Trans Women Quotes

“The moms I knew when I was little didn't have to prove that it was okay to want a child. Sure, a lot of women I know wonder if they do want a child, but not why. It's assumed why. The question cis women get asked is: Why don't you want kids? And then they have to justify that. If I had been born cis, I would never even have had to answer these questions. I wouldn't have had to prove that I deserve my models of womanhood. But I'm not cis. I'm trans. And so until the day that I am a mother, I'm constantly going to have to prove that I deserve to be one. That it's not unnatural or twisted that I want a child's love. Why do I want to be a mother? After all those beautiful women I grew up with, the ones who chaperoned my classes on field trips, or made me lunch when I was at their house, or sewed costumes for all the little girls that I ice skated with — and you too, Katrina, for that matter — have to explain their feelings about motherhood, then, I'll explain mine. And do you know what I'll say? Ditto.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“It's actually a very old archetype that trans girl stories get put into: this sort of tragic, plucky-little-orphan character who is just supposed to suffer through everything and wait, and if you're good and brave and patient (and white and rich) enough, then you get the big reward...which is that you get to be just like everybody else who is white and rich and boring. And then you marry the prince or the football player and live boringly ever after.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“Why does she deserve to be so angry? What has she truly lost? Quietly, to herself, she answers her own question: I have lost a child.
The statement jolts her. She hears in her own voice a latch sliding into place. She says it again, phrased slightly differently, I have lost my child. Is it grief she feels? Is grief even a feeling to which she is entitled?”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Be paralyzed whenever you want to write anything. You were so wrong for so many years, so incredibly good at lying to yourself, and given that, how could you possibly think you’ll ever put a pen to paper and say something true?”
― torrey peters, How to Become a Really Really Not Famous Trans Lady Writer

“I don't want to be a phenomenon...... I want to
be a quite normal and ordinary woman.”
― Lili Elbe, Man into Woman: The First Sex Change

“Because I support trans rights, I must be trans, because why would you care about something if it didn’t directly affect you?”
― Rachel Charlton-Dailey

“Being exception isn't revolutionary, it's lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community? I have been held up consistently as a token, as the "right" kind of trans woman (educated, able-bodied, attractive, articulate, heteronormative). It promotes the delusion that because I "made it," that level of success is easily accessible to all young trans women. Let's be clear: It is not.”
― Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love So Much More

“We are poison women, Diane, because our bodies do all turn what enters them into poison, and we make poison and spread poison, because we are sadness itself. There is no way for us not to be that.”
― Jeanne Thornton, Summer Fun

“Trans and gender non-conforming people have stood by lesbians throughout the gay rights movement. We now need to support them as they fight for their equality.”
― Ella Braidwood

“I have been doomed to be a girl who must pass her earthly existence in a male body. How dreadful it is to a young woman to have a slight growth of hair on lip or cheeks ! Only one mark of the male ! How much more dreadful for a young woman to possess almost all the male anatomy as I do ! How I have bewailed my fate!”
― Jennie June, Autobiography of an Androgyne

“I am a woman entombed in the body of a man.”
― Jennie June, Autobiography of an Androgyne

“All other women were allowed to be ugly, to be hideous, to have all kinds of defects and flaws in their appearance. But I had to be pretty; if I did not look good, I had lost any right to exist, to be a woman ......”
― Lili Elbe, Man into Woman: The First Sex Change

“At the end of the day, this isn’t about who is and isn’t a woman. It’s about who performs womanhood enough. It’s about who presents themselves as being a good little pretty wifey who doesn’t stand up to men.”
― Rachel Charlton-Dailey