Efforts to bar transgender people from restrooms are nothing more than an attempt to codify discrimination before our country advances any further on transgender equality.
Sarah McbrideRead
I've always been Sarah. My gender identity has always existed. I've always been a woman. Gay people aren't straight before they come out as gay, and transgender people are who they are before they come out and transition.
Interpretation
Gender identity is an innate aspect of a person's true self, existing regardless of societal acceptance.
In this quote, Sarah McBride emphasizes that one's gender identity is not something that changes or is adopted; it is inherently part of who a person is from the beginning. The analogy to gay people expresses that just as they are always who they are, even before coming out, transgender individuals are also their true selves regardless of societal validation or recognition.
In practice
During a pride parade, this quote could be used to promote understanding of transgender identities.
Efforts to bar transgender people from restrooms are nothing more than an attempt to codify discrimination before our country advances any further on transgender equality.
Access to public facilities like bathrooms is important for transgender people. But the fight for transgender rights does not begin and end at the bathroom door.
We can celebrate the speed at which LGBT equality has progressed, but we also have to acknowledge that it wasn't fast enough, because too many people didn't get to experience it. We can never be too impatient.
For me, having a gender identity that was different from my sex assigned at birth and that wasn't seen by society felt like a constant feeling of homesickness - that unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach.
My whiteness, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege, family support, and so many other factors shield me from some of the worst possible consequences - often fatal ones - that result from the toxic combination of misogyny, racism, and anti-trans sentiment.
Too often, when transgender people die, family members or funeral homes will end up dressing a body of a transgender person in the garments of the gender that they were assigned at birth instead of their gender identity. They're often dead-named and misgendered.
Marriage is an effort to legalize love. It is out of fear. It is thinking about the future, about the tomorrows. Man always thinks of the past and the future, and because of this constant thinking about past and future, he destroys the present. And the present is the only reality there is. One has to live in the present. The past has to die and has to be allowed to die.
In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.
When you protect yourself from pain, be sure you do not protect yourself from love.
There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.
Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets_x000D_ _x000D_ loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today_x000D_ _x000D_ the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the_x000D_ _x000D_ techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.
If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?
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