Jessica DeWitt

“Imagine everyone you encounter all day long telling you that you are not real and that there is something fundamentally wrong with you. Being constantly invalidated takes a toll: 40 percent of trans and gender non-conforming people have attempted suicide.”
― Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary

“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

“We silenced our own differences, subdued our creativity, and toned down our own gender non-conformity in order to fit in.”
― 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