Trans Quotes

Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. (They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.)

People try to say suicide is the most cowardly act a man could ever commit. I don't think that's true at all. What's cowardly is treating a man so badly that he wants to commit suicide.

Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.

Perform all thy actions with mind concentrated on the Divine, renouncing attachment and looking upon success and failure with an equal eye. Spirituality implies equanimity. [Trans. Purohit Swami]

From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.

Being transgender is who you are, and the pain is what the outside does to you. The pain is what happens when you and the world go at each other's throats.

Art must state a link to the challenges of previous eras and the twinkles and heartbeats of the present moment to ensure a ‘trans historic’ bond with our living world where past and present can converse. ("When is Art?")

Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odor is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it's the smell of schizophrenia.

Being gay or straight,” says Elizabeth, “is about who you want to go to bed with. Being trans—or cis—is about who you want to go to bed as.

I'm not ashamed to dress "like a woman" because I don't think it's shameful to be a woman.

Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it is to always stand in good lighting.

Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow. Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home.

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

In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognized as female, a raw strength that only comes fro unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.

When the majority of jokes made at the expense of trans people center on "men wearing dresses" or "men who want their penises cut off" that is not transphobia - it is trans-misogyny. When the majority of violence and sexual assaults omitted against trans people is directed at trans women, that is not transphobia - it is trans-misogyny.

I'm done begging for a scrap of respect-I am done with those who enact suffering, and I am done with the sons of bitches who stand back and let it happen.

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.

Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.

...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.