Transgender

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Trans persons should have the right to access legal and safe healthcare which includes medical procedures, surgeries, and hormones without discrimination. —Shahzi Bokhari
It wasn’t always the case, but I really love who I am today, and I really love being trans. —Teddy Cook
For me, it's always important to support other transgender people, to love and support each other. There's enough spotlight, there are enough resources to go around, so for me it's always about loving and supporting my trans siblings. —Laverne Cox
Do we have a theory on why people are gay? No. They just are. The only reason we even feel like we need a theory about trans people is that society is so unaccepting of us that it’s constantly demanding we justify our own reality. —Natalie Wynn

Transgender people have a gender identity that differs from their sex assigned at birth.


Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A[edit]

B[edit]

  • Trans persons should have the right to access legal and safe healthcare which includes medical procedures, surgeries, and hormones without discrimination.

C[edit]

  • It wasn’t always the case, but I really love who I am today, and I really love being trans.
  • Young kids are missing days of school, not going to school because they feel unsafe. Now. They’re restricting their intake of food and drink so that they don’t have to go to the bathroom. They’re suffering from bladder and urinary tract infections because they refuse to go to the bathroom, ‘cause they don’t feel safe or comfortable. That’s happening now.
  • I got to say in many ways, I really wish the trans community was as big as members of this committee seem to think that we are. [...] The reality, though, is that we aren’t powerful enough to disrupt the culture of this country. Many of us, even though we are incredibly resilient, are just trying to get through the day, really. We aren’t the threat you imagine us to be.
  • I see the rates of suicidality in my community, and the violence. I see the rejection and the turmoil. I hear the stories of people who have ended their own lives. Young people who would prefer not to be alive than to live in a world that tells them that there’s something wrong with them. That we’re disordered, that we’re a problem, that we’re a challenge to deal with, that we’re something to legislate against.
  • The preoccupation with transition and surgery objectifies trans people. And then we don't get to really deal with the real lived experiences. The reality of trans people's lives is that so often we are targets of violence. We experience discrimination disproportionately to the rest of the community. Our unemployment rate is twice the national average; if you are a trans person of color, that rate is four times the national average. The homicide rate is highest among trans women. If we focus on transition, we don't actually get to talk about those things.

F[edit]

G[edit]

USA TODAY )

P[edit]

S[edit]

  • It is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed to disappear. The highest purpose of the [medically defined] transsexual is to erase h/erself, to fade into the "normal" population as soon as possible. Part of this process is known as constructing a plausible history--learning to lie effectively about one's past. What is gained is acceptability in society. ... In the transsexual's erased history we can find a story disruptive to the accepted discourses of gender.
    • Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Body Politics: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (1991), pp. 280–304.
  • To attempt to occupy a place as speaking subject within the traditional gender frame is to become complicit in the discourse which one wishes to deconstruct.
    • Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Body Politics: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (1991), pp. 280–304.
  • Transsexuals for whom gender identity is something different from and perhaps irrelevant to physical genitalia are occulted by those for whom the power of the medical/psychological establishments, and their ability to act as gatekeepers for cultural norms, is the final authority for what counts as a culturally intelligible body.
    • Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Body Politics: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (1991), pp. 280–304.

V[edit]

  • The US routinely searches for new legal scapegoats to deposit its fears and anxieties around gender/sexual deviance. In the past, this has included the Witch Trials, sodomy laws, hyper-criminalization of suspected gay pedophilia in the late 20th century, and most recently dozens of state and local anti-trans bills across the country. While the face/identity of the alleged perpetrators have changed, the supposed purity of the "victims" has remained quite stagnant. These days the narrative is that freaky transgender people (or as they say "crossdressers") will come into your bathrooms and abuse innocent little girls. This type of legal/carceral culture relies on two things: The construction of morally abhorrent perpetrators/scapegoats AND the production of pure, innocent victims. In this case, as in so many cases in the past, these victims are archetypical (white) (cis) innocent little girls. We totally need to challenge the white Christian supremacist, right-wing rhetoric around trans bodies, absolutely. But we also need to seriously overhaul the idea that there is a perfect victim anywhere.
  • I'm non-binary, which means it's not just that I'm challenging the binary between male, female, man, woman, but between us and them. And in your statement, you said, "why don't I help them", as if this struggle is not your struggle too. The reason you don't fight for me is because you're not fighting for yourself fully. And any movement that's trying to emancipate men from the shackles of heteropatriarchy or emancipate women from traditional gender ideology has to have trans and non-binary people at the forefront, because we are actually the most honest. We're tracing the root, where did these ideas of manhood and womanhood come from? They come from a binary structure, and so that's why people like me, who are visibly gender nonconforming, who are both feminine and masculine and none of the above, we experience the brunt of all of these collective fantasies that were created that are killing other people, that are also killing us, it just looks different. And so one of the things that I try to do in my work is say, "don't show up for me because you wanna protect me, or you wanna help me. I don't need your help. I have an unshakeable and irrevocable sense of who I am, because I am divine." [...] I don't need to be legitimized, or I don't have anything to prove. What I want us to rephrase the conversation is, are you ready to heal? And I don't think the majority of people are ready to heal, and that's why they repress us as trans and gender variant people, because they've done this violence to themselves first. They've repressed their own femininity, they've repressed their own gender non-conformity, they've repressed their own ambivalence, they've repressed their own creativity. And so when they see us have the audacity to live a life without compromise, where we say there are no trade-offs, where we say we actually get to carve in a marrow of this earth and create our own goddamn beauty, instead of saying "thank you for teaching me another way to live", they try to disappear us because they did that to themselves first.

W[edit]

  • Do we have a theory on why people are gay? No. They just are. The only reason we even feel like we need a theory about trans people is that society is so unaccepting of us that it’s constantly demanding we justify our own reality.
  • I feel like trans culture is just so obsessed with reassuring ourselves that we’re valid, that we sometimes forget that the end goal of a political movement is not validity, it’s equality.

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