally visible but legally erased. To this day, trans Filipinas have M gender markers on their documents and cannot change their names in court. We don't have robust antidiscrimination protections. No amount of pageant glory can make up for the fact that our government still doesn't see and treat trans people as full citizens able to participate in society as we truly are. In a country of over 100 million people, only a few dozen certified endocrinologists offer gender-affirming care. Growing up, I relied on other trans people to find hormones, figuring out the right dosages through hearsay, transitioning entirely without proper medical supervision. There was no other choice back then - and for many today, DIY is still the only option. My community is littered with stories of injections gone horribly wrong. Even worse, when someone dies from an overdose or an unsupervised medical treatment, it's shrugged off as a sad fact of life. 'That's what happens,' the emergency techs will say, our lives stripped of value by the very institutions that ought to care for us. I will never forget when one of my Garcia clan sisters succumbed to death from a botched medical procedure, a victim of all the intersecting forces trans Filipinas have to navigate to get treatment.

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.

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.

Please don't apologize for what you write. For some people your words will never be enough. If you write a female Jedi they’ll complain she’s evil. Write a gay Holmes they’ll complain he isn’t black. Write a transgender cop they’ll complain he isn’t the hero. Here’s the thing about that: You personally can’t write all the wrongs. You can write gay-positive stories, women-motivated tales, or whatever you write that gives voice to people who are often marginalized. What you can’t possibly do is give voice to every one. And some people will complain about that, and for them nothing you write will ever be enough. So when they tell you your trans cop, your bad ass Jedi, your gay Holmes isn’t good enough—don’t listen. Make the world better in the way you do it. Those people are not living in your skin, you are. They’re not writing, you are. So write what’s inside you, make it beautiful and affirmative, give yourself and others a voice, but please don’t apologize to people who would never, ever apologize to you.

Studies—one of them involving 90,000 American teens46—are unequivocal: Teenagers with strong emotional bonds to their parents fare better. A child must be attached to those responsible for her. Attachment is based, in part, on trust and honesty. When a school facilitates a student’s “social affirmation” in the absence of parental consent, it encourages secrecy, distrust, and a “double life.

Another manifestation fo transformative anger is "anger that challenges respectability." This anger rejects official worlds of sense wherein one's being is apathologized, dehumanized, understood as dysfunctional, malformed, undesirable, wrong. This is a defiant anger, an anger that provides resources for working through internalized oppressions that manifest as self-hatred and self-abuse. When collectivized, such anger becomes protest. In order to become collectivized, this anger must resonate, must transfer affectively from one being to another. We witness it, we hear it out, and we feel it; we affirm it. We sometimes say, in these moments, int eh spark of recognition that occurs when affect is made manifest in a way that meshes with one's own, perhaps yet-to-be-articulated experiences, "I feel you.

In drafting Side Affects, other trans folks have told me over and over how relatable a book about, as I describe it in shorthand, "being trans and feeling bad" is. but I have also had many folks ask me why I choose to dwell on negative affect rather than, say, the experience of so-called gender euphoria experienced by subjects when their correct pronouns are used or when they engage in some kind of gender-affirming activity. [...] and I definitely can't pretend that the cultivation of happiness makes any sense at all as a political aim. If and when I feel something akin to gender euphoria, it's surprising, dependent off actors well beyond my own agency, and also somewhat predictably predicated on axes of privilege that structure my quotidian experience. Moreover, it doesn't last. [...] the opening line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: all happy families are the same, they say, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. What they mean by this is that happiness is not actually all that interesting: there's nothing there to process, nothing there to illuminate, nothing that's particularly mysterious, enigmatic, confusing, or complex. Happiness is nice, that most lukewarm of adjectives, and in its niceness, it is also banal. They're saying, in these moments, that it's alright that we'll be processing trauma for the rest of our lives; it's to be expected, and it's from and through that collective processing that we'll be most able to approximate anything close to radical transformation, anything that remotely resembles healing. The only way around it is straight through.

This produces the narrative of transition as entrée into a kind of gender euphoria, one where each gender-affirming step carries one further away from negativity, one where a kind of giddiness and pleasure sweeps one up in moments of gendered recognition that feel right, even if the recognition is only taking place between yourself and a mirror.

You see me as a boy?” Something like a frown presses into the corner of her mouth. “I think your ideas of gender are confusing." 
“Faery doesn’t have trans people?” “Faery is not arrogant enough to assume we know anything about our children before they’ve a chance to learn it for themselves.” She shakes her head. “There are as many genders as there are people. And each one of them comes into the language they’d like to use for themself, in their own time.

I will ask over and over until I die why doctors, therapists, school educators, and counselors are not looking deeply at the individual in front of them and creating a treatment plan with options that heal trauma, offer tools and adaptive coping strategies to navigate their emotional life, and address underlying mental issues before placing that young person on a rapid medicalization pathway that ignores complex dynamics of their personality and experiences.

There’s no need to rush life-changing, body-altering decisions that are difficult or impossible to reverse.

Something is terribly wrong when natural and holistic measures to relieve emotional struggles are left untouched in favor of lifelong, irreversible medical interventions that are experimental, expensive, and come with a host of additional adverse effects.

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.

I am not aware of any other mental or medical condition in which a kid or young adult self-diagnoses themselves after social media and internet engagement, undergoes no objective testing, and then receives irreversible medication and surgery upon demand

Did you know cis people get gender-affirming surgeries too? A cis woman who’s had a mastectomy and gets breast reconstruction? A cis woman who gets a breast augmentation? Collagen lip injections? Cis men who get pectoral implants? Or take medication to prevent hair loss? Or help them maintain erections? All are gender-affirming medical procedures!

If you don’t believe these allegories exist, it’s because you don’t want to. Because it’s easier for you not to. Because being comfortable in the matrix that affirms who you are every second of the day is too cozy for you to leave.

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.

Was it possible no one had asked? Psychotic symptoms such as auditory or visual hallucinations always warrant further questions. An obvious one: What did the voices say? Was Zach hearing voices telling him he’s a girl? These were questions that demanded attention from his clinicians prior to affirming a new identity. Maybe Zach’s gender dysphoria was related to his disordered thinking and hallucinations. Perhaps instead of lip gloss he needed Risperdal (anti-psychotic medication).

It doesn't occur to me that Sabah has heard Sami's question until she says, "Maybe they don't want to grow it out." I realize she hasn't gendered me in a conversation, not once, since she saw my haircut this morning. She made no comments, only stepped aside from names and pronouns, and now I understand that Sabah has always been paying attention in ways that had been invisible to me until the moment they were not.

It is a book for parents who would like to support their child’s exploration of identity but who do not believe it is advisable to concretize such exploration with irreversible drugs and surgeries. It is a guide for parents who affirm their child’s wonderful, unique personhood without believing “gender identity” should be privileged over other aspects.

They are wilfully ignorant of the fact that removing the provision of gender-affirming pathways by blocking trans children from care is forcing them onto an irreversible path – that of an unwanted puberty, and a body that will later be harder to change.

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.

In the words of Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza, “Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.

Affirming your gender can be joyful and safe! If your current binding method isn't doing it for you, experiment with other methods. There is a better one out there for you.

There is no such thing as gender-affirming surgery for transgender children—that’s a dog whistle from the right. Gender affirmation in children is entirely social, involving support from the people around them and things like hair and clothing changes. There isn’t even really medical affirmation in children until they start to undergo puberty, at which point some transgender children may be able to access puberty blockers—drugs that have been used to halt precocious puberty in cisgender kids for decades. Some adolescents who have been affirmed in their gender for a long time may be able to access surgery, after going through extensive evaluation processes and with the consent of their parents, but it’s not common. It’s also worth noting that cisgender adolescents also get surgeries that affirm their gender—breast reductions and procedures for gynecomastia, nose jobs, and the like. But gender affirmation for children is just loving them and supporting them and giving them the ability to be themselves. —DR. ELIZABETH BOSKEY (she/her), Phd, MPH, MSSW, social worker and researcher focusing in trans health11