Trans Joy Quotes

That's the thing about trans joy: It can never be fully extinguished. People can try to narrow the possibilities for our lives, even end them, but our spirits will always expand to fill whatever space we are given. We will find the power in us.

No surgery in the world was going to offer him the particular history that went along with growing up female. No procedure was going to give him the joys or the terrors that must accompany pregnancy- that must, for teen girls, make sex a walk over Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

Forgetting! It is a form of suicide, a renunciation of the only good the we truly and ineluctably possess: the past. For if joys alone were forgotten, perhaps oblivion would be justly desired. But we are proud and jealous of our sorrows, we love them, we want to remember them. It is they that comprise the crown of life.

I do not get to savor the masculine cut of my clothes, or the illusion of short hair, or the feeting joy of my skin feeling like mine. Instead, I have to worry if my boyhood is convincing enough to keep me safe. There is no joy in that. Only fear.

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.

It is an eternal phenomenon: The insatiable will always find a way, by means of an illusion spread over things, to detain its creatures in life and to compel them to live on. One is chained by the Socratic joy of knowing and the delusion of being able thereby to heal the eternal wound of existence; another is ensnared by art’s seductive veil of beauty fluttering before his eyes; yet another by the metaphysical consolation that beneath the whirl of appearances eternal life flows on indestructibly—to say nothing of the more common and almost more forceful illusions the will has at hand at every moment. (The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann)

The Sex and the City Problem wasn't just Reese's problem, it was a problem for all women. But unlike millions of cis women before Reese, no generation of trans women had ever solved it. The problem could be described thusly: When a women begins to notice herself aging, the prospect of making some meaning out of her life grows more and more urgent. A need to save herself, or be saved, as the joys of beauty and youth repeat themselves to lesser and lesser effect.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

Donne loved the trans- prefix: it's scattered everywhere across his writing—'transpose', 'translate', 'transport', 'transubstantiate'. In this Latin preposition—'across, to the other side of, over, beyond'—he saw both the chaos and potential of us. We are, he believed, creatures born transformable. He knew of transformation into misery: 'But O, self-traitor, I do bring/The spider love, which transubstantiates all/And can convert manna to gall'— but also the transformation achieved by beautiful women: 'Us she informed, but transubstantiates you'. And then there was the transformation of himself: from failure and penury, to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age; one whose work, if allowed under your skin, can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you. Because amid all Donne's reinventions, there was a constant running through his life and work: he remained steadfast in his belief that we, humans, are at once a catastrophe and a miracle.

But suddenly, in the distance, a long, plaintive howl rends the silence. Nothing can delay Gaston now: you will soon know why. He bounds toward a string of sausages that festoons the doorway of the shop, seizes two, three of them and falls upon a ham, which he grips by the knuckle-bone; then, intoxicated with the joy of thieving, he clears the wicket at a single bound. … but oh, misfortune! Something tugs at his jaws, the string of sausages gets caught and a shrill bell tinkles, more tragic to Gaston than a funeral knell! The hour of his destiny has struck! Alas, he has to abandon his treasures! He flees; and the alarm is given: “Stop thief! Stop thief!” cries the pork-butcher, running out.

Trans people's counter-conception of gender as a joyful and imaginative experience rattles these 'trans-exclusionary radical feminists' or TERFs, for whom gender is simply indicative of one's biologically defined position in a hierarchy of violence.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard

Queer contagion, including the anxiety triggered by gender nonnormativity, found its viral materiality in the early 1980s. The diagnosis of gay cancer, or GRID (gay-related immune disorder), the original name for AIDS, was a vengeful nomenclature for the perversion of existing in a world held together, at least in part, by trans/queer undoing. Found by chance, queers began showing symptoms of unexplainable illnesses such as Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP). Unresponsive to the most aggressive treatments, otherwise healthy, often well-resourced and white, young men were deteriorating and dying with genocidal speed. Without remedy, normative culture celebrated its triumph in knowing the tragic ends they always imagined queers would meet. This, while the deaths of Black, Brown, and Indigenous trans and cis women (queer or otherwise) were unthought beyond the communities directly around them. These women, along with many others, were stripped of any claim to tragedy under the conditions of trans/misogyny. Among the architects of this silence was then-President Ronald Reagan, who infamously refused to mention HIV/AIDS in public until 1986. By then, at least 16,000 had died in the U.S. alone. Collective fantasies of mass disappearance through the pulsing death of trans/queer people, Haitians, and drug users - the wish fulfillment of a nightmare world concertized the rhetoric that had always been spoken from the lips of power. The true terror of this response to HIV/AIDS was not only its methodological denial but its joyful humor. In Scott Calonico's experimental short film, "When AIDS Was Funny", a voice-over of Reagan's press secretary Larry Speakes is accompanied by iconic still images of people close to death in hospital beds. LESTER KINSOLVING: "Over a third of them have died. It's known as a 'gay plague.' [Press pool laughter.] No, it is. It's a pretty serious thing. One in every three people that get this have died. And I wonder if the president was aware of this." LARRY SPEAKES: "I don't have it. [Press pool laughter.] Do you?" LESTER KINSOLVING: "You don't have it? Well, I'm relieved to hear that, Larry!" [Press pool laughter.] LARRY SPEAKES: "Do you?" LESTER KINSOLVING: "No, I don't.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chiang Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Secrets, by Nuruddin Farah

We were dancing on election night. I felt energy in my body. I felt joy... Joy returns us to everything that is good and beautiful and worth fighting for. In joy, we see even darkness with new eyes. I was not alone. I was one in millions. I was part of a movement. One in a constellation. I had to shine my light in my specific slice of sky. I could do that. I did not know then all the crises yet to come, the rise of white nationalists who held this presidency as their great awakening, mass detentions and deportations, Muslim bans, zero tolerance policies separating migrant children from their parents, attacks on the rights of queer and trans people, assaults on women and women's rights, and new mass shootings and hate violence against Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, black people, Latinx people, indigenous people, and immigrants. All I knew was that the future was dark. And that as it got darker and more violent people would get tired, go numb, and retreat into whatever privilege they might have. I wanted to help people stay in the fire. I wanted to help myself stay in the fire. I concluded that revolutionary love was the call of our times and started building the tools to practice it.

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.

for my 15-year-old, 18-year-old, and 21-year-old me, who didn't know that so much joy was on its way but fought to stick it out anyway.

I looked again at the heap of quilts. An hour ago they had been patchwork, and nothing more. But now! The old woman's words had wrought a trans formation in the homely mass of calico and silk and worsted. Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love, and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the soul's longing for earthly immortality.

Jackson shrugged. "It's no big deal. I'm sorry that people were assholes today, you know. You don't deserve that. No one deserves that because they are gay, or trans, or ace, or any of that." I managed a small smile. "Thanks. I appreciate that. I suppose this is awkward for you with the military background. What if your friends see that your 'with' a man?" Jackson sighed softly and looked into his cocoa cup. "They'll probably be happy for me," he said quietly. "My last partner was a man, and he died in Afghanistan. I've been alone since then." He poured his cup into the sink. "I should turn in. Good night.

But when this fear comes up, you have two options: You can take it as the gospel truth and keep shutting down your pleasure, or you can get curious. Is it true that your partner doesn’t respect your trans identity, or is it just fear talking?

Gender freedom is not about erasing gender, but allowing it to be a playground, full of richness and individuality and freedom for everyone, cis and trans alike.

among us.

When Manuela arrives, my loge is transformed into a palace, and a picnic between two pariahs becomes the feast of two monarchs. Like a storyteller transforming life into a shimmering river where trouble and boredom vanish far below the water, Manuela metamorphoses our existence into a warm and joyful epic.

Some of us see ourselves as people born with a unique birth defect, one that can be “cured” by the intervention of the medical profession, and think of that journey in terms of physical transition. Some of us see ourselves as people who want to celebrate the fantasy aspects of gender, who want to enjoy the sense of escape and joy and eros that embracing an alter ego sometimes provides. Some of us see ourselves as people who reject the medical community and who are less interested in winding up at one gender destination or another than in the journey itself, a voyage that may or may not have a clear end point. Some of us hope to free ourselves from the binary poles of gender, want a personal and political liberation from the tyranny of culturally defined gender markers, and wish to express ourselves as we please, anywhere along the wide spectrum.

If we were to take another example, and apply the same rules, it becomes obvious just how inappropriate and harmful this trope is. For some (not all) trans people, one element of being trans is the physical process of transition. It can be joyful, it can be painful, it can be messy, and it can involve surgery. The same could be said of parenthood. Conception, pregnancy, and childbirth are necessary parts of making a family for the majority of people. Like medical transition, it is vital that we're educated about these processes if there's a chance we'll find ourselves personally affected. And luckily, in both of these cases, the medical information is freely and easily available online, through public health initiatives, in libraries, and from the relevant medical authorities. But it would never be appropriate to approach a new mother in a cafe and say, 'so, did you rip your vagina giving birth to that one?' When greeting a colleague returning to the office after maternity leave, we don't ask if we can examine the stretch marks and possible scars, or ask about hemorrhaging and post-natal incontinence. If we're close friends or family, we might well talk about the most personal physical aspects of creating and delivering a baby - the same is true of transition. But the need to be honest and close with our loved ones doesn't make the intrusion of strangers okay.

