Trans Love Quotes

We live in a world full of people who are satisfied with pretending to be someone they are not.

I learned that love can end in one night, that great friends can become great strangers, that strangers can become best friends, that we never finish to know and understand someone completely, that the “never ever again” will happen again and that “forever” always ends, that the one that wants it can, will achieve it and get it, that the one that risks it never looses anything, that physique, figure and beauty attracts but personality makes one fall in love.

Being exceptional isn’t revolutionary, it’s lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community? I have been held up consistently as a token, as the “right” kind of trans woman (educated, able-bodied, attractive, articulate, heteronormative). It promotes the delusion that because I “made it,” that level of success is easily accessible to all young trans women. Let’s be clear: It is not.

Frankly, I'm not responsible for other people's perceptions and what they consider real or fake. We must abolish the entitlement that deludes us into believing that we have the right to make assumptions about people's identities and project those assumptions onto their genders and bodies.

...nobody really wants to be a trans woman, i.e. nobody wakes up and goes whoa, maybe my life would be better if I transitioned, alienating most of my friends and my family, I wonder what'll happen at work, I'd love to spend all my money on hormones and surgeries, buying a new wardrobe that I don't even understand right now, probably become unlovable and then ending my short life in a bloody murder.

Little girls fear being a princess that was never rescued but little boys fear being a prince that was too late.

Hope can be limitless. Inspiration can always be found. Ideas are endless. But time, that is the one resource that none of us can afford to waste.

My father loved the library because it was a safe haven for him — no missed cultural cues, no bigoted insults from his coworkers, no glaring reminders of what was lost. All patrons of the library were pilgrims to the oracle all seeking the sake thing: knowledge. And in their pursuits of the same thing, they were all equals.

There are few things more dangerous to a transgender woman than the risk of a straight man not totally comfortable in his sexuality or masculinity realizing he is attracted to her.

Compromise is often necessary [in politics], but entire marginalized identities are not expendable chess pieces.

It could've been easy to say I was hurt because I'm trans, because someone singled me out for my identity, but there's something weird about that - something off, about suggesting that my identity is the thing that brought me any sort of pain. It's the opposite. Being trans brings me love. It brings me happiness. It gives me power.

Falling in love with another human is terrifying. As our language insists, romantic love is always preceded by a fall, the necessity of losing control and potentially hurting yourself in the process of connecting with another

This pervasive idea that trans women deserve violence needs to be abolished. It’s a socially sanctioned practice of blaming the victim. We must begin blaming our culture, which stigmatizes, demeans, and strips trans women of their humanity.

A single man, he said he loved women but preferred engines.

We must never be a country that says there’s only one way to love, only one way to look, and only one way to live.

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.

The first step to loving yourself begins with the words, ‘I matter.’ You deserve to occupy space. You deserve to stand up for yourself and claim your right to happiness. You deserve to be here, just as much as anyone else.

I hear a small voice in the back of my mind and it is chanting a prayer: ‘Please don’t fall in love again, please don’t fall in love again.’ Maybe this time I will listen. Maybe this I will learn.

My old man taught me to never trust anything that bleeds for three days and doesn't die.

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. And till the last breath in my body, I shall be serving you all with all the power in my veins. And beyond death, my ideas shall be serving you for eternity.

Each of us has a deep and profound desire to be seen, to be acknowledged, and to be respected in our totality. There is a unique kind of pain in being unseen. It's a pain that cuts deep by diminishing and disempowering, and whether done intentionally or unintentionally, it's an experience that leaves real scars.

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.

What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to the Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. The stoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on the hoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary School parking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit “Love Is Like Oxygen”—you get too much, you get too high, not enough and you’re gonna die. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them. But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.

I'm a woman. And I'm a man. That's how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn't do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.

According to the media, trans women were subject to pain and punch lines. Instead of proclaiming that I was not a plot device to be laughed at, I spent my younger years internalizing and fighting those stereotypes.

I'm supposed to a man who never blows his composure A boy trapped in a war, forced to be a solider The weight of the world just put on top of my shoulders But if there's one thing I know for sure It's that my mind has had its exposure And my emotional turmoil has finally had its closure

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

The vessel of my heart couldn't hold both my rage for my father and my love for my mother. Like glass subjected to heat and cold, I cracked.

When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, & activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier.

Models of justice that centre punishment do not prevent abuse but only react to it, and they don't offer a pathway toward healing for either perpetrators or survivors. Nor do they acknowledge the dual reality that a great many perpetrators are themselves survivors.

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.

Having certain privileges does not mean that your life is easy or that you do not face challenges. It just means that you don't experience specific kinds of obstacles or barriers faced by someone with a different identity or background. And our empathy should require us to acknowledge the plight of others in both its similarities to ours and in its differences.

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.

You can't take the human out of the person.

love that you cannot leave is not love.

FOR TRANS, NONBINARY, GENDER- CREATIVE, AND GENDER-FIERCE YOUTH. YOU ARE SEEN. YOU ARE PRECIOUS. AND YOU ARE SO, SO LOVED

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.

So now my prayer is this: You, my own deep soul, trust me. I will not betray you. My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Dann bete du, wie es dich dieser Iehrt,” Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)

That’s when I want you— you knower of my emptiness, you unspeaking partner to my sorrow— that’s when I need you, — Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Ich bin derselbe noch, der kniete,” Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)

As I read, I began to understand that all the great works wrangled with big questions, important questions: our place in the world, the value of our experience, the fairness and meaning of our suffering, our quest for love and belonging.

Asking for love as a trans person, with the blunt hammer weight that word carries, feels like walking on fragile, cracking ice. Asking for love as the angry mess I am feels like inviting dark water to swallow me whole. Of course I didn’t want to test his love for me. I knew it would have a breaking point. I just didn’t want to learn where that was.

When you're a child trapped in a situation of physical or psychological deprivation, you learn shame as an efficient, elegant mechanism of survival: shame simultaneously shields you from the reality that danger is our of your control (since the problem is not that you're unloved and deprived; it's that you're Bad) and prevents you from doing or saying anything challenging that might provoke a threat.

Os meus amigos ainda não têm dentes do siso. Ou então foram arrancados porque os maxilares não cresceram o suficiente. Os nossos corpos já nem têm espaço para os dentes do juízo.

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.

Principles are worth something only if you stick by them, even when they feel inconvenient. It's easy to rationalize and find seemingly altruistic reasons for betraying a moral imperative, but that's exactly when principles are most important.

It struck me that many Christians flash around their 'no trans fat' label, trying to convince everyone they are healthy and good. Yet they have no substantive or healthful elements to their faith. It's like the Laodiceans, who thought they had everything until Christ told them they were poor and wretched.

The misconception of equating ease of life with “passing” must be dismantled in our culture. The work begins by each of us recognizing that cis people are not more valuable or legitimate and that trans people who blend as cis are not more valuable or legitimate. We must recognize, discuss, and dismantle this hierarchy that polices bodies and values certain ones over others. We must recognize that we all have different experiences of oppression and privilege, and I recognize that my ability to blend as cis is one conditional privilege that does not negate the fact that I experience the world as a trans woman (with my own fears, insecurities, and body-image issues) no matter how attractive people may think I am.

Gratitude is a species of love, excited in us by some action of the person for whom we have it, and by which we believe that he has done some good to us, or at least that he has had the intention of doing so. Passions, III, 193. XI, 473-474. Trans. John Morris

He is setting out to cure the world, she is setting out to save the world, but I have chosen to inspire the world. Each of us have chosen to try and do our part to change world. What have you decided to do?

Teach me how to love you so good our hearts will be beating thunderously against our ribcages straining to get out. For so long I have only known how to hurt. There are scars on my body like constellations. The one on my hip was from when I was six and I learned my parents were the Titanic and the iceberg. My wrist has a faint bruise reminding me of when I gave myself to a boy who crashed and burned and took me down with him. Heartbreak sounds a lot like a slamming door. Show me it doesn’t have to be this way, I want to be proven wrong. Teach me how to love right.

