Transgender Ally Quotes

Can you be gay or transgender and Christian? The answer is yes.

God’s palette of shifting hues is vast, subtle, and beyond our comprehension. We humans are like those colors. Subtle, shifting, unique. Non-binary. Unable to be labeled or singled out. Beautiful and one-of-a-kind, and seen by God’s eyes alone.

Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry against transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies. Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other's differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation.

Jesus is like us in every respect. Don’t brush this sentence off casually. Let it sink in, deep to the core of who you are. God is like us in every respect. He is like the transgender woman who is worried she’ll be murdered while walking to her car after work. He is like the broken-hearted gay man who can’t attend the church of his childhood. He is like the bisexual intersex person who doesn’t conform to gender norms and endures the snide looks and sniggers of strangers. He is like these people just as much as the heterosexual man who is comfortable performing his gender in a way this society finds acceptable.

When out in public, and are uncertain of a person's gender… stop worrying about it. It doesn't matter. They are a person.

I still identify as Black. Not because I believe Blackness, or race, is a meaningful scientific category but because our societies, our policies, our ideas, our histories, and our cultures have rendered race and made it matter. I am among those who have been degraded by racist ideas, suffered under racist policies, and who have nevertheless endured and built movements and cultures to resist or at least persist through this madness. I see myself culturally and historically and politically in Blackness, in being an African American, an African, a member of the forced and unforced African diaspora. I see myself historically and politically as a person of color, as a member of the global south, as a close ally of Latinx, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native peoples and all the world’s degraded peoples, from the Roma and Jews of Europe to the aboriginals of Australia to the White people battered for their religion, class, gender, transgender identity, ethnicity, sexuality, body size, age, and disability. The gift of seeing myself as Black instead of being color-blind is that it allows me to clearly see myself historically and politically as being an antiracist, as a member of the interracial body striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference of all kinds.

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

We’re at this really unique time, I think, in trans representation in popular culture where homelessness, depression, mental health issues, instability-in-general are still so very real and need to be talked about, but we’re aware that they’ve dominated “trans” stories for years and years. And we’re now finally at a place where we’re seeing some really positive representations of trans folks in pop culture, and there’s this new pressure -- at least, I feel it, within trans and trans-ally communities -- to only focus on the positive. Because we’re trying, in some sense, to overcompensate for the years and years of too much negativity. As a writer, you might feel a pressure to push the negative stuff away. But there are consequences for that too. Anyone who’s working with trans characters right now is going to have to reconcile that tension.

Coalitions of the like-minded are important, but they are not enough to defend democracy. The most effective coalitions are those that bring together groups with dissimilar—even opposing—views on many issues. They are built not among friends but among adversaries. An effective coalition in defense of American democracy, then, would likely require that progressives forge alliances with business executives, religious (and particularly white evangelical) leaders, and red-state Republicans. Business leaders may not be natural allies of Democratic activists, but they have good reasons to oppose an unstable and rule-breaking administration. And they can be powerful partners. Think of recent boycott movements aimed at state governments that refused to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, continued to fly the Confederate flag, or violated gay or transgender rights. When major businesses join progressive boycotts, they often succeed.

Adults, whether anti-trans hate groups, trans exclusionary feminists, conservative activists, parents, so-called interested observers, or even allies and advocates, tarry within the dangerously limiting circumstances of a system that continues to assay the value of trans children’s being in terms not of their humanity and personhood but via questions absurd in their abstraction for how they ask us instead to wonder if trans children “prove something” about the biological basis of sex and gender or how identity politics have so injured a cis, white, heteronormative imaginary that cannot fathom the obvious fragility of its claims to universalism in the face of a defiant no.

A year might not feel like a long time, but years add up. Every single one has bought me closer to the person I am now.

I am Trans. This is MY struggle and MY fight. You can be an ally, a friend, a lover, or simply leave me alone. I have enough pain, doubt, and crisis to fill a warehouse. So please, just let me be on my own battlefield in peace.

Sex workers and their allies are dismissed as the ‘pimp lobby’. Trans people and their allies become the ‘trans cabal’, or in an incredibly offensive formulation, the ‘trans Taliban’…. And any challenge to reactionary feminist views is repackaged, via these conspiracy theories, as evidence that they are indeed right. Terms such as ‘trans Taliban’ echo other reactionary monikers, such as the racist ‘woke Stasi’ and misogynist ‘feminazi’, which are common on the far right. They also tap the contemporary appetite for conspiracy that has supported recent rightward shifts. Reactionary feminists may well be the InfoWars of the movement.

Why is it that when people who use a word like ‘tranny’ to describe transgender people, are told, by a transgender person, that the word is derogatory and offensive towards transgender people, they rally and insist that it isn't? To deny this in the face of someone who is on the receiving end of this abuse – and who has just informed you that it is offensive – only adds to and compounds the abuse. To claim that a transgender person is ‘over reacting’ when insulting terms are used against trans people, and that a cisgender person is easily capable of understanding life from a transgender perspective... While making facetious statements like ‘just because you're confused about your gender...’ only adds injury to the insult. You clearly do NOT understand, and you've just proved it. To crown it all, saying in your defense that you're ‘not transphobic’ because you watch ‘tranny porn’ does NOT make you a cis-ally to transgender people!

see myself culturally and historically and politically in Blackness, in being an African American, an African, a member of the forced and unforced African diaspora. I see myself historically and politically as a person of color, as a member of the global south, as a close ally of Latinx, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native peoples and all the world’s degraded peoples, from the Roma and Jews of Europe to the aboriginals of Australia to the White people battered for their religion, class, gender, transgender identity, ethnicity, sexuality, body size, age, and disability.