Gender Transition Quotes

“Dysphoria is that bitch who visits the family and wreaks havoc. Sometimes she plucks away, needling and poking, whispering doubts and lies and pulling at the threads of resolve. Sometimes she is in full-on assault mode, attacking the very core of belief, ego and confidence. Sometimes she lingers. Sometimes she disappears as rapidly as she appears, but not before she has darkened things, unsettled all and left a tumultuous mess.”
― Anne M Reid, She Said, She Said: Love, Loss and Living My New Normal

“As a woman, I would have rather been bipolar, something I could take medication for, than been treated like a woman - something I could not control.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“I think it's hard for people to understand what I mean when I say "I'm a guy's guy." I am in one way "becoming" a man and in another way I have always been one and I'm trying out all the ways to understand how I want to live that out, good and bad. Becoming a white man visibly is like a newly found superpower-like when Spider-Man suddenly realizes he can scale the sides of buildings but doesn't quite know how to control his own power and smashes up against a concrete wall on his first several attempts. He flails until he eventually knows how to use his power for good.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“In the final image, he is sitting atop the horse. We have not witnessed a victory or a conquering, but a love scene, a man who knows innately how connection happens, how we traverse emotional distance, how we calm one another's fears.

Similarly, toward the end of the film, Brady goes to visit Lane. He is wearing his cowboy hat, green rodeo shirt, jeans, and a bandanna tied around his neck as if he's ready to go riding. With the help of the nurses at the rehab facility, he dresses Lane in boots, jeans, and his old maroon-striped rodeo shirt. Brady puts Lane's cowboy hat atop his head: "We don't want you to get a sunburn," he says. With great difficulty, they ease Lane over a saddle propped up on parallel bars. Brady holds the reins as if he is the horse and takes Lane riding again.

"You're loping off into the distance," he says as Lane struggles to stay upright. Lane's head falls and Brady cajoles it back up with the patience of a parent teaching a child to ride a bike.

Together they are in a rehab facility loping, smiling, tilting, riding, Brady talking softly, lovingly. Brady's man talk soothes me. I have been the horse and I have been Lane, broken through a transition, learning to allow my body to feel pressure, to be cajoled to walk two steps forward, to trust someone enough to help me imagine what it would be like to lope along in my cowboy hat protecting me from sunburn, to learn what it means to talk like a man.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition