Transsexual Quotes

“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.”
― Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

“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.”
― Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

“Me? I had no dreams. No longings. Dreams only set you up for disappointment. Plus, you had to have a life to have dreams of a better life.”
― Julie Anne Peters, Luna

“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.”
― Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

“John [the father] kept saying, "You have a penis. That means you’re a boy." One day, Shannon noticed that her son had been in the bathroom an awfully long time and pushed the door open. "He had a pair of my best, sharpest sewing scissors poised, ready to cut. Penis in the scissors. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'This doesn’t belong here. So I’m going to cut it off.' I said, 'You can’t do that.' He said, 'Why not?' I said, 'Because if you ever want to have girl parts, they need that to make them.' I pulled that one right out of my ass. He handed me the scissors and said, 'Okay.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant "existing things" does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like “woman,” “butch,” “lesbian,” or “transsexual” are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism.”
― Gayle Rubin

“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.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue

“God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason he made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine: so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”
― Julian K. Jarboe, Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel

“What is the bedrock on which all of our diverse trans populations can build solidarity? The commitment to be the best fighters against each other's oppression. As our activist network grows into marches and rallies of hundreds of thousands, we will hammer out language that demonstrates the sum total of our movement as well as its component communities.

Unity depends on respect for diversity, no matter what tools of language are ultimately used. This is a very early stage for trans peoples with such diverse histories and blends of cultures to form community. Perhaps we don't have to strive to be one community. In reality, there isn't one women's, or lesbian, gay, bi community. What is realistic is the goal to build a coalition between our many strong communities in order to form a movement capable of defending all our lives.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue

“Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire. I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts. I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatrual process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.”
― Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage

“وقد أستطيع إماتة فؤاد من طريق المحاكم في الجزائر . لكن في بلجيكا وبعض بلدان أوربا الشمالية أستطيع أن أغير جنسي وأستبدله كليا بجنس ثان . ففي بلادي لايعترفون بذلك ، أما الحكومة البلجيكية فتمنحني جنسيتها بصفتي رندا المولودة في الجزائر”
― حازم صاغية, مذكرات رندا الترانس

“فهناك في أوربا وحدها يموت فؤاد وتولد رندا ، لكن أوربا لاتزال بعيدة جدآ”
― حازم صاغية, مذكرات رندا الترانس

“There were things that Pumpkin Head—now not Pumpkin Head anymore—had to do to be a girl. He had to be careful how he dressed, and how he acted. He had to be careful how he talked, and he always had to be calm. He was very frightened of what would happen if he didn't stay calm. For his face was really just a wonderful plastic one. The real Pumpkin Head was still inside, locked in, waiting to come out.”
― Al Sarrantonio, 13 Horrors of Halloween

“We're forced to walk a difficult line by this insistence that we only write about our personal journeys," I told the audience. "We end up in this position of only being allowed to represent ourselves, but having to make sure we don't misrepresent everyone. This creates some division in our communities - everyone has their own opinion about what's good representation and what isn't, and you can't please them all." (p. 231)”
― Juliet Jacques, Trans: A Memoir

