Transgender Awareness Quotes

It's easy to fictionalize an issue when you're not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.

Even when we are confused about someone’s gender, and don’t have a greater awareness of what it means to be trans, we have a choice to respond with kindness rather than cruelty.

It’s not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered self-consciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature.

I'm quite certain now that I'm male and always have been, but I was told otherwise for so long that I accepted I couldn't be.

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.

How does ANY male-identified person know he is a man? And does my answer really diverge greatly from how many men, trans or cisgender, would answer? Transgender people are often said to have a 'narrative' to their lives; we’re encouraged to see our journey toward recognizing our gender as a story with an articulable pattern. The truth is, though, that everyone’s gender is a story; it’s just that trans folks are more likely to be — perhaps I could say “are given the gift of having to be” — aware of it. The story of becoming a man, a woman, or a person of any other gender often follows aspects of that most instinctual of story arcs: the hero’s journey. For instance, my personal narrative was one of effort in seeking a transformative goal (a quest), assistance (tools provided by medicine, law, and intangible emotional support), and mentorship by those who went before me (guides). And my manhood was ultimately achieved through what could be considered rites of passage — which is to say a similar structure to communal cultural tales of how one achieves cisgender manhood. It’s simply some details that vary. I do see one key difference in how all this plays out, however: Trans men make this invisible process disconcertingly visible by flipping the variables. While a cisgender man may be born with certain inherent potentials to physically embody a manhood that others will acknowledge socially, he’s not necessarily imbued with the demanding drive, the internal compass, the awareness of the systems and tropes he’s drawing on, and the deep gratitude concerning the specific man he’ll be. It’s quite possible to reach cisgender manhood externally (for instance, by reaching a certain age or displaying changes in voice, facial hair, etc.) long before one reaches an internal sense of his own unique self — and, further, before one reaches a sense of how hard he’ll fight to be that self, no matter the costs or resistance. For trans men it’s often much the opposite case." - from "'But How Do You Know You're a Man?': On Trans People, Narrative, and Trust

Dwarves are sequential hermaphroditic parthenogens," Ruby said, anticipating his question. "What?" "They can change back and forth from male to female and are capable of fertilizing themselves to make more dwarves. They exhibit what we regard as male characteristics, typically, but some favor a more feminine approach." Durham sat with his mouth hanging open. Ruby poked him in the tongue with her quill feather making him gag and sputter. "So, Ginny is, what, short for Regina? Virginia?" "I rather think it's long to 'Gin'," Ruby answered. "She's head of hazard team and Thud's second." "So, the changing sex thing. How does that work? Does it take a while or is it the sort of thing that might happen in the middle of a conversation?" "Hard to say," Ruby said. "Does she need to clear her throat or did she just become a male? Is he just pausing for thought or did he just impregnate himself mid-sentence?" She shrugged. "Dwarf physiology isn't really my field." "Is there an easy way to tell?" "Which sex a dwarf is at the moment? Not that I'm aware of but I haven't managed to think of a situation where it would matter, either, so I've not dwelt on it much.

What same-sex marriage, women's franchise and the end of segregation all have in common is that they extend the rights of a privileged group to everyone. And when people hear the phrase 'trans rights', they assume something similar is being demanded - that trans people be enabled to live without discrimination, harassment and violence, and to express themselves as they wish. Such goals are worthy ones, but they are not what mainstream transactivism is about. What campaigners mean by 'trans rights' is gender self-identification: that trans people be treated in every circumstance as members of the sex they identify with, rather than the sex they actually are. This is not a human right at all. It is a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single-sex spaces, services and activities. And in its requirement that everyone else accept trans peoples' subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws. All this explains the speed. When you want new laws, you can focus on lobbying, rather than the painstaking business of building broad-based coalitions. And when those laws will take away other people's rights, it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness - it is imperative to keep the public in the dark.