A common effect of dysphoria is that it places a cap on your emotions and tricks you into confusing contentedness for happiness. It tells you that being numb and dissatisfied with everything is the normal way to be.

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.

Many people believe trans women choose to engage in the sex trade rather than get a real job. That belief is misguided because sex work is work, and it’s often the only work available to marginalized women. Though we act as individuals, we can’t remove ourselves from the framework of society. Systemic oppression creates circumstances that push many women to choose sex work as a means of survival, and I was one of those women, choosing survival.

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 moms I knew when I was little didn't have to prove that it was okay to want a child. Sure, a lot of women I know wonder if they do want a child, but not why. It's assumed why. The question cis women get asked is: Why don't you want kids? And then they have to justify that. If I had been born cis, I would never even have had to answer these questions. I wouldn't have had to prove that I deserve my models of womanhood. But I'm not cis. I'm trans. And so until the day that I am a mother, I'm constantly going to have to prove that I deserve to be one. That it's not unnatural or twisted that I want a child's love. Why do I want to be a mother? After all those beautiful women I grew up with, the ones who chaperoned my classes on field trips, or made me lunch when I was at their house, or sewed costumes for all the little girls that I ice skated with — and you too, Katrina, for that matter — have to explain their feelings about motherhood, then, I'll explain mine. And do you know what I'll say? Ditto.

My friend, still seemingly perplexed, asked me "So if it's not about genitals, what is it about trans women's bodies that you find so attractive?" I paused for a second to consider the question. Then I replied that it is almost always their eyes. When I look into them, I see both endless strength and inconsolable sadness. I see someone who has overcome humiliation and abuses that would flatten the average person. I see a woman who was made to feel shame for her desires and yet had the courage to pursue them anyway. I see a woman who was forced against her will into boyhood, who held on to a dream that everybody in her life desperately tried to beat out of her, who refused to listen to the endless stream of people who told her that who she was and what she wanted was impossible. When I look into a trans woman's eyes, I see a profound appreciation for how fucking empowering it can be to be female, an appreciation that seems lost on many cissexual women who sadly take their female identities and anatomies for granted, or who perpetually seek to cast themselves as victims rather than instigators. In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognised as female, a raw strength that only comes from unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world. In a trans woman's eyes, I see someone who understands that, in a culture that's seemingly fuelled on male homophobic hysteria, choosing to be female and openly expressing one's femininity is not a sign of frivolousness, weakness or passivity, it is a fucking badge of courage. Everybody loves to say that drag queens are "fabulous", but nobody seems to get the fact that trans women are fucking badass!

I know what I am. I know that I've chosen to identify as a transgender woman, and that I am - by and large - happy with where I am in this world. I'm far from perfect, and I could give you a list as long as my arms of the things I'd love to change. Nevertheless, I am still here, and I am still me, and no one can change that without my permission. -Gwendolyn Ann Smith, "We're All Someone's Freak

How the fuck did somebody come out as trans, anyway? It wasn't about who you flirted with on the dance floor or walked down the aisle with. It was about who you fucking were. It wasn't putting on drag. It was God putting it on you without your consent.

Safety is, I believe, an inherently classed, raced, and gendered experience that frequently runs the risk of being used for regressive ends—ironically, for restricting the freedoms of the vulnerable, those who are never really safe. Often, we see the call for safety actually reinforce the power of oppressive institutions, like the police and the prison system, in our lives. When we choose safety over liberation, our movements fail.

We can change, evolve, and trans­form our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing. Neither does power. What is positive and what is negative is not absolute.

If there's one thing I know about women, it's that they have vaginas.

...she might not have been party to love, but it still took a lot of volume to fill a life.

Nothing -- and I mean nothing, Carly Banks -- is crazy if you're in love.

A government cannot be “of the people, by the people, and for the people” if wide swaths of the people have no seat at the table,

To be transgender all you need is to have an inkling that the gender on your birth certificate is not quite right. That’s it.

...the human soul is a divine non-substance. A spirit that permeates our flesh, dwells in our conscious, and rules our subconscious self. It makes us cling to life even when we no longer want to embrace it. It makes us hope in the most desperate of circumstances. It gives our dream shape, our inspiration form, our love its timeless beauty." From The Cartesian Machine

Who then shall unravel all these subtle combinations? Who shall trace the exact dividing line that marks off one form of extremism from its opposite? It can be done only by a love of country and a love of truth. Kings and knaves will always try to destroy this love, for they shun reason and truth like the plague. [trans. G. Rudé; On Revolutionary Government (December 25, 1793)].

If a trans woman who knows herself and operates in the world as a woman is seen, perceived, treated, and viewed as a woman, isn't she just being herself? She isn't passing; she is merely being.

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.

One of the first significant, substantial purchases I made after starting testosterone, was a Compact Colt .45 1991 A1 automatic pistol. It's just about the best penis substitute I've ever waved at a sex partner. I love my gun. Can I get an a-a-ay-men? You better fucking believe I lo-o-ove my gun. I love to take it apart and put it back together and admire...oh,you sexy little death-machine...I suppose I oughta feel guilty or something, loving and fetishizing to the point of anthropomorphizing it it. But I don't. I won't either-don't matter to me whether or not I'm supposed to keep this a dirty little secret. I got a dick and I can kill you with it. Yeah, baby, trip my trigger, why dontcha. Heh.

They say that nothing good or happy goes on for very long, or rather does not last, but in my opinion the same is true for the bad, it should also all end sometime, right?” - Olga Romanov (trans Helen Azar)

Once I was asked be a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight....what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughters, who wanted to be a writer. [I said], "Tell your daughter three things." Tell her to read...Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. ...Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means. Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things. Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these are three I trust. -- from "A Voice

Somewhere between ‘I love you’ and ‘but’ is mankind, a giant loneliness strolling through an even greater loneliness. — Negar Emrani (trans. Kaveh Akbar), “Somewhere Between the World and the Mirror,” published in Asymptote (April 2017) (via bostonpoetryslam)

The work begins by each of us recognizing that cis people are not more valuable or legitimate and that trans people who blend as cis are not more valuable or legitimate. We must recognize, discuss, and dismantle this hierarchy that polices bodies and values certain ones over others.

...He wanted to tell her that all at once he fell madly in love with everything about her, the way she kissed, the taste of her lips, her voice, her smell, her nearness…but such a premature confession at this point could make her suspicious of his intelligence." From The Cartesian Machine

He harbored a hidden inclination toward poetry but in the hard boiled world of adjusting, reading a sonnet seemed like something that could get a guy killed. It was perfect, Ben had told him. Like a book with a compartment cut out of the pages to hide a flask of whiskey, this one also let a guy hide a secret vice: the cover was bound upside down. So he could read the book, and if anyone saw him, it would look like he was posing. Plausible deniability.

Hope is magic. Hope is a gift. Hope is a raft we cling to in the midst of a storm. Hope by nature is an independent of logic. Hope is power outside of the facts. The human mind longs for something better. Hope is not rational. Yet who need rationality when God is on our side? The capacity of hope is the most significant fact in life.

Once I was asked by a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight, a man who took the liberty of glancing repeatedly at the correspondence in my lap, what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughter, who wanted to be a writer. I didn't know how to answer him, but before I could think I heard myself saying, 'Tell your daughter three things.' "Tell her to read, I said. Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the world beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like The Odyssey. They've been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly useful, and, to borrow Evan Connell's observation, with a good book you never touch bottom. But warn your daughter that ideas of heroism, of love, of human duty and devotion that women have been writing about for centuries will not be available to her in this form. To find these voices she will have to search. When, on her own, she begins to ask, make her a present of George Eliot, or the travel writing of Alexandra David-Neel, or To the Lighthouse. "Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing on information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means. "Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things. "Read. Find out what you truly are. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these three I trust.

Society often blurs the lines between drag queens and trans women. This is highly problematic, because many people believe that, like drag queens, trans women go home, take off their wigs and chest plates, and walk around as men. Trans womanhood is not a performance or costume. As Wendi likes to joke, “A drag queen is part-time for showtime, and a trans woman is all the time!

...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.

cheers to the bisexuals the lesbians, gays, and queers cheers if you liked to be called all three cheers to the trans folks to marsha p. johnson and sylvia rivera thank you for letting me be here cheers to the two-spirit to the nonbinary the questioning the not sure yet cheers to the allies cheers to everyone who did work so i could fully be me sexual experiences don’t have to define your sexuality

O little sliver of moon waning that shines on waves desolately reigning, O little sliver of silver, what mass of dreams swells here towards your gentle glow! Fleeting breaths of foliage, sighs of flowers from the woods exhale to the sea: no song, no cry, no sound pierces the vast silence. Oppressed by love, by pleasure, the world of the living falls asleep… O little sliver waning, what mass of dreams swells here towards your gentle glow! (Trans. Michael Shindler)

Stereotypes are the most reductive kind of story: They reduce others to single, crude images. In the United States, the stereotypes are persistent: black as criminal, brown as illegal, indigenous as savage, Muslims and Sikhs as terrorists, Jews as controlling, Hindus as primitive, Asians of all kinds as perpetually foreign, queer and trans people as sinful, disabled people as pitiable, and women and girls as property. Such stereotypes are in the air, on television and film, in the news, permeating our communities, and ordering our institutions. We breathe them in, whether or now we consciously endorse them. Even if we are part of a marginalized community, we internalize these stereotypes about others an ourselves.

I’m trans, and that means a lifetime of hormones. My life will likely be shorter and it’s likely I will be sicker as I get older. I keep my maleness intact with testosterone because my body knows it wasn’t born the way I want it to be. I can change my body but I can’t change my body’s reading of my body. The paradox is that I felt in the wrong body but for my body it was the right body. What I have done calms my mind and agitates my chemistry. Few people know what it’s like to live in this way.

I confess that I sometimes felt like I was being launched into the endless expanses of space alone...But from the moment I had voiced my trans identity that first night, every step I took felt like coming home. Every step felt like healing, aching and uncomfortable as it began, but slowly hinting at a kind of relief, a feeling of rightness I’d never known before. I was shedding my skin like a snake. I knew it as soon as the itch began. I can only describe how I knew it as the unyielding certainty of instinct.

And lovers also gather your inheritance. They are the poets of one brief hour. They kiss an expressionless mouth into a smile as if creating it anew, more beautiful. Awakening desire, they make a place where pain can enter; that’s how growing happens. They bring suffering along with their laughter, and longings that had slept and now awaken to weep in a stranger’s arms. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Und du erbst das Grün,” Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)

The dawn divides all light from shadow, and all my sensuousness from desiring. O sweet stars, now’s come the hour of dying. A higher love from heaven lets you go. Burning eyes, O you—fated to fade away. Sad stars, snuff yourselves while you’ve pure light! Die, I must. I’ve no wish to see the day, for I do so love my dream and the night. Hold me, O Night, with motherly affection, While the wan earth wakes with a misty yawn. By my blood will be born the dawn and from my fleeting dream—the undying sun! (Trans. Michael Shindler)

This is why the concept of chosen family is woven so deeply into the fabric of queer community culture: where the bonds of blood have failed us time and again, we hope that our friends, lovers, and mentors will fill the void. We dream of relationships that stand against the test of time and gay drama, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. Shut out of the heteronormative institutions of marriage and the nuclear family for most of history, queers have traditionally turned to more daring and creative notions of kinship and sharing the future.

There is no set of rules that dictates what you owe someone you love. What parts of your past should be disclosed? Should you confess you are trans? Alcoholic? That you had a same-sex relationship? An abortion? That you were abused by the person you trusted most in the world? When, if ever, is the right time for that conversation: before your first date, before your first kiss, before you sleep together? Where is the line between keeping something private, and being dishonest? What if the worst happens? What if honesty is the thing that breaks you apart?

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.

Grief is an important part of the work. So many of the movements I’ve been a part of in my lifetime—the movements against wars in Afghanistan/Iraq and against Islamophobic racist violence here on Turtle Island, movements for sex work justice and for missing and murdered Indigenous women, movements led by and for trans women of color, movements for Black lives, movements by and for disabled folks and for survivors of abuse—involve a lot of grieving and remembering people we love who have been murdered, died, or been hurt/abused/gone through really horrible shit.

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

In no particular order, I read what I could, sometimes with Fadiman as my docent, sometimes not: Flaubert, Twain, Kerouac, Brontë, Kafka, Camus, Ibsen, James, Thurber, Shakespeare. But in the course of reading great books, something happened. My reading molded me, the tool hammering its hand into shape. By some miracle—and by miracle, I mean great teachers—I pushed past the shallowness and stupidity of my own motivations. I fell in love with the actual literature and the actual ideas of great literature. As an immigrant, as a Vietnamese kid, as a poor kid, I had collected so many scarlet letters of alienation that I connected profoundly to the great works. As I read, I began to understand that all the great works wrangled with big questions, important questions: our place in the world, the value of our experience, the fairness and meaning of our suffering, our quest for love and belonging. Universal themes bound these great works together, and they bound me to their oaky, yellowed pages like Odysseus lashed to the mast of his ship. I felt a connective and humanizing resonance in books: I wasn’t alone in my aloneness. I wasn’t alone in my longing for love. I wasn’t alone in my fear of being rejected, my fear of never finding my place, my fear of failing. The snarl of my journey was untangled and laid out clearly by books.

these glaring disparities, about how those with the most access within the movement set the agenda, contribute to the skewed media portrait, and overwhelmingly fail at funneling resources to those most marginalized. My awakening pushed me to be more vocal about these issues, prompting uncomfortable but necessary conversations about the movement privileging middle- and upper-class cis gay and lesbian rights over the daily access issues plaguing low-income queer and trans youth and LGBT people of color, communities that carry interlocking identities that are not mutually exclusive, that make them all the more vulnerable to poverty, homelessness, unemployment, HIV/AIDs, hyper-criminalization, violence, and so much more.

That night I looked Stephanie [Burt] up online and started reading more about her work...I kept encountering a striking factoid...: she’s often cited as the most influential poetry critic of her generation. And she’s openly trans. This is not the world I was taught I would grow into when I was a young trans child -- the one where transgender people are heard, are brilliant, are influential, are even the best. At anything. Being trans, I’d learned subliminally, was supposed to keep you from being that -- even if you loved your trans self, and even if some other trans people and a few allies did too, the world at large would keep your potential tamped down." - from "Surface Difficulty: An Adventure in Reading Trans Poetry," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014

There is no set of rules that dictates what you owe someone you love. What parts of your past should be disclosed? Should you confess you are trans? Alcoholic? That you had a same-sex relationship? An abortion? That you were abused by the person you trusted most in the world? When, if ever, is the right time for that conversation: before your first date, before your first kiss, before you sleep together? Where is the line between keeping something private, and being dishonest? What if the worst happens? What if honesty is the thing that breaks you apart? “What’s her name?” Asher asks, drawing me out of my reverie. I cover the new hive. I’ve been thinking of Billie Eilish, but maybe not every queen needs to be a pop diva. “Lily?” I suggest. I sit down next to him in the field, as stragglers from the crate fly to the entrance of the hive. We watch the sun go down,

In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32

There are these Precious Moments figurines, they’re like porcelain, little kids with giant eyes handing each other a heart that says LOVE on it, or rolling around with a puppy? Maria stumbles into a whole aisle of them. Tears start welling up in her eyes, again, which is totally not tough and totally not punk but which also you totally can’t lie about. Like, they’re depictions of this idealized childhood innocence, right? This idea that little kids have the potential for sadness in their giant eyes, but really they just know these pure emotions: love, happiness, whatever. It’s totally hokey and stupid and obviously a construction. Real little kids are as dirty, impure, and complicated as the adults they’re going to grow up and be. But this sort of thing gets her all melodramatic and choked up specifically because of how fucked up she was convinced she was when she was little. She didn’t know she was trans, she couldn’t put into words that she was a little girl, but she did know that something was horribly wrong and she blamed herself for it. Other kids could stomp around and punch eachother and sleep at night, but she was this self-conscious mess who liked books a lot because sometimes people in books seemed as bewildered by the world and themselves as she was. She was never a little kid who could get a puppy and be happy about it. If you’d given her a puppy, she would immediately have started worrying about what if she trained it wrong, what if it ran away. She would already be sad that it would die.

To the Nightingale On what secret night in England Or by the incalculable constant Rhine, Lost among all the nights of my nights, Carried to my unknowing ear Your voice, burdened with mythology, Nightingale of Virgil, of the Persians? Perhaps I never heard you, yet my life I bound to your life, inseparably. A wandering spirit is your symbol In a book of enigmas. El Marino Named you the siren of the woods And you sing through Juliet’s night And in the intricate Latin pages And from the pine-trees of that other, Nightingale of Germany and Judea, Heine, mocking, burning, mourning. Keats heard you for all, everywhere. There’s not one of the bright names The people of the earth have given you That does not yearn to match your music, Nightingale of shadows. The Muslim Dreamed you drunk with ecstasy His breast trans-pierced by the thorn Of the sung rose that you redden With your last blood. Assiduously I plot these lines in twilight emptiness, Nightingale of the shores and seas, Who in exaltation, memory and fable Burn with love and die melodiously.

But since we’re on the topic of identity and narrative voice - here’s an interesting conundrum. You may know that The Correspondence Artist won a Lambda Award. I love the Lambda Literary Foundation, and I was thrilled to win a Lammy. My book won in the category of “Bisexual Fiction.” The Awards (or nearly all of them) are categorized according to the sexual identity of the dominant character in a work of fiction, not the author. I’m not sure if “dominant” is the word they use, but you get the idea. The foregrounded character. In The Correspondence Artist, the narrator is a woman, but you’re never sure about the gender of her lover. You’re also never sure about the lover’s age or ethnicity - these things change too, and pretty dramatically. Also, sometimes when the narrator corresponds with her lover by email, she (the narrator) makes reference to her “hard on.” That is, part of her erotic play with her lover has to do with destabilizing the ways she refers to her own sex (by which I mean both gender and naughty bits). So really, the narrator and her lover are only verifiably “bisexual” in the Freudian sense of the term - that is, it’s unclear if they have sex with people of the same sex, but they each have a complex gender identity that shifts over time. Looking at the various possible categorizations for that book, I think “Bisexual Fiction” was the most appropriate, but better, of course, would have been “Queer Fiction.” Maybe even trans, though surely that would have raised some hackles. So, I just submitted I’m Trying to Reach You for this year’s Lambda Awards and I had to choose a category. Well. As I said, the narrator identifies as a gay man. I guess you’d say the primary erotic relationship is with his boyfriend, Sven. But he has an obsession with a weird middle-aged white lady dancer on YouTube who happens to be me, and ultimately you come to understand that she is involved in an erotic relationship with a lesbian electric guitarist. And this romance isn’t just a titillating spectacle for a voyeuristic narrator: it turns out to be the founding myth of our national poetics! They are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman! Sorry for all the spoilers. I never mind spoilers because I never read for plot. Maybe the editor (hello Emily) will want to head plot-sensitive readers off at the pass if you publish this paragraph. Anyway, the question then is: does authorial self-referentiality matter? Does the national mythos matter? Is this a work of Bisexual or Lesbian Fiction? Is Walt trans? I ended up submitting the book as Gay (Male) Fiction. The administrator of the prizes also thought this was appropriate, since Gray is the narrator. And Gray is not me, but also not not me, just as Emily Dickinson is not me but also not not me, and Walt Whitman is not my lover but also not not my lover. Again, it’s a really queer book, but the point is kind of to trip you up about what you thought you knew about gender anyway.