Happy the Man Horace (65BCE- 8BCE); trans. John Dryden   Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own: He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today. Be fair or foul, or rain or shine The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine. Not Heaven itself, upon the past has power, But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

It felt fantastic to be back filming again, and it made me realize how much I missed it. The crew represented our extended family. I never once caught a feeling of annoyance or impatience at the prospect of having a six-day-old baby on set. To the contrary, the atmosphere was one of joy. I can mark precisely Bindi Irwin’s introduction to the wonderful world of wildlife documentary filming: Thursday, July 30, 1998, in the spectacular subtropics of the Queensland coast, where the brilliant white sand meets the turquoise water. This is where the sea turtles navigate the rolling surf each year to come ashore and lay their eggs. Next stop: America, baby on board. Bindi was so tiny she fit on an airplane pillow. Steve watched over her almost obsessively, fussing with her and guarding to see if anything would fall out of the overhead bins whenever they were opened. Such a protective daddy. Our first shoot in California focused on rattlesnakes and spiders. We got a cute photo of baby Bindi with a little hat on and a brown tarantula on her head. In Texas she got to meet toads and Trans-Pecos rat snakes. Steve found two stunning specimens of the nonvenomous snakes in an abandoned house. I watched as two-week-old Bindi reacted to their presence. She gazed up at the snakes and her small, shaky arms reached out toward them. I laughed with delight at her eagerness. Steve looked over at me, as if to say, See? Our own little wildlife warrior!

If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?" Hillel's questions confront us with the uncomfortable fact that, trans or nontrans, we all have to become ourselves--not just once, by growing from childhood into adulthood, but throughout our lives... "If I am not for myself, who will be?" Hillel didn't have to know anything about transsexuality to know that the answer to that is "no one." No one expected me, needed me, or even wanted me to become myself. In fact, my family clearly needed me not to become myself. My journey toward becoming a person could begin only with the radical act of being-for-myself suggested by Hillel's question. Being-for-myself seemed selfish, solipsistic, even psychotic, for I would have to be for a self that didn't yet exist. But Hillel showed me, in the plainest possible terms, that if I wasn't for myself, my self would never be. Hillel's first question leads inexorably to his second: being for myself was only the first step toward becoming a person, because "If I am for myself alone, what am I?"... Hillel's question is more than a call to come out of the closet. It is also a demand that we take responsibility for the consequences to others of our becoming. If I am not, cannot be, for myself alone, if I need others to become myself, then I cannot ignore the pain that results from my becoming. However much I've suffered, my self and my life are no more important than the suffering selves and shattered lives of those whose destinies are tangled with mine. People I love are in anguish as a consequence of my transition, and, unless I acknowledge that that anguish is as real as the anguish that drove me to transition, I will be for myself alone... For most of my life, I tried to be for others without being for myself--to be the man they needed me to be, to suppress and deny the woman I felt I was. Once I began to transition, I wanted desperately to do the opposite, to insist that, after all the years of self-denial I had given them, their feelings didn't matter, to demand that they embrace and support the miraculous, cataclysmic process of my transition from death to life. Hillel's question forced me to recognize that to become a person, a real person and not someone acting like a woman, I had to be both for myself and for others, to be as true, as compassionate, as present to my family and friends as I was to myself.

the difference unless she looks very, very carefully.” The few times I’ve gotten out a mirror and checked out the unit, it seems like that’s true. Also, I’m pretty sure Asher’s not going to be doing an inspection. For all I know, everything’s going to be under blankets, and maybe we’ll have the lights out? I’d like that, I admit, just so I don’t have to worry about all of this. But another part of me thinks, Dammit, when do I get to stop hiding? I want to see Asher’s face. I want to see his body. I want to see everything. People think that being trans is about sex. I suppose for some, it is. But for me, sex was the last thing I was thinking about. I want to be alive and I want to be joyful and I want to be on fire, I want to be so human it makes the ice in my water glass melt. So, sure: I love sex—or at least the idea of it—and I want to experience every last