Genderqueer Quotes

“I hurried out to the pond to catch polywogs in a jar. I leaned on my elbow and looked up close at the little frogs that climbed up on the sun-baked rocks.

"Caw, caw!" A huge black crow circled above me in the air and landed on a rock nearby. We looked at each other in silence.

"Crow, are you a boy or a girl?"

"Caw, caw!"

I laughed and rolled over on my back. The sky was crayon blue. I pretended I was lying on the white cotton clouds. The earth was damp against my back. The sun was hot, the breeze was cool. I felt happy. Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“People are complicated. And messy. Seems too convenient that we’d all fit inside some multiple-choice question.”
― Riley Cavanaugh

“Gender is like a Rubik’s Cube with one hundred squares per side, and every time you twist it to take a look at another angle, you make it that much harder a puzzle to solve.”
― Sam Killermann, The Social Justice Advocate's Handbook: A Guide to Gender

“i’ll be okay
even if i don’t understand
how i don’t want to be a girl, but also don’t want to be a man”
― Courtney Carola, Have Some Pride: A Collection of LGBTQ+ Inspired Poetry

“I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“you’re such a pretty girl” they say
but they don’t see the way she recoils back from the world
as if it’s coming for her like fire, as if it burns
and it does
it burns like a flame that no one can see
so white hot and intense that it rivals the sun
it melts her skin and eats away at her flesh
until she is nothing
nothing but a skeleton that no one can call
a girl”
― Courtney Carola, Have Some Pride: A Collection of LGBTQ+ Inspired Poetry

“Bye Bye Binary!”
― Miss Vera

“One of the first significant, substantial purchases I made after starting testosterone, was a Compact Colt .45 1991 A1 automatic pistol. It's just about the best penis substitute I've ever waved at a sex partner. I love my gun. Can I get an a-a-ay-men? You better fucking believe I lo-o-ove my gun. I love to take it apart and put it back together and admire...oh,you sexy little death-machine...I suppose I oughta feel guilty or something, loving and fetishizing to the point of anthropomorphizing it it. But I don't. I won't either-don't matter to me whether or not I'm supposed to keep this a dirty little secret. I got a dick and I can kill you with it. Yeah, baby, trip my trigger, why dontcha. Heh.”
― Allen James, GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary

“Even when we are confused about someone’s gender, and don’t have a greater awareness of what it means to be trans, we have a choice to respond with kindness rather than cruelty.”
― C. N. Lester

“All surgery and no makeup make Jack a dull girl.”
― Brian Spellman

“By claiming that our words are too hard to understand, the media perpetuates the idea that WE are too hard to understand, and suggests that there’s no point in trying.”
― C. N. Lester

“After a year and a half my therapist retired, so I was bounced to someone else-a woman.
Shazam! I suddenly felt I could open up and talk about the real stuff going on in my head. She lasted two session. I guess it was the castration fantasy that pushed over the edge.”
― Joan Nestle

“Now, as she looked at the person standing before her in a body like her own, she saw someone who seemed neither male nor female, but another substance entirely: something wholly and powerfully of its own kind.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“After three hours, I come back to the waiting room. It is a cosmetic surgery office, so a little like a hotel lobby, underheated and expensively decorated, with candy in little dishes, emerald-green plush chairs, and upscale fashion magazines artfully displayed against the wall.
A young woman comes in, frantic to get a pimple "zapped" before she sees her family over the holidays. An older woman comes in with her daughter for a follow-up visit to a face-lift. She is wearing a scarf and dark glasses. The nurse examines her bruises right out in the waiting room.
And you are in the operating room having your body and your gender legally altered. I feel like laughing, but I know it makes me sound like a lunatic.”
― Joan Nestle Riki Anne Wilchins Clare Howell

“One Saturday morning walking to the farmers' market with my lover she tells me she needs to look like a man on the street. She hates binding her breasts. Hates having breasts, hates not passing. I press her. I ask her, but what do you feel like when you're naked in bed with me? Do you like your body then? She is quiet. Later she tells me she had a dream. Her mother brought home a bottle of medicine from the hospital for her. The doctor says she has to take it. The medicine is testosterone.

On Shabbat I remember to pray for enough space inside of me to hold all the darkness of the night and all the sunlight of the day. I pray for enough space for transformations as miraculous as the shift from day to night.

Later when that lover has changed his name and an ex-boyfriend has come out to me as a lesbian I go to visit my best friend's sister-turned-brother-turned-sister-again and she tells me about the blessing of having many names and using them all at once.”
― M.J. Kaufman

“Our body-minds tumble, shift, ease their way through space and time, never static. Gender transition in its many forms is simply another kind of motion. I lived in a body-mind assigned female at birth and made peace with it as a girl, a tomboy, a dyke, a queer woman, a butch. But uncovering my desire to transition—to live as a genderqueer, a female-to-male transgender person, a white guy—challenged everything I thought I knew about self-acceptance and love.”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“When did you know you were a girl? When did I know I was a boy?" he said. "I knew my whole life. I can't tell you exactly when, but it wasn't like I was ten and realized, 'Oh gee, I must be a boy!' What people fail to realize is they made that decision way earlier than that. It just happened that their gender identity and their anatomy matched.”
― Jaime A. Seba, Feeling Wrong in Your Own Body: Understanding What It Means to Be Transgender

“Sexual-patriarchal relational systems overwhelm, from media glorifying sexual connection above other forms of intimacy and interaction, to medical, economic, and legal structures that automatically privilege sexual/domestic/romantic dyadic partnerships and genetic family bonds over other chosen platonic relationships and support systems. Oppressive social structures and micro-aggressive interpersonal interactions constantly grate on us, damaging our health and maybe even pushing us to seek care, but often available formal assistance is part of the same harmful system and populated by the same privileged persons.”
― Zena Sharman, The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care

“That’s the vicious truth doctor. For me and persons like me, we are experiencing a divorce from our own individual self by sensing our sensations, emotions, behaviors as not belonging to the same person or identity. That’s how you psychiatrists could explain it. That’s how society would like to codify its population. Such a ludicrous model we’ve been creating calling it civilization”
― Neda Aria

“So all I am today is not who I'm gonna be tomorrow, because of the things that happened to me today and later tonight.”
― Miss Major

“As if I’ve never held dear my feminist rage, never thought about how I feel so politically aligned with womanhood and yet hate inhabiting it, hate it when my body is read as such.”
― Lamya H., Hijab Butch Blues

“My editor asks, 'Why does it need to be painful?'

My partner asks, 'Why do you fight so much?'

My audience asks, 'But where is hope in the darkness of your work?'

My ancestors ask, 'Why do you make your hands claw around the lie of your solitude?'

My government asks, 'Why won't you let us use your body to feed the worms?'

I ask, 'What can I write down?”
― Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom