Max von Essen Quotes

Watching 'The Jeremy Kyle Show' is my guilty pleasure.

The talk show, as a genre, has been in decline for a while. It started with Jerry Springer, when the talk shows suffered a metamorphosis, going from the real and social issues to the hair-raising.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a boy. I really had gender issues.

If someone asks about sexual reassignment surgery, you are supposed to say, 'Why are we talking about that?' But I am a post-op transsexual. And I am a reporter. If you can explain and talk about it, you demystify it. And if you demystify it, it's not an issue.

The problem with the spectrum that is trans-ness and where people like Caitlyn Jenner lie, transitioning and being trans is more than a physical thing. Transition is a process.

I look like a dude and feel like a dude, and it sucks. But eventually I'll flip, and I'll present as female.

The weirdest thing I've seen is someone who was a male, and he changed one half of his face to be female.

When you transition, it's a long process. Some people are so, like, ignorant about it. They're like, 'Oh she's a girl tomorrow.' It's not like that. You have to literally, you take all this medication. It's really hard on your body.

Transsexualism is, basically, just another, more drastic twist on the male menopause.

I'm conflicted. On one hand, I don't want to say that because you were a man and now you're a woman, you can't be in a women's fashion show. But I feel it's a dicey issue. The fact of the matter is, when you are transgender - if you go, say, male to female - you're not having your pelvis broken and having it expanded surgically. You still have the anatomical bone structure of a man.

There are few things harder than being born into the wrong body.

I had a lot of questions where I had to be very frank and clinical. I had to go to school on it about what it could mean physically to be trans and the options that have to be weighed and considered. But I love that. Exploring that opens my worldview in ways that I would never be able to try.

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

You can really learn from Donahue. I didn't know you could be a woman in a man's body. You go out and you can't parallel park.

In Russia, if a male athelete loses he becomes a female athelete.

It's funny. Some people now are like, 'Why would you transition? Why can't you just be comfortable how you were born?' That was my logic, but at a certain point, I realized that I was born uncomfortable.

On my road to self-discovery, only certain terms were available - I didn't use 'trans' or 'transgender' until junior high school, but I was living as trans much earlier.

One of my dream roles would be to play a man.

Trying to erase 53 years of being a macho aggressive guy to trying to be a woman, and this is greatest challenge of my life.

I think it's really difficult for folks that aren't transgender to really wrap their mind around the feeling of having a gender identity that differs from their sex assigned at birth. But for me, it felt like a constant feeling of homesickness.

MMA is the most dangerous sport there is for a transgender, with all the body contact, I know that.

I don't know that I had context for being trans until I moved to Rochester, New York, to pursue my dream of acting, and started going to drag shows. I had never seen a transsexual before, and I didn't yet fully understand my own identity.

I'm a gay man trapped in a woman's body!

I’m a gay man in a woman’s body.

I do think that that would be fair, but I can understand that people would be a little apprehensive to take that road because there is a tradition of natural-born women, but today where there are so many surgeries and so many people out there who have a need to change for a happier life, I do accept that because I believe it’s a free country.