Janine Cousins

“I loved that the complexities of my emotions were understood by authors writing hundreds of years ago, I loved looking at their texts and trying to understand what they were aiming to do, to pull my own meaning from them, to point out what others didn’t see or notice—the repetition of blue imagery, the recapitulation of motifs of separation. I was good at that.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“He was happy, I could tell. Happy to be free, happy to be a genius, happy to be a beautiful man with his elbow out the open window, squinting at the sun in the October afternoon.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“To stand together under a sky - that no matter how grey and uncertain - still holds room for butterflies, moths, dragonflies and things we once were too fearful to name; things like whispered hope.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“Yet - to speak personally - I can say that, ever since I was a child, I have had to learn to keep on going in a world which signaled to me at every turn that I was mad, bad, sick, deluded, disgusting, a pervert, a danger, unlovable. I still do...Often, in the course of writing and researching this book, I spoke to younger trans people and their families and found myself hoping that, at a deep psychic level, they would not have to abide with the recurrent narratives of disgust and shame that this world has always imposed on me. This is not intended to be self-pitying; hope, including mine, is precious and powerful.”
― Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice