Transgender Woman Quotes

If you are a woman, if you are a person of colour, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are person of intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world.

The hardest part has been learning how to take myself seriously when the entire world is constantly telling me that femininity is always inferior to masculinity

It is offensive that so many people feel that it is okay to publicly refer to transsexuals as being “pre-op” or “post-op” when it would so clearly be degrading and demeaning to regularly describe all boys and men as being either “circumcised” or “uncircumcised.

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.

If you are a woman, if you're a person of colour, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are a person od intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world. And it's going to be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere. Especially women's and gay men's culture. It's all about how you have to look a certain way or else you're worthless. You know when you look in the mirror and you think 'oh, I'm so fat, I'm so old, I'm so ugly', don't you know, that's not your authentic self? But that is billions upon billions of dollars of advertising, magazines, movies, billboards, all geared to make you feel shitty about yourself so that you will take your hard earned money and spend it at the mall on some turn-around creme that doesn't turn around shit. When you don't have self-esteem you will hesitate before you do anything in your life. You will hesitate to go for the job you really wanna go for, you will hesitate to ask for a raise, you will hesitate to call yourself an American, you will hesitate to report a rape, you will hesitate to defend yourself when you are discriminated against because of your race, your sexuality, your size, your gender. You will hesitate to vote, you will hesitate to dream. For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution and our revolution is long overdue.

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.

I am rather disturbed by the fact that so many people—who are neither medical professionals nor trans themselves—would want to hear all of the gory details regarding transsexual physical transformations, or would feel that they have any right to ask us about the state of our genitals.

...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.

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.

The most radical thing that any of us can do is to stop projecting our beliefs about gender onto other people's behaviors and bodies

Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic to girls and very harmful to their mental health. It is, perhaps, not surprising, therefore, that there seem to be some girls baling out and seeking to upgrade their status.

For every woman who burned a bra, there's a man burning to wear one.

How are you supposed to be believed about the harm that you experience when people don't even believe that you exist? The assumption is that being a masculine man or a feminine woman is normal, and that being "us" is an accessory. Like if you remove our clothing, our makeup, and our pronouns, underneath the surface we are just men and women playing dress-up.

God is a woman, by the way. Likely a transgender woman of color, according to contemporary biblical scholars (i.e., me, my friends, and Ariana Grande).

While all this sexual identity politics marches through the front door, a large-scale robbery is taking place: the theft of women's achievement. The more incredible a woman is, the more barriers she busts through, the more "gender nonconforming" she is deemed to be. In this perverse schema, by definition, the more amazing a woman is, the less she counts as a woman.

Queer antiracism is equating all the race-sexualities, striving to eliminate the inequities between the race-sexualities. We cannot be antiracist if we are homophobic or transphobic. We must continue to “affirm that all Black lives matter,” as the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Opal Tometi, once said. All Black lives include those of poor transgender Black women, perhaps the most violated and oppressed of all the Black intersectional groups. The average U.S. life expectancy of a transgender woman of color is thirty-five years. The racial violence they face, the transphobia they face as they seek to live freely, is unfathomable.

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.

Women feel things deeply. We empathize. For good reason, when asked to identify their best friend, most men name their wives; most women name another woman.

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

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.

Consider that people will talk about the fact that I now "pass" as a woman, but nobody ever asks about how difficult it must have been for me to "pass" as a man before.

Venus to Tig: "I'm afraid, Alexander, that I may have fallen in love with you." Tig doesn't know what to say, so Venus says it for him: "I'm a man. I am a man who knows she's a woman. And that's exactly where I'm supposed to be. It's the criss-cross that I've come to love. I don't want the surgery. I don't want to undo what God has given me. I know how beautiful I am.

I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of woman and wake with the same. I don't foresee no time where this ain't true no more.

After a year and a half my therapist retired, so I was bounced to someone else-a woman. Shazam! I suddenly felt I could open up and talk about the real stuff going on in my head. She lasted two session. I guess it was the castration fantasy that pushed over the edge.

I have heard an argument that transgender people oppress transsexual people because we are trying to tear down the categories of male and female. But isn't this the same reactionary argument used against transmen and transwomen by those who argue that any challenges to assigned birth sex threaten the categories of man and woman? Transgender people are not dismantling the categories of man and woman. We are opening up a world of possibilities in addition. Each of us has a right to our identities. To claim one group of downtrodden people is oppressing another by their self-identification is to swing your guns away from those who really do oppress us, and to aim them at those who are already under siege.

