Laura Kate Dale > Quotes

“Gender is a figment of consciousness, and I’m free to conceive of my role however I want.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“I didn’t need anyone’s permission to be my authentic self, and neither do you.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“just more proof that a found family is as good, if not better, than a birth family.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“My friends were very supportive; my co-workers didn’t use my pronouns but did put my new name on my name tag; my family refused all of it and still chastised me for ‘trying to look like a boy’. But what mattered most to me is that I felt so much more comfortable in my own skin now that I had a better idea of who I was.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“To feel safe in a lover’s arms is to feel the touch of the Goddess – or God, if you’re into that sort of thing.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“It’s hard to care about how you look when you don’t feel a connection to your own body.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“Social media, as we all know, can be a toxic wasteland, but it can also be the provider of a silver lining on a very dark day.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“It is such a simple act to affirm someone’s gender but it brings so much positivity for all.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“We only live once, and since we are all in danger, I do not intend to take any regrets to my grave. I’m not going to live in fear and let that stop me living my life.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“I started to feel more at peace with my body being what it was, even if I didn’t necessarily trust the world around me to view it as a validly female body.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“Gender euphoria is being called by my preferred name and pronouns and knowing that I’m actually seen as genderless.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“I’d never had a good relationship with my mother, but when I told her I was trans, she said, ‘I know. I always knew.’ And that was an amazing moment, because for the first time it felt like she understood me.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“The experience of breastfeeding is anchored in womanhood. I’m not a woman, but I feel that anchor dragging on me.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“but we should reclaim sexuality as a site of power for ourselves, not only in all its luridness but also, perhaps especially, in its ridiculousness.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“I do think it’s important to highlight that it wasn’t so much my fear of being a woman that drove me to transition. It was my desperate yearning to be a man.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“If you try presenting yourself as something other than your birth-assigned gender, and it makes you feel euphoric, that’s just as valid a reason to claim your identity as escaping dysphoria. Gender euphoria is an equally valid reason to decide who you are.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“I had never disliked being a girl, but it always felt like a tight sweater on a warm day: wearable, possibly fashionable, but overall uncomfortable.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“Simply claiming non-binary identity isn’t enough to opt out of sex-based oppression – we also have to radically shift the patterns of our lives.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“By not assigning a gender we’re not only disrupting the male/female binary, we’re disrupting the trans/cis binary. If trans is not being the gender you were assigned at birth, and cis is being the gender you were assigned at birth, by our current definitions Ember won’t be trans or cis. It feels healing and radical to change the rules of the game. I look forward to learning what Ember’s generation has to teach us about gender.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“Boo: partly for Big Boo from Orange is the New Black, a soft-butch-queer-daddy icon, but mostly short for Boob Parent.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“If you don’t mind keeping a secret, I can tell you that the reality is that people ask fewer questions about what’s going on in your pants if they’re distracted by what you’ve got drawn on your arms.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“It’s difficult to live with a parent you love and care for deeply, who is supposed to love you back unconditionally, and know that they see some part of you as wrong. I never took the words themselves to heart, but knowing that he felt something was inherently wrong with the way I wanted to be caused a hurt to settle deep in my chest.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“Sometimes gender healing is sorting out the division of labour in your household – or changing the way you relate to it. Sometimes it’s writing a chapter about gender that forces you to confront your dysphoria and change your clothes and hair. And sometimes it’s parenting in a way that heals gender trauma rather than perpetuating it.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“There’s a radical self-acceptance in seeing myself without decoration. This is me. This is what I look like.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“In the end, I learned that for me gender euphoria isn’t an ocean of good feelings. It’s the little waves appearing against the horizon before crashing into nothingness. It shouldn’t be mourned, however temporary it is.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“Euphoria is when I look in the mirror and I don’t see a girl or a boy, I just see me smiling back.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“I feared that if I ever missed a day of keeping up these outward-facing appearances, my identity as female would fall away with it.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“My leg hair reminds me of wildflower meadows. My head hair is long pond grass. My armpit hair is a hawthorn bush. My pubic hair is wet moss and lichen on a rock.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“Tattoos on skin have the convenient and highly pragmatic ability to dissuade curiosity about the body beneath. They help you exist as a person whose body is interesting for reasons other than gender divergence.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria

“This fixation on fiction is something a lot of trans people experience. I didn’t want to engage with real life because it held nothing but disappointment for me. I just wanted to get lost in fantasy so I could forget who I was and live through the characters.”
― Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria