Ivan E. Coyote > Quotes

“I am a rare species, not a stereotype.”
― Ivan Coyote

“I became something I had no name for in solitude and only later discovered the word for what I was and realized there were others like me.”
― Ivan Coyote

“I am not trapped in the wrong body; I am trapped in a world that makes very little space for bodies like mine.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide

“We are carrying contraband words with us, memorized, tucked away in tattered journals and stored magically on disks in Anna's left pocket. Canadian words, queer words that we spoke on-stage for money in the land of the brave. With no valid permit, license, visa or contract to do so. Felons, really, all of us, and now we intended to flee the scene without paying income tax on the twelve dollars and fifty American cents we each made. It's just this kind of shameless law-breaking that gives all poets a bad name.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Boys Like Her: Transfictions

“I want you to know that it is not always easy to love me. That sometimes my chest is a field full of landmines, and where you went last night, you can’t go tomorrow. There is no manual, there is no road map, no help line you can call; my body does not come with instructions, and sometimes even I don’t know what to do with it. This cannot be easy. But still, you touch me anyway.”
― Ivan E. Coyote

“Bullies are almost always outnumbered by the bullied. We just need to organize.”
― Ivan Coyote

“I realize that the English language is sadly devoid of names for people like me. I try to cut the world some slack for this every day. All day. And the day after that, too. But the truth is that every time I am misgendered, a tiny little sliver of me disappears, A tiny little sliver of me is reminded that I do not fit ... I remember that the truth of me is invisible, and a tiny little sliver of me disappears. Just a sliver, razored from the surface of my very thick skin most days, but other times right from my soul, sometimes felt so deep and other days simply shrugged off, but still. All those slivers add up to something much harder to pretend around.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“So I get a little tired of having to swallow my lived experience to be force-fed someone else's what-ifs. I get tired of my safety coming second. I get tired of the realities of trans and gender non-conforming people's lives being overshadowed and ignored in favour of a boogey-man that might be lurking in the ladies' room. I get really tired of being mistaken for a monster. I get tired of swallowing all these bathroom stories and smiling politely. But the last thing I can do is allow myself to get angry. Because if I get angry, then I am seen as even more of a threat. Then it's all my fault, isn't it? Because then there is a man in the ladies' room, and for some reason, he's angry.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“Some thoughts on heaven? I have this theory that heaven is different for everyone. It has to be, or it wouldn’t be heaven. My grandmother’s heaven? In her heaven she doesn’t have to share the remote with anyone, and it is Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune on all the time, with nary a rerun ever, and the old lady always wins the big money and a trip to Europe to tour a castle or somewhere warm but not too hot with nice churches. In her heaven your knees don’t hurt and your back doesn’t hurt and you get to be whatever age was your favourite age to be and you still have all your teeth and there are bingo games right after dinner and raspberry hard candies and no one ever has to do the dishes. In my gran’s heaven, you can still have yourself a proper smoke in the living room and it doesn’t ruin the new paint job and the lawn never gets too long and the foxes don’t chase the birds off the birdfeeder. In her heaven, a nice bit of cheese won’t give you the bad stomach and real men don’t beat their wives or fuck their children, and every day is payday, and the Friday of a long weekend. Floors wax themselves, but you still get to hang the laundry, but only if you feel like it.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide

“You don’t have to look a certain way to be a tomboy. Don’t let anyone tell you that, ever, and please don’t find that here in my words. Tomboy thrums in your heart. It’s in your head. It’s what is holding your spine in place. It can’t be hidden by a haircut. It’s not about nail polish or not. It’s running right now in your veins. If it is in you, you already know. Tomboy blood is so much bigger than the outside of you.”
― Ivan E. Coyote

“I didn't know why it made my heart sing loud to itself that a stranger thought I was a boy. It just did. Made me feel like he could look inside me and see some part of the truth of me in there.
But it did make me inexplicably sad that a stranger could see me, and my own family could not.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide

“I told her to come right out and ask me what she was asking me. So she asked me if I still had my breasts, or if I was planning to have a breast augmentation, or if I wanted to have a penis constructed, or my penis removed. It was only then that I realized she didn’t know what sex or gender I had been assigned at birth, so she couldn’t even be sure what I might want removed or added on to me, but still. She had to know. She just had to ask.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“It’s a terrifying thing, the pain of a stranger. Impossible to bear it all, even on a strong day, even when the sun is shining and my back doesn’t hurt and the dishes are all done.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide

“...words are always imperfect, words are just sounds we make with our mouths that point our minds to think of things that cannot be fully described in words anyway. I am a writer, so I know where words fail us. A name is not a person, it is just what we have agreed to call them.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“I pressed send and left Grindr open on my phone for a while. After fifteen minutes when there was no response, I closed it and tried to forget about the conversation. After twenty-four hours and still no response, I started to understand that the clear rejection was based on my being trans.
- How to Be Gay When the Gays Won’t Have You -
Rae Spoon”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“Thou shalt not let the world make you hard”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide

“It's not you, it's them. It really is. And those boxes, those binaries, those bathroom signs, those rigid roles, they hurt them too, they do, they carve away at their souls and secret desires and self-esteem and believable dreams and possible wardrobes and acceptable careers just like they do ours, just it's harder for them to tell it's happening on account of no one is hassling them in the bathrooms every other day about it. They somehow just fit better in those boxes, so they can't see what fitting has cost them, not like we can.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide

“Please rate the strength of your feelings from one to five, one meaning you feel not very strongly about it all, to five meaning you have very strong feelings about me getting top surgery. Now, please fold up your answers and put them in your pocket. Please keep them to yourself, as I will try to do with my feelings about your breasts. Thank you so much for participating.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“Some of us have hard roads, but the Lord never gives anyone a burden without also giving them a gift. Your job is to find out what that gift is and use it, y'hear me? God doesn't make mistakes. Never forget that. You are exactly who God meant you to be.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide

“Like I said, one man’s pornography is another man’s brass reading lamp with the articulated adjustable arm and three-way light bulb.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, The Slow Fix

“If being a man is something that required a person to tick off a bunch of boxes, not many people would make it through.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“books: Nancy Drew, Harriet the Spy, Encyclopedia Brown, and later, anything with even a passing mention of sex in it: Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret, and those Clan of the Cave Bear books, the whole Flowers in the Attic series. But mostly we were obsessed with a book called The Chrysalids. We”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide

“It is true what they say: without an audience, a storyteller is just some guy talking to himself.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, The Slow Fix

“I rarely bring a date along to family functions, because more than two or three of us in one room can be hazardous, especially if you are shy, offend easily, clean and sober, or don’t eat meat. The way my family demonstrates our love and affection for each other has occasionally been mistaken for verbal abuse by outsiders, so I usually don’t take the risk.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, The Slow Fix

“She worries because she fears what the world might do to you, and because she doesn't know any successful tattooed butch storytellers with biceps and a brush cut. Yet.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, One in Every Crowd

“I don’t want to sound like someone’s grandmother or anything here, but really, would it be so hard to pick up a phone and call?”
― Ivan E. Coyote, The Slow Fix

“If you do ever decide to go on testosterone, build yourself into a good man. The last thing the world needs is another misogynist prick.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, One in Every Crowd

“How she loved us all, no matter who we were, no matter what we did, her whole band of misfits. I am so proud of you, she would say.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide

“Today I sat next to a man who immediately informed me he was on his way to Europe to work with the Christian embassy, spreading the good will of the Lord. Before the plane was off the ground, he asked me if I had a girlfriend. I took this line of inquiry to mean that he thought I was a clean-cut young man, and therefore possessed a soul worth saving. I told him the truth; I did have a girlfriend, and no, we were not married yet, and yes, we were indeed living together and yes, I was aware that we were living in sin. I smiled inside at the time as just how much sin he didn’t realize we were actually living in, and pondered telling him I was not as nice, young, or male as he appeared to think I was. Then I realized how much fun it was to listen to a fundamentalist Christian lecture me on how God wanted me to marry my girlfriend, how the family unit in this country was depending on me, and how not fun it might immediately become if he were to find out he was brushing thighs with a full-blown sodomite disguised as a harmless wayward Catholic boy in a crisp shirt and tie. I knew there was as much chance of me changing his mind about anything as there was that he would ever lead me back to the path of righteousness, so I told him he was right, and that I was going to propose to my girlfriend as soon as I had enough money saved up to buy her a decent conflict-free diamond ring. He took this to mean that he had helped me see the light, and continued the Lord’s work all the way up to Toronto. When the plane finally landed, he shook my hand and told me that I seemed like a good person, and that if I were ever in Guelph, I should look up his son, who had strayed from God’s path a little and had pierced his eyebrow, and was pursuing an art degree. “I’d like him to meet some friends with ambition. People who realize their appearances matter. I pray that he grows up to be just like you.
“I hope God answers that prayer,” I told him. “I really do.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, The Slow Fix

“It’s strange, the things you miss. Me, I miss the way she used to wear her socks to bed and then pull them off with her toes. I would find them hidden in the sheets when I made the bed in the morning, crumpled into little black balls, covered in dog hair. It used to drive me nuts, but not anymore, in retrospect. Now it seems kind of adorable.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, The Slow Fix