Jessica DeWitt

“I had a room to myself as a kid, but my mother was always quick to point out that it wasn't my room, it was her room and I was merely permitted to occupy it. Her point, of course, was that my parents had earned everything and I was merely borrowing the space, and while this is technically true I cannot help but marvel at the singular damage of this dark idea: That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mine could be forfeited at someone else's whim.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Acceptance, on the other hand, is about integrating difference into your own life:”
― Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary

“problem. But maybe we aren’t the problem; maybe the whole gender system is.”
― Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary

“This is how power works: It makes the actual people experiencing violence seem like a threat. Moving from a place of fear leads us to make harmful assumptions about one another. In our fear, we treat other people’s identities as if they are something that they are doing to us and not something that just exists.”
― Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary