Chaz Bono Quotes

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.

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

I was never going to become a beautiful, passable woman, and I was never going to be a man. It's a quandary. But the trans condition is a beautiful mystery; it's one of nature's best ideas.

For my entire life, I've wrestled with my gender identity.

If someone's OK with being the 'transgender girl,' that's fine, but that's not me.

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.

I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body.

Number one, I don't understand a transgender. I don't understand. Is it a guy dressed up like a girl, or a girl dressed up like a guy?

When I was five, I came to understand that I was not a boy.

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.

I've always known exactly who I am. I was a girl trapped in a boy's body.

When I was growing up, I didn't know of anybody who was trans. There was always, like, this shame, anxiety thing