Transexuality

Trans symbol

Transsexuals are people experiencing a gender identity inconsistent with their assigned sex.

Quotes:

• She said it wasn't worth living for her if she couldn't be a girl. What would you do tomorrow morning if you woke up with the body of the opposite sex while your entire personality remained the same? May you imagine how trapped you would feel? May you imagine the desperate desire to be able to recover a proper body? That's how Hailey feels. She’s trapped in a wrong body from which she wishes to escape. (Law & Order - Special Victims Unit)
• Transsexuals are glorious, shining miracles of God, which we men cannot help but find attractive. (Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi)
• I’m not a woman and I don't want to be one. I’m not even a man, as specifically others are. We should find a terminology that suits us. Not even transsexual or hermaphrodite. We are little meteors falling to Earth. It's not that I want to be a rare beast or that I want to be an idol. We are flashes, beautiful. That the world exploits. They’re are those who castrate themselves, those who want to become women, to achieve a rational objective because society wants subdivisions. I think I'm one of the few who has remained who she is and who wants to live for who she is. Because I want to piss with my penis, not with an artificial vagina. (You live in love)
• Trans people aren't the only ones who dissociate - but we often do it very well. We’re a kind of people who don’t need to be in a body or in the world. The body feels wrong. The world treats us like we’re wrong. dissociation maybe debilitating. But sometimes it isn't. [...] I want to save at least certain types of dissociation from the lexicon of psychiatry. I want to find ways that this disability can become empowering. A way to discover things about the world. (McKenzie Wark)
• Transsexuals have to spend their lives managing their own indomitable virility, women managing men's femininity, men managing women's virility: hell for every gender. (Aldo Busi)
• We are, for example, transsexuals. That’s, we’re born... women. In every way, mentally... everything. And we would like to be women. [...] they treat us with a definitive word: the pederast, or the homosexual or vulgarly, as they say, the butt... They put us all in the same bag. (You live in love)
• Edit {{{2}}} One cannot generalize, because eroticism doesn’t concern the masses but the individuals. The key word here is “identity”. But what does this word mean? He certainly doesn't know Giorgia Meloni, he doesn't know Enrico Letta and I don't know either. For the simple fact that this word means nothing. It's just the reversal of the difference. (Tinto Brass)
• Whatever the emperor's new clothes, mutilating his genitals doesn’t make him an empress. (Milo Yiannopoulos)
• [On transgenders] What I would like is for us not to be the object of fetishism, but instead to be protected and respected. (Leyna Bloom)
• All dolls are trans women, but not all trans women are dolls. [...] The dolls are ultra-feminine, they may be sex workers and they are likely to attract men. They have no place except the night. the dolls have their own scene. But it's not for me to tell. [...] It’s an ambiguous policy to only let dolls in for free. It’s meant to attract beautiful ones. A couple of stunning transsexuals who know how to behave and dance the night away give the event a shine that no amount of queer cis women or gay cis men can match. But so at the end of the evening ^{[sic] [sic]} they’ll think that we exist only to ^[sic] have fun and believe they are ^[sic]... on the wild side. Ta-dan. (McKenzie Wark)
• Once upon a time there were only transvestites and there were no transgenders... a trans is a woman with a dress or a man who talks a lot [...]. If you make a joke about a transgender you'll get ten complaints... they'll get pissed off. (Beppe Grillo)

Lea T:

• Let's face it: in Italy a trans and black girl is considered an escort. [...] transsexualism has always been a taboo, a blurred reality.
• Cisgender society [when sexuality coincides with a person's gender identity, ed] has always been led to exclude and discriminate against transsexuals and has always tried to cancel the visibility of transsexual women as women. Even though we have existed for millennia. Before white colonization we were seen as sacred creatures. In the Indian tribes of North America we were revered and called Two Spirits, Rae Rae in Polynesia. Even in Greek mythology there has been a lot of talk about gender ambiguity. With Catholicism came, however, discrimination and a patriarchal mentality.
• I define myself as a woman, but I'm also proud of my transsexual past: I'm so proud of it that I would tattoo it on my forehead, as happy as I am. I wouldn't give up any tears I cried along the way. And that makes you a 3 times stronger woman, because she goes against the world.

Leslie Feinberg:

• Woman or man? I’m guilty of causing confusion, and I’ll be punished. The only thing I see in myself is that I’m "other", I am different, and I always will be. I’ll never be able to take refuge in the comfort of uniformity.
• The butler was a woman: discovered after death. [...] The title was chilling: a life reduced to 9 words.
• But who was I now, woman or man? I had fought long and hard to be considered a woman among women, but I had always felt excluded because I was different. Passing as a man hadn't just been a way of hiding myself; I had hoped that it would allow me to express that part of me that didn't seem to fit into the feminine. Thus, instead of fully experiencing my condition as a woman-man, I had simply become a man without a past.
  As long as the question 'man or woman' was an obligatory question, as long as those were the only two possible answers, I didn’t I could answer.
• "In dream I had a beard and a flat chest. I was so happy. It's a part of me that I can't explain, you know? [...] It's an old thing inside me. something that concerns growing up different. In my life I never wanted to feel different, in the dream I liked it and I was with other people who were different like me. [...] But in the dream it wasn't about being gay but to be a man or a woman, do you know what I mean? I always thought I had to prove that I'm like other women, but in the dream I didn't feel like that. Maybe I didn't even feel like a woman."
  The moonlight illuminated the wrinkles on Theresa's forehead. “Did you feel like a man?”
  “No,” I said, shaking my head, “that was the strange part. I didn't feel like a man or a woman and I liked being something different.”
• Every day in this city I saw others like me, enough to populate another city. But we exchanged only furtive glances, afraid of attracting attention. Being alone in public was painful enough; two of us would have attracted even more attention. Evidently we didn't have a place of our own, where we could gather in community, live our way of being, speak our language.
• "There have never been many other women in the world I could identify with. But one thing is for sure, I don't even feel like a man. I don't know what I am. It drives me crazy. [...] For me it's different because I'm living as a man. I don't even know if I'm still a butch."
  "[...] you're not the only one to have this feeling of being neither a man nor a woman."
  "I don't like it be neither."
  [...] "You are something more than neither. There are other ways of being, not just one thing or the other. It's not that simple, otherwise there wouldn't be there would be so many people who don't fit into these categories. [...]"
• We sat in a circle and reflected in each other's eyes. I looked around and couldn't tell who was a woman and who was a man. Their faces shone with a beauty different from that advertised on television and in magazines. It’s a beauty that you aren’t born with, but that you earn through struggle and sacrifice. I was proud to sit among them, to be one of them. [...] I felt that my life was composed in a perfect circle. Having grown up so different, discovering myself as a butch, passing as a man and then returning to the same question that had shaped my life: woman or man?

Related entries:

• Drag queen
• Stonewall Riots
• Transphobia
• Transvestism