Some AFAB individuals who identify as butch use he/him/his pronouns, while others use she/hers, others use hy/hys/hym, and so on. Countless AFAB individuals who identify as butch encounter many of the same barriers, discrimination, and even violence that transgender people encounter in society. Research has shown that being butch is experienced as an “unmalleable aspect of self, so essential that it even preceded their awareness of that label” (Levitt & Hiestand, 2004). It is something that is deep inside, so deep one may not even have a word for it, but the knowledge of being is just that – it just is. Many describe themselves in childhood as tomboys, and socialized as boys rather than as girls, and even as adults are uncomfortable with feminine clothing or even being perceived as feminine (Levitt & Hiestand, 2004). This is, no doubt, a clear example and definition of what it is to be non-binary (or transgender). Those who are not masculine-appearing can also be non-binary in identity, despite a more feminine appearance.

So, how do we make things better? Given so many obstacles, both internal and external, discussed above, how can a bisexual person come to a positive bisexual identity? Understand the social dynamics of oppression and stereotyping. Get support and validation from others. Join a support group. Subscribe to an email list. Attend a conference. Read books and blogs about bisexuality. Get a good bi-affirming therapist. Find a friend (or two or twenty) to talk to. Silence kills. I encourage bisexual people to come out as bisexual to the maximum extent that you can do so safely. Life in the closet takes an enormous toll on our emotional well-being. Bisexuals must remember that neither bisexuals nor gays and lesbians created heterosexism and that as bisexuals we are its victims as well as potential beneficiaries. Although we must be aware that we, as bisexuals, may—because of the gender/sex of our partner compared to our own gender/sex at a given point in our lives—be accorded privileges that are denied to gays, lesbians and to transgender people of any orientation, this simply calls for us to make thoughtful decisions about how to live our lives. We did not create the inequities, and we must not feel guilty for who we are; we need only be responsible for our actions.

In 1991 Money, a New Zealander–American psychologist, was at the peak of his fame. He was seventy and had given the world the vocabulary to talk more intelligently and kindly about sexual orientation, about being transgender, about atypical genital anatomy, about sexual identity, and indeed about gender itself. Before Money came along, those who failed to fit society’s pigeonholes were customarily dismissed as deviants and freaks. It was this sexologist who in 1955 introduced the label gender, which until then had been used only for grammatical classification. In English, we recognize the gender of words such as king and queen or ram and ewe. In some other languages, the gender of nouns is reflected in articles, such as le and la in French, or der and die in German. Money borrowed this grammatical label, saying that for him gender refers to “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively.” He set gender apart from biological sex, aware of the occasional disparity between those two. He also founded the world’s first Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in 1965. The terminology invented by Money gained immense popularity when feminism declared gender to be a social construct and when transgender people gained public recognition.1

Offer a school assembly on one teen’s suicide and you will raise awareness, possibly at the cost of more suicide.5 The same goes for depression and cutting.6 And now trans identification.

In an interview in The New York Times Magazine in 2016, Alison Bechdel, who appeared in the photograph accompanying the piece dressed in a very smart tailored suit, was asked: “In Fun Home, you wrote about becoming a connoisseur of masculinity at a young age. Today a young person like you would be more likely to identify as transgender than gay. Is the butch lesbian endangered?” “Well, first of all, great question!! Second, wow, in the New York Times? Really? Third, well, is the butch endangered?” Bechdel answers adroitly: “I think the way I first understood my lesbianism, before I had more of a political awareness of it, was like: Oh, I’m a man trapped in a female body. I would’ve just gone down that road if it had been there. But I’m so glad it wasn’t, because I really like being this kind of unusual woman. I like making this new space in the world.

Although I may have been faintly aware that I had questions about my gender identity and my sexual orientation, I buried those ideas so deeply that I wasn’t aware of them. I developed the most toxic form of masculinity to stay closeted instead.

HAPPY TRANS AWARENESS WEEK! I'm trans and intersex people exist! MY PRONOUNS ARE THEY/THEM ZI ZIR

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

Some may feel super woke to say that transgender women athletes belong in female sports, but let me tell you as a biologist, in terms of muscle mass, transgender women have similar advantages over females as male athletes do, even with testosterone suppression therapy, therefore, it is not enough to simply acknowledge transgender as a distinct gender, we must also make necessary alterations to our preexisting societal fields, such as setting up transgender category in sports, where performance is predicated on physiological attributes, so that in an attempt to vest upon the transgender population their long-overdue fundamental rights, we do not start treating other genders unfairly without even being aware of it. Remember, replacing one wrong with another is not rightness. Our purpose is to preserve the rights of everyone, not to change the shape of the violation of those rights.