If one does not make an ego out of gender, one would still know whether one is a man or a woman, gay, straight, bisexual, transgender—whatever else we may think of. But those identities need to fit very loosely and be worn very lightly. All sense of privilege or deprivation that has developed around one’s gender identity, all rigidity regarding proper roles and behaviors for the various genders, must be cut through.

Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.

How could her body be a woman's body, if it didn't house a woman?

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.

They didn’t need proof. All a woman had to be was alive. Just being a woman was, in the church’s eyes, evil.” “But there must’ve been a reason,” said Gabri. “Is there a reason gay, lesbian, and transgender people are attacked?” asked Ruth. “Is there a reason Black men are shot? Is there a reason women are raped, abused, refused abortions, groomed and sold as sex slaves?” “Murdered,” said Myrna, looking at the bouquet of white roses on the kitchen island.

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.

That was it. The bracket of her bent leg against the stones. The way her mouth angled around the cigar in a grimace that was almost a smile. The sight of a woman in a well-tailored jacket and trousers. Unexpected, unimagined. A prickling sensation. A stomach-dropping, blood-fizzing, breath-stopping, knotted lurch-and-swoop that I recognized, by then, as the first faltering step towards falling in love.

Jack struggled throughout his life to maintain his male identity, yet in a final symbol of rejection by family and society, and a final assault upon his body, this little old gray-haired man was buried in a woman’s white satin dress

After three hours, I come back to the waiting room. It is a cosmetic surgery office, so a little like a hotel lobby, underheated and expensively decorated, with candy in little dishes, emerald-green plush chairs, and upscale fashion magazines artfully displayed against the wall. A young woman comes in, frantic to get a pimple "zapped" before she sees her family over the holidays. An older woman comes in with her daughter for a follow-up visit to a face-lift. She is wearing a scarf and dark glasses. The nurse examines her bruises right out in the waiting room. And you are in the operating room having your body and your gender legally altered. I feel like laughing, but I know it makes me sound like a lunatic.

The Bible’s primary invitation to every Christian is not to act more like a man or to act more like a woman, but to act more like Jesus.

I don't want to be a phenomenon...... I want to be a quite normal and ordinary woman.

It’s not easy for a young gay fabulous boy in Japan, I should know, that’s why I became a woman.” Momma Nakama

You’re not a woman!” I say, “I don’t know what I am if I’m not a woman.

Men and women are performative and somatic fictions, convinced of their natural reality.

However, the answer "Some people simply are transgender" doesn't seem to satisfy certain people, so they may feel compelled to seek out some kind of alternative explanation. Once again, this isn't the result of pure curiosity- after all, we don't actually understand why most people turn out to be cisgender, yet very few people ever inquire about that outcome!

If the goal of feminism is to end patriarchy and gender-based oppression, then transgender politics supplies us one of the most important perspectives from which to view - and challenge - binary gender and gender-based oppression. As mentioned in previous chapters, if no clear distinction exists between "male" and "female," it becomes impossible to oppress people according to their gender. If we have no sole criterion for determining who is "man" and who is "woman," we can't know whose role it is to be oppressor, and whose to be oppressed.

While all this sexual identity politics marches through the front door, a large-scale robbery is taking place: the theft of women’s achievement. The more incredible a woman is, the more barriers she busts through, the more “gender nonconforming” she is deemed to be. In this perverse schema, by definition, the more amazing a woman is, the less she counts as a woman.

Here’s a story I heard: somewhere there was a transgender woman trying to explain her transition to a geeky-but-otherwise-clueless friend. Nothing she tried could really convey what she was going through to him, until she described it in terms he could grasp. “It’s like I’m the Doctor,” she said. “Except I’m regenerating into a woman.” His eyes lit up. He got it then.

If I were a transgendered lesbian—a woman trapped in a man’s body (gender identity) with a sexual orientation toward females—would my behavior be any different than a heterosexual man’s?

I knew that I would never in any book find anything about people who were like me...... no poet had yet written about such a being, because it had never occurred to any poet that it could exist.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a human who can't hum the opening lines of Darth Vader's theme, "The Imperial March," or describe one of the iconic scenes it underscores in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. It would be far more difficult to find someone who knows that John Williams's longtime collaborator on that film and many others was Angela Morley, a transgender woman who is responsible for some of the most memorable scores in film and television.

Our body-minds tumble, shift, ease their way through space and time, never static. Gender transition in its many forms is simply another kind of motion. I lived in a body-mind assigned female at birth and made peace with it as a girl, a tomboy, a dyke, a queer woman, a butch. But uncovering my desire to transition—to live as a genderqueer, a female-to-male transgender person, a white guy—challenged everything I thought I knew about self-acceptance and love.

In my own experience, it is entirely possible for a person to know a woman is trans, insist they do not believe she is really a woman, and yet still treat her misogynistically. This may seem a paradox, - but, as Serano argues, it is because our popular culture and media has spent decades depicting trans women as extreme embodiments of very misogynistic tropes. First, we are represented as agents of vapid and regressive femininity - vain, obsessed with how we look, stupid, weak, childish, and entitled. We are simultaneously hypersexualized: either as grotesque sexual deviants, particularly if we are unconventionally feminine (or lesbians); or, as yielding, sexually passive and deceptive if we are more feminine in appearance and/or if we date men.

Can a woman [mother] forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me.” (Isaiah 49:15–16 ESV)

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.

You’re an idiot. I know you’re joking but do you realise how prejudistic you sound when you say things like that?” “I’m not being prejudistic, I’m just saying there’s nothing worse than a confident fat woman. Except transgender old people of course. Can I have the remote please?” “No, I’m watching another Hallmark movie.

I could hear the *click clack* of my heels on the brick walkway. *click* A boy starts a ballet class and doesn’t worry about what his friends will say. *clack* A college student reads Judith Butler. *click* A transgender person understands that, while they have a difficult life to face, they will not be alone. *clack* A sex worker reclaims her dignity and autonomy from a world that says she’s worthless. *click* A woman finds freedom from her abusive husband. *clack* A friend, struggling with bulimia, realizes that she is beautiful. *click* All people, man and woman, realize that in some small way, they have not been true to themselves, and the bonds of gender stereotypes and heterosexism dissolve into truth.

Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son who still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means— this way or that—but for the way facets set off prisms and prisms spin up everywhere and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows—made every shining true color. Now try to tell me—man or woman—your heart was ever once that brave.

When and where there is repression, what a woman does when she gets dressed in the morning may be considered political. Wearing or not wearing a veil, disobeying laws that prohibit transgender dressing, or wearing a large Afro in an institution that seeks to diminish the formation of racial alliances are all actions that can serve as challenges to domination

While many people define being a man or a woman as being dependent on reproductive capacity, it is worth noting (should such a superficial argument present itself) that there are many males and females who are born male or female and cannot reproduce either. Are they to be considered 'not male' and 'not female'? Or does that only apply to transgender people?

In no way should we minimize the psychological difficulties that a person with one of these conditions might experience. These are ripe pastoral opportunities to embody the love and life of Jesus toward people who, for whatever reason, might feel “othered” by society (intentionally or unintentionally) or by their own self-perception of what it means to be a “real” man or woman.

She lives always dressed as a woman and she whores as a woman. I would never think she was a man. I can't really see the man in her. Most of the time I absolutely know but she has none of the qualities of female impersonators that I can recognize. have gone into restaurants with her and every man in the place has turned around to look at her and made all kinds of hoots and whistles. And it was her, it wasn't me.

And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being, she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of ignorance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather blown on the gale.

Moreover, autogynephiles often eroticise aspects of womanhood that most women dislike, such as menstruation, undergoing intimate medical examinations, experiencing sexism or wearing uncomfortable clothes. 'Forced feminisation' - someone making a man cross-dress or undergo sex-reassignment surgery - is a staple of transgender erotica. Quite a few of Lawrence's informants say they would find it shameful to be a woman, and that this turns them on.

The main reason why trans-woman-exclusion evokes such passion and frustration in me is precisely because it is both anti-trans and antifeminist. And as a feminist, it gravely disturbs me that other self-described feminists are so willing to overlook or purposefully ignore how inherently sexist trans-woman-exclusion policies and politics are: they favor trans men over trans women, they rampantly objectify trans female bodies, and they privilege trans women's appearances, socialization, and the sex others assigned to us at birth over our persons, our minds, and our identities.

The Gender Sonnet Woman means not weakling, but wonder. Woman means not obstinate, but original. Woman means not man-slave, but mother. Woman means not amorous, but amiable. Woman means not neurotic, but nimble. Man mustn't mean medieval, but moral. Man mustn't mean abusive, but affable. Man mustn't mean nefarious, but noble. Trans doesn't mean titillating, but tenacious. Trans doesn't mean riff-raff, but radiant. It doesn't mean abhorrent, but affectionate. It ain't nasty and sick, but nerved and sentient. Gender has no role in society except in bed. Person is known by character, not dongs 'n peaches.

The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace. As he stood there, silver trumpets prolonged their note, as if reluctant to leave the lovely sight which their blast had called forth; and Chastity, Purity, and Modesty, inspired, no doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell short by several inches. Orlando looked at himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discompose, and went presumably, to his bath. We many take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman - there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change in sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory - but in the future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’, and ‘she’ for ‘he’ - her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark spots had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change in sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando has always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

Mercy looked down at her hands in surprise... 'I'm not a woman. Or even a man, really. I guess I'm actually nothin' at all.' Abigail smiled slowly. 'I beg to differ Mercy Midnight,' she said. 'I commanded you to take your true form. And this is what you picked.' Mercy glanced at Abigail from beneath her hair as they turned to climb the hill once again. A vaguely hopeful expression had dawned upon her features. 'I...I guess you're right,' she said. 'You know--I never really had a true form before. I didn't know there was such a thing. I just kept turnin' into whatever I thought people expected me to be.' Abigail smiled warmly. 'But you have one now,' she said. 'And I'm very fond of it, you know.

And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear, what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty, and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.

Griffin Hansbury, who was born female but underwent a sex change after graduating from college, has another well-informed view of the powers of testosterone. “The world just changes,” he said. “The most overwhelming feeling was the incredible increase in libido and change in the way I perceived women.” Before the hormone treatments, Hansbury said, an attractive woman in the street would provoke an internal narrative: “She’s attractive. I’d like to meet her.” But after the injections, no more narrative. Any attractive quality in a woman, “nice ankles or something,” was enough to “flood my mind with aggressive pornographic images, just one after another…Everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex.” He concluded, “I felt like a monster a lot of the time. It made me understand men. It made me understand adolescent boys a lot.

here are many things that I’ve always known about myself, but my gender just isn’t one of them. I didn’t know that I was a girl. And forgive the double negative, but I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t a boy, either. I just knew that gender was kinda stupid and that I wanted to play with Barbies, get dirty in the creek behind my house, and kiss the blue Power Ranger real bad. As people, our identities change over our lifetimes. This applies to transgender and cisgender people alike. Everyone has a gender that evolves. Even if you identify as a woman, what it means to be a woman is never the same from day to day. Or, if you identify as a man, the way that your manhood manifests will be different throughout your life. The idea that gender is consistent is a flawed premise to begin with. By resisting convenient labels and embracing authentic ambiguity, I want to challenge the tenet that gender must be consistent and immediately legible to others.

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

Orlando had become a woman--there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory--but in future we must, for convention's sake, say 'her' for 'his,' and 'she' for 'he'--her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

Orlando had become a woman--there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory--but in future we must, for convention's sake, say 'her' for 'his,' and 'she' for 'he'--her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

In the spread of gender-identity ideology, developments in academia played a crucial role. This is not the place for an extended critique of the thinking that evolved on American campuses out of the 1960s French philosophy and literary criticism into gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory and the like. I will merely focus on what some have dubbed 'applied postmodernism' and the form of activism, known as 'social justice', that seeks to remake humanity along ideological lines. And I will lay out the key elements that have enable transsexuality, once understood as a rare anomaly, to be converted into an all-encompassing theory of sex and gender, and body and mind. Within applied postmodernism, objectivity is essentially impossible. Logic and reason are not ideals to be striven for, but attempts to shore up privilege. Language is taken to shape reality, not describe it. Oppression is brought into existence by discourse. Equality is no longer achieved by replacing unjust laws and practices with new ones that give everyone the chance to thrive, but by individuals defining their own identities, and 'troubling' or 'queering' the definitions of oppressed groups. A dualistic ideology can easily be accommodated within such a framework. Being a man or woman – or indeed non-binary or gender-fluid - becomes a matter of finding your own gender identity and revealing it to the world by the medium of preferred pronouns. It is a feeble form of dualism to be sure: the grandeur of Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' replaced by 'they/them' on a pronoun badge.

Had these wise storytellers lived in modern America, they might point to a poor, black transgender woman or an asylum-seeking toddler alone in a detainment center and say: God is in this one. This one—the one on the outermost ring of the rankings we’ve made up about who matters. This one—the one farthest from whom we have centered. This one is made of our same flesh, blood, and spirit. When we hurt her, we hurt our own kin. This one is One of us. This one is Us.

If I can be any gender I want to be, can I also be any race I want to be? Can I be a white guy today and a black woman tomorrow? Or is that racist?

And who can speak more authoritatively of what it is like to inhabit the middle ground between biology and culture than gender-variant people? An individual who has inhabited the social roles of both and and woman, with all the cultural baggage that accrues to both states - or to neither- acquires a kind of gender gnosis: a secret knowledge denied the rest of us who live in our assigned boxes, M or F, with really probing the boundaries.

My bad choices had destroyed my identity, my family and my career. The surgeon’s knife and resulting amputation had not changed me from a man into a woman. I now knew that. The surgery was a complete fraud, a fraud which required a willing participant, me. I realized that it was impossible for any surgeon to completely change anyone’s birth gender through surgery.

Transgender rights activists campaign to downgrade the importance of biology in support of the claim that men can really be women. This has had particularly widespread consequences for women's status. For a feminist movement to exist, women have to be thinkable, to conceptualise themselves as an oppressed group based upon a common characteristic. If the word 'woman' ceases to have any meaning, or the meaning is downgraded, then feminism cannot exist because 'women' have become unthinkable. This erasure of women is the ultimate triumph of transvestism at this time in history.

[...] 'Transwomen' are intensely preoccupied with the ancient patriarchal question: "What is a woman?" Their answer is that a woman is who she says she is, so long as it is not actually a woman who says it!

Diversity policies, saturated with a monologic view of 'gender identity', execute a masculinist trans rights political programme through the universities, the healthcare system, Gender Identity Development Clinics, the school system, the police and political parties in the UK. Through this politicised programme 'group think', the majority of the population - women - have a 'cis' identity foisted upon us and cries of transphobia are heard whenever a woman rejects the idea that male bodied humans are our 'sisters' (just because they say they are) and who, in the 'victimisation awards', suffer extreme oppression at our hands.

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.

The average U.S. life expectancy of a transgender woman of color is thirty-five years.11 The racial violence they face, the transphobia they face as they seek to live freely, is unfathomable.

The eunuch passage calls us to a broader biblical vision of what it means to be a man or a woman, reminding us that we don’t need to mimic the cultural scripts of masculinity and femininity.

Had these wise storytellers lived in modern America, they might point to a poor, black transgender woman or an asylum-seeking toddler alone in a detainment center and say: God is in this one. This one—the one on the outermost ring of the rankings we’ve made up about who matters. This one—the one farthest from whom we have centered. This one is made of our same flesh, blood, and spirit. When we hurt her, we hurt our own kin. This one is One of us. This one is Us. So let us protect her. Let us bring her gifts and kneel in front of her. Let us fight for her and her family to have every good thing we want for ourselves and our families. Let us love this one as we love ourselves. The point of this story was never that This One is more God than the rest. The point is that if we can find good in those we’ve been trained to see as bad, if we can find worth in those we’ve been conditioned to see as worthless, if we can find ourselves in those we’ve been indoctrinated to see as other, then we become unable to hurt them. When we stop hurting them, we stop hurting ourselves. When we stop hurting ourselves, we begin to heal.

The second issue is that men are now edging women out of prized positions and awards while wearing dresses and heels. The hottest flashpoint in the culture today is the transgender movement, with the progressive mob even coming after feminists, such as the famed author of the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling. Anyone who dares to oppose the idea that men can become women (or vice versa) is targeted. Activists use the derogatory term “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” or “TERFs,” to criticize those who, like Rowling, embrace the idea that a woman is someone who is a biological female, from birth, distinct from mere gender expression.

I wanted to so badly to be a woman that I could not really understand anyone wanting anything else

As a trans woman, I might now and then feel freakish, or horribly clockable, or out of place, or resented, but those were all projections from without. In and for myself, I did not have a speck of doubt. I had once described myself in print as a creature made entirely of doubt, most of it self-doubt, but I had now been given something like a euclidean proof of an essential truth about me.

She moved like a woman whose body not only provided her with pleasure, but peace and ease. She moved like a fully embodied universe of her own making.

Perhaps all my shifts from room to room were just social camouflage, but that wouldn't convey the magic of catharsis. Every bed-bound woman saw in me what they needed most, mistaking a single part for a multifaceted whole. Of course for me that resulted in terrible frustration mottled with a wonderful joy. For who on Earth can shape-shift through such dramatic social roles if not the genderqueer? Everyone in the transgender revolution knows how it feels to be mistaken, their pronouns casualties of misassumption. And while I wish I could attest to some resolution, to be genderqueer is to be in the thick of it.

September 18, 2021, the one-year anniversary of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) tweeted a quote about abortion rights from Justice Ginsberg’s 1993 Supreme Court confirmation hearing, editing out all of the words that identified abortion as a right that pertains exclusively to women, i.e., female humans—the only humans who are capable of getting pregnant (full disclosure: I worked at the ACLU from 2012 to 2014). Justice Ginsberg’s original statement read: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.” The version that the ACLU tweeted read: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity … When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.

As a mom, I feel compelled to ask questions. Why are girls demanding the drug testosterone in skyrocketing numbers? Why are so many young girls and women getting mastectomies? What is happening when the young woman’s scarred mastectomy chest is glorified? Why is there a new industry profiting from removing any traces of femininity of our daughters? Why is this drastic medicalized trend rushed, creating a destructive trans train that roars fast and furious, ignoring the whole person, their history, and their family?

Let us question why we are losing so many teenage girls and young women to an ideology that encourages them to discard all things that represent womanhood and motherhood. Moms are often thrown out, along with the young women’s healthy breast tissue. Being a woman is a gift if not rejected.

Rooted in black and Chicana feminist thought, intersectional feminism calls into question the idea that the social oppression of women can be adequately analyzed and contested solely by concentrating on the category “woman.” Intersectional feminism insists that there is no essential “Woman” who is universally oppressed. To understand the oppression of any particular woman or group of women means taking into account all of the things that intersect with their being women, such as race, class, nationality, religion, disability, sexuality, citizenship status, and myriad other circumstances that marginalize or privilege them—including having transgender or gender-nonconforming feelings or identities.

Yes, I am as one who tries to sail against the current up over a waterfall, and I feel that the current has grabbed me and overpowered me ...... I no longer know where it leads me ...... perhaps towards complete destruction ...... and yet I cannot get off the boat now that I am halfway, the decision has been made ...... there is no turning back.

Yes, I am as one who tries to sail against the current up over a waterfall, and I feel that the current has grabbed me and overpowered me ...... I no longer know where it leads me ...... perhaps towards complete destruction ...... and yet I cannot get off the boat now that I am halfway, the decision has been made ...... there is no turning back.

All other women were allowed to be ugly, to be hideous, to have all kinds of defects and flaws in their appearance. But I had to be pretty; if I did not look good, I had lost any right to exist, to be a woman ......

I have been doomed to be a girl who must pass her earthly existence in a male body. How dreadful it is to a young woman to have a slight growth of hair on lip or cheeks ! Only one mark of the male ! How much more dreadful for a young woman to possess almost all the male anatomy as I do ! How I have bewailed my fate!

I am a woman entombed in the body of a man.

So, for example, whether transgender women should be housed in women-only prisons should depend not on an abstract debate about how to define the term “woman,” but on an evidence-based assessment of how best to protect the safety of all inmates.

How can one explain why a six-year-old boy (the author) should class himself as a girl, give himself a girl’s name, fight against his parents’ course of bringing him up as a boy, and grieve because he could not be brought up as a girl, except on the assumption that the cells of his brain were identical with the cells of a girl’s brain and fundamentally different from those of a normal boy?

Practically it is all right, but medico-legally it is wrong, to make the genitals the universal criterion in the determination of sex. Medico-legally, sex should be determined by the psychical constitution rather than by the physical form. There are thousands of physical females who feel themselves to be men and have the mental traits of men, and there are thousands of physical males who feel themselves to be women and have the mental traits of a woman. Should any blame be attached to such individuals when they conduct themselves according to their psychical sex?

Did society ever compel any other woman, except those like me, to live, eat, sleep, frequent the same comfort-rooms and baths, lie sometimes in the same bed, with men, and sometimes to listen to the unclean talk of men?