Lauren

“The best way I can describe [being transgender] for myself [...] is a constant feeling of homesickness. An unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that only goes away when I can be seen and affirmed in the gender I've always felt myself to be. And unlike homesickness with location, which eventually diminishes as you get used to the new home, this homesickness only grows with time and separation.”
― Sarah McBride, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality

“The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Normal is often treated as a moral judgment, when it is often simply a statistical matter. The question of what everyone else is doing is less important than the question of what works for the two people in the actual relationship. It matters that everyone’s needs are carefully considered and respected, not that everyone is doing the same thing.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Research reveals that, depending on the study, between 23 and 53 percent of people show variability in their brains, with features associated with both men and women. Meanwhile, the proportion of people in the studies she has analyzed that have purely masculine or purely feminine brain features is between none and 8 percent.
“If you take any two brains, they are different, but how they differ between any two individuals, you cannot predict,” she explains. By this logic, there can’t be any such thing as an average male or average female brain. We are all, each one of us, a mix. Our brains are intersex.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story