Nicole Maines Quotes

Because trans people are marked as artificial, unnatural, and illegitimate, our bodies and identities are often open to public dissection. Plainly, cisgender folks often take it as their duty to investigate our lives to see if we're real.

Trans women, and women in general, have so many constraints placed on our bodies. As women, we are told not to show our bodies, and as trans people, we've been told not to exist.

I wore a thong and a bra and a wig. Those things hurt. I mean, thongs? Like, they dig in. It takes a tough man to be a woman.

The characters I've played that people have noticed included a cross-dresser and a transsexual.

I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a female transgender on television.

'Clocked' means someone sees you for being transgender.

I can say with confidence that my trans/transfeminine identity emerges as the most heavily problematized aspect of my lived experience. My transness is not a problem on its own but problematized by a society that reviles it, hates it, fails to understand it - or does not wish to.

I feel like so many people invalidate the experience of transgender girls thinking that they aren't regular girls, but I am a normal girl.

What's hurtful is when you have portrayals like, you know, when you have someone like Jared Leto who accepts an award for 'Dallas Buyers Club,' after playing a trans woman, standing in a full beard and looking fully cis male: it is communicating to our audiences that underneath all of that, it's still a man under that.

We exist in a culture where trans people are constantly delegitimized.

I am happy being a man in a dress. Some people get confused and think I'm a trans woman, but I'm strict about the difference. What I do is performance, it's staged, it's glamour - it's not real life. But for trans people, being born in the wrong body - there's nothing glamorous or easy about that.

I think that trans women have endured a lot and they compromise a lot when dealing with cis hetero men.

We all have a cross-gender character: Every woman has a man that they can play, and every man has a woman that they can play.

Being in drag for three months - I now have an idea of what women go through. At least maybe a little.

We all live in a culture that is continually isolating feminine and masculine aspects, even when they're not related to people.

To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

If you come from a normal family, you immediately start playing the role of a boy, a girl a man or a woman, but I'm sure you'll agree with me that those are only roles, limited roles, at that.

It's my view that gender is culturally formed, but it's also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation.

You don't go out and change your gender for a television show, O.K.? It ain't happening. I don't care who you are.

I hate female men.

We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it's a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.

Girls can wear jeans, cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots, 'cause it's okay to be a boy, but for a boy to look like a girl is degrading.

I see myself as quite feminine. But many people seem to think differently about that; sometimes people mistake me for a man. In Paris I often hear 'bonjour monsieur'.

Gender is a way to hide from the simple truth we all tell: 'Hey, I'm here, I have a body.'

I don't have the panic I used to have, meeting people who are androgynous, but when you meet someone whose identity is unclear, that throws your own identity into flux because the way we treat each other is very gendered.