Andrej Pejic Quotes

I was born a girl; it just took me a little while to become one fully.

It took me a long time to realise that I was a girl as a teenager. At that point I never really believed it. I looked like a boy for a long time. Now, finally, I feel like a woman.

Being transgender is more than just medical books and everything, procedures. It's something spiritual in which you're finding yourself and really discovering who you are and learning to love yourself.

Being transgender isn't a medical transition. It's a process of learning to love yourself for who you are.

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.

This is the amazing thing about you. Had I not known anything about your story, I would have absolutely not a clue that you had ever been a boy - a male. Which makes me absolutely believe you always should have been a woman.

Also, I had read a book called She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, written by a professor who had gone through transgender surgery, but it took this person well into his thirties to come to terms with the absolute necessity of having to do it.

I figured out who I was very early on - actually, at the age of 13, with the help of the Internet - so I knew that a transition, becoming a woman, was always something I needed to do.

I think we all evolve as we get older, and that's normal, but I like to think that my recent transition hasn't made me into a different individual. Same person - no difference at all, just a different sex.

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.

Luckily for me the public have known me before my transition and I've always had the same body type.

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.

I couldn't remember when I'd stopped willing to be trans and started wanting to be trans. If there were a difference, I'd forgotten it.

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.

On May 6, 2013, I started hormone replacement therapy and began transitioning. I was very depressed, which is not uncommon for people with gender dysphoria. Two hours after my first estrogen injection, my depression went away for the first time in my life.

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.

When I told my parents that I was starting my transition, my Dad said, 'Well that makes so much more sense 'cause I never saw you any other way and now it totally works.'

Some people say I appeared on the Phil Donahue show to tell 'my' sex change story but I've never appeared on his show for any reason... not even as a member of the studio audience.

If you feel inside you are a woman, be a woman - no one can take that away from you, man. No one can make that feeling go away. If that's what you need to do to be complete, then no one has the right to tell you you can't do that.

I thought, transgender people are much worse off than I am. That's why they're willing to risk everything to be who they are. But the older I got, the harder it got to stay in my body.

I feel so much more comfortable that I've ever been. I've felt male as far back as I can remember.

I'd be happy to be taken as a woman - and that's what I was initially trying to do when I started throwing on dresses and stuff. But that wasn't going to happen because everyone kept calling me sir. So I thought I'd change the method and just start wearing what I wanted to wear.

In the first couple of years when you're transitioning you don't really fit into any gender, because you're changing over. You have to start getting electrolysis before you even start your therapy. But I think all the weird looks help to give you conviction in who you really are.

When I was little, the idea of waking up as a girl was like a fairytale. I had this idea that I'd meet a witch who would transform me. From the moment I found out that it was actually possible, I went to bed each night feeling that when it happens, it will be the best day of my life. And it was!