“Where is the freedom in all this? Nowhere! There is no choice here, no final decision. All decisions concerning networks, screens, information or communication are serial in character, partial, fragmentary, fractal. A mere succession of partial decisions, a microscopic series of partial sequences and objectives, constitute as much the photographer's way of proceeding as that of Telecomputer Man in general, or even that called for by our own most trivial television viewing. All such behaviour is structured in quantum fashion, composed of haphazard sequences of discrete decisions. The fascination derives from the pull of the black box, the appeal of an uncertainty which puts paid to our freedom.
Am I a man or a machine? This anthropological question no longer has an answer. We are thus in some sense witness to the end of anthropology, now being conjured away by the most recent machines and technologies. The uncertainty here is born of the perfecting of machine networks, just as sexual uncertainty (Am I a man or a woman? What has the difference between the sexes become?) is born of increasingly sophisticated manipulation of the unconscious and of the body, and just as science's uncertainty about the status of its object is born of the sophistication of analysis in the microsciences.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“The triumph of the transsexual and of transvestitism casts a strange light, retrospectively, upon the sexual liberation espoused by an earlier generation. It now appears that this liberation - which, according to its own discourse, meant the bursting forth of the body's full erotic force, a process especially favorable to the principles of femininity and of sexual pleasure - may actually have been no more than an intermediate phase on the way to the confusion of categories that we have been discussing. The sexual revolution may thus turn out to have been just a stage in the genesis of transsexuality. What is at issue here, fundamentally, is the problematic fate of all revolutions.
The cybernetic revolution, in view of the equivalence of brain and computer, places humanity before the crucial question 'Am I a man or a machine? ' The genetic revolution that is taking place at the moment raises the question 'Am I a man or just a potential clone? ' The sexual revolution, by liberating all the potentialities of desire, raises another fundamental question, 'Am I a man or a woman?' (If it has done nothing else, psychoanalysis has certainly added its weight to this principle of sexual uncertainty.) As for the political and social revolution, the prototype for all the others, it will turn out to have led man by an implacable logic - having offered him his own freedom, his own free will - to ask himself where his own will lies, what he wants in his heart of hearts, and what he is entitled to expect from himself. To these questions there are no answers. Such is the paradoxical outcome of every revolution: revolution opens the door to indeterminacy, anxiety and confusion. Once the orgy was over, liberation was seen to have left everyone looking for their generic and sexual identity - and with fewer and fewer answers available, in view of the traffic in signs and the multiplicity of pleasures on offer. That is how we became transsexuals - just as we became transpoliticals: in other words, politically indifferent and undifferentiated beings, androgynous and hermaphroditic - for by this time we had embraced, digested and rejected the most contradictory ideologies, and were left wearing only their masks: we had become, in our own heads - and perhaps unbeknownst to ourselves - transvestites of the political realm.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“It seemed evident to me that this client was not genuinely androphilic: He was
clearly an autogynephilic man whose most intense source of erotic arousal involved
the most common type of behavioral autogynephilia, autogynephilic interpersonal
fantasy involving a male partner. But what was evident to me was not at all evident
to this client, even though he was probably more intelligent than 99.9% of the population and had read more about autogynephilia than most psychologists and psychiatrists who specialize in the treatment of gender dysphoria. The most intense and
rewarding sexual experiences of this man’s life had involved sex with male partners.
How could he not wonder whether his real sexual attraction was toward men? His
uncertainty about an issue that seemed so straightforward to me was a reminder of
how profoundly confusing this type of behavioral autogynephilia can be, even to
highly intelligent, well-informed people. Eventually, this client recognized that he
was not genuinely androphilic, but this realization occurred only gradually.”
― Anne A. Lawrence, Men Trapped in Men's Bodies

“Interestingly, forced feminization fantasies are also symbolic representations of
our actual life experiences. Because we fi nd the prospect of becoming women so
shameful and humiliating, we really do have to be forced into it. We are forced by
our unremitting gender dysphoria, by our powerful erotic desires, by our love and
admiration for women’s bodies and our wishes to turn our bodies into facsimiles of
them, and by our need to honor our strongly held cross-gender identities in order to
give meaning and vitality to our lives. If we are prudent, we autogynephilic transsexuals undergo sex reassignment only if we feel we have no other viable alternative: We transition because we feel forced to do so. Forced feminization is, in a very
real sense, the story of our lives.”
― Anne A. Lawrence, Men Trapped in Men's Bodies

“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.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“The mind of the transsexual cannot be changed”
― Lou Sullivan, From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland

“Different should make no difference! Hell: I’m a liberal Democrat Jewish transsexual. My husband was a conservative Republican Christian 40 years older— I’m not someone who thinks you have to be the same to be friends—”
― Jenna Ware, Shadow Life: Aerospace, Love, and Secrets

“There are two main reasons why trans people enter or remain stealth, about being trans overall or some key aspect: (a) to be the needed goal, and (b) to avoid repercussion. In earlier years of stealth living, the former may seem like the main reason, but the balance between the two will likely change through decades.”
― Jenna Ware, Shadow Life: Aerospace, Love, and Secrets

“De huisarts had er net zoveel zin in als ik. 'Zullen we dan maar?' Hij brak het dopje van de ampul en vulde de spuit met vloeistof. Ik deed mijn broek naar beneden. Hij wreef met een desinfecterend doekje over mijn bovenbeen.
'Als je je ontspant, voel je er niets van,' zei hij.
De naald gleed naar binnen.
Dit was het begin, het lentepunt. De zon kruiste de evenaar van mijn wereld, hierna werden de dagen langer.
De huisarts drukte de spuit leeg in mijn been. 'Nu gaan we het beleven,' zei hij.”
― Thomas van der Meer, Welkom bij de club

“In 2010, I published a study of the relative prevalence of nonhomosexual and
homosexual MtF transsexualism across national cultures (Lawrence, 2010c )
that had implications for understanding the phenomenon of autogynephilic transsexualism. In this article, I attempted to explain the observation that nearly all MtF
transsexuals in Asian cultures are homosexual, whereas most MtF transsexuals in
the USA, Canada, and the UK are nonhomosexual. I demonstrated that differences
in a measure of societal individualism —the degree to which a culture condones its
members pursuing personal happiness and self-expression, regardless of the opinions of others—accounted for most of the differences in the relative prevalence of
nonhomosexual MtF transsexualism. If one assumes that nonhomosexual MtF
transsexualism is equivalent to autogynephilic transsexualism—a justi fi able
assumption, in my opinion—these results suggest the hypothesis that the permissible expression of autogynephilia , rather than the prevalence or severity of autogynephilia, primarily accounts for these cross-cultural differences. Undergoing MtF
sex reassignment probably feels far more permissible to autogynephilic men living
in individualistic Western cultures than to their counterparts in cultures in which
individual self-expression is discouraged.”
― Anne A. Lawrence, Men Trapped in Men's Bodies

“Autogynephilia has long been conceptualized as a sexual orientation...but its advocates, myself among them, have not
sufficiently emphasized this point. We should arguably use every opportunity to do
so. Autogynephilia, we should explain, is another variety of sexual orientation: It is
an unusual variant form of heterosexuality. Like other sexual orientations, it is
something we autogynephilic transsexuals did not choose and something we cannot
change. It certainly determines what we lust after, but it also determines what we
love and want to unite with. And we autogynephilic transsexuals understandably
feel strong pressure to express and act on our autogynephilic sexual orientations.”
― Anne A. Lawrence, Men Trapped in Men's Bodies

“We autogynephilic transsexuals strive to become womanly in our bodies, but
we can also strive to become womanly in our personalities. The feminine personas
we create in the process of sex reassignment function as integral elements of the
extended works of performance art that are our lives. We create our feminine personas by trying to express and embody the feminine virtues, whatever we think these
are. For me, they include gentleness, nurturance, empathy, agreeableness, cooperation, friendliness, and grace. These qualities do not describe how I am naturally, but
they describe the way I want to be and try to be; as such, they de fi ne a spiritual path
that I attempt to follow. To try to express and embody these feminine virtues in our
everyday lives makes us better people—especially if we have spent most of our
lives expressing the kind of nerdy masculinity that values things over people,
emphasizes competition over cooperation, and sometimes alienates us from our
emotions and from other people. The transsexual journey is, in this case, less about
finding our “true selves” than our best selves. Autogynephilia is a paraphilic sexual
orientation, but it is possible to build a satisfying, passionate, spiritually fulfilling
life around it—a life very much worth living.”
― Anne A. Lawrence, Men Trapped in Men's Bodies

“First, we autogynephilic transsexuals often observe that autogynephilia seems to exert its motive force indirectly, by giving rise to our strongly held, highly valued cross-gender identities. Second, our lives often do feel
as though they lack vitality and purpose if we fail to express our cross-gender identities. Finally, we often pay a heavy price for expressing our cross-gender identities,
because we are not naturally feminine and because the female personas we create
sometimes appear unusual or inauthentic—to ourselves as well as to others.”
― Anne A. Lawrence, Men Trapped in Men's Bodies

“Perhaps if I have sex enough I´ll convince myself I enjoy it?" (Regarding not being able to have penetrative intercourse)”
― Elliot Page, Pageboy

“I'd rather feel pain while living, than hiding”
― Elliot Page, Pageboy

“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?”
― Jennie June, Autobiography of an Androgyne