Alex Iantaffi > Quotes

“When opinion and facts become equivalent, and when people’s lives become a matter of debate, that’s when we start to get into the lethal waters of fascist rhetoric masquerading as free speech.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“For many disabled people, there is also a specific type of intimacy, which Mia Mingus calls access intimacy. Access intimacy is not just for disabled people; it can also be experienced by many other people who might share experiences of marginalization, such as people of color or trans people. Mia describes access intimacy as “that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level.”2 Mia goes on to talk about how it can happen with people with whom there are long-lasting relationships and people we’ve just met. Mia describes access intimacy also as the closeness that emerges from “an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“human experiences are biopsychosocial: a complex interaction between the world around us, our personal experiences of it, and our bodies and brains, with all of those aspects influencing the others. We risk doing further damage to ourselves when we attempt to change our individual experience without recognizing the role of social injustice and/or cultural messages in our suffering.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“One of the most insidious things about trauma is that it’s not about the “bad thing(s)” that happened to us but rather how they have impacted us, and how they can become stuck in us, held in our very being, and leading us to ongoing suffering.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“Along with the destruction of people and nations—and their legacies—another deep wound of settler colonialism and slavery is the us/them binary of humans/nature. This tells us that we don’t belong with other mammals, teaching us that we’re not interdependent with every other species in the global ecosystem, and that the land is something we can own.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“Both anger and loss are things that we might try to avoid as humans and that get a “bad press” in dominant culture. Nevertheless, we might find ourselves in a paradox: while we’re hypervigilant about our fear of conflict, and the accompanying potentiality of anger and loss, we’re not paying as much attention to the suffering that is caused by trying to avoid them.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“When we divide the world into us/them though, we do not only start to dehumanize the other, as we can see in every form of slavery and genocide. We begin to also dehumanize ourselves. If we start to think that we can own the land, green bloods and red bloods—that is animals—then we can also own people, if we can categorize them as not fully human in some ways.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“Gender identities, expressions, roles, and experiences are not fixed and static. There is no ‘pure’ idea of gender, untouched by the impact of colonisation, globalisation, and technology. Learning about gender diversity in the past and present is not about trying to reclaim an idyllic past or exoticising specific bodies or cultural groups; rather, it is a reminder of the strength of diversity in human nature. No matter how hard we might have tried to suppress gender diversity, our varied identities, expressions, roles, and experiences keep re-emerging, claiming a little more space and room to breathe, reminding us that this is not a landscape that can be tamed and shaped into two parallel and distinct highways.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“When you spend much of your life under attack, or invisible, or both, it can be extremely valuable to create some spaces where you’re around people with similar experiences, and can relax and get some support. This is why it can be really important to have women-only spaces, online communities for people of color, Pride events for LGBTQ+ folks, dating apps just for bis, and non-binary safer spaces at an event. But whenever such spaces emerge, there are controversies over who gets to use them and who doesn’t. Much of this tends to come from more privileged people, for whom such spaces are a painful reminder of how we’re all implicated in a system which marginalizes people.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“Take time for YOU. What would it look like, in this moment, if you could meet some of your own needs? Do you even know what your needs are right now? Tune in and take care of this very important, primary, intimate relationship with yourself right now. When we can do this, we can also have more capacity to care for others. You are worth your time, care, and attention. Your needs have worth. You can take time to nurture and care for yourself. We’ll say it again: You are worth your time, care, and attention.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“Another important point to make is that just because an aspect of gender is fluid for somebody does not mean that they could easily choose for it to be otherwise. Often we might observe aspects of our gender shifting over time, but experience these changes as a path that we need to go down. It wouldn’t be easy – or even possible – to take another road, and if we are denied the possibility of going down that path, we can end up feeling a great deal of pain and discomfort. We need to be very careful not to give the impression that people could ever simply choose for their gender – or their gender journey – to be other than it is.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“Figure 5.2: Compass of emotions”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“If we look at tropes and stereotypes, it becomes clear who is allowed what emotions. There is no stereotype of the “angry white woman” but there is one for both the “angry Black woman” and “the angry trans person” (especially trans women). For some people, such as Black trans women of color, displaying appropriate emotional reactions can be lethal.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“If we reduce everything to the personal, we no longer understand the systemic power, privilege, and oppression operating in the world, and think that everything is possible for everybody, and that everyone is equal already! Sadly we know that too many people are far from equal in our world and that none of us can be free until we’re all free—to paraphrase Emma Lazarus.1”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“Our mind is an integral part of our body. We are embodied beings, with embodied thoughts, emotions, and reactions.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“When I gave birth to my child I was a mom. To her, I am still mom because she does not believe this should be a gendered role. I’m her mom and also a trans masculine person. She says my mom and “he” (I use both they and he pronouns) to refer to me in the same sentence, with the ease of someone who has been doing this for the past ten years.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“A few threads and fragments of our history have escaped and survived – a few poems, some paintings, a couple of legal decisions – and we cherish them. They feel like reassurance, like validity – we have always been here; this has always been a thing.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“The gender binary is culturally specific and—like the sexuality binary—related to the settler-colonial, imperialist project of categorizing different groups of people and bodies as superior or inferior to each other. It’s also rooted in a capitalist system which required femininity to be “opposite” to masculinity in various ways in order to justify women’s unpaid labour within the home: caring for the current workforce and raising the next one, or—particularly in the case of women of color—serving other people’s families in these ways.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“So there’s a giant whistling void in our history across large swaths of the world, a void which might otherwise have yielded hundreds of years of custom, law, ceremony, ideas, and ideals about trans and genderqueer and non-binary lives. An artificial void, like there would be if you created the meanest black hole you can imagine – one that makes only that of which it disapproves of disappear completely.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“Outward focus is also a great way to resist the shaming, criticising, judging culture that we live in. We can gently but firmly point out that if our genders are difficult in our place and time in history, then it’s the world that’s flawed and needs to change, not us. Without this approach we might never have reached the point of gender equality we’re at now, because women would have simply focused on how to make themselves more feminine – according to patriarchal standards – instead of embracing feminism and demanding equal rights. Similarly, LGBTQ+ people might still be being imprisoned and treated with drugs or electroshock therapies, instead of occupying the place they currently do in many countries as equal citizens with heterosexual and cis people.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“For example, in the pre-Christian Roman Empire, the cult of the Phrygian deity Cybele was widespread. Her priestesses, called the Galli, were usually people who were assigned male at birth and presented in a feminine manner.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“Ideals of attractiveness also often obscure racism, misogyny, ageism, and ableism.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“we require “feminist killjoys”, “melancholy migrants”, and “unhappy queers” to speak from “negative emotions” if we are to reach a more equal society where pleasure isn’t always found at the expense of others”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“If we reduce everything to the personal, we no longer understand the systemic power, privilege, and oppression operating in the world, and think that everything is possible for everybody, and that everyone is equal already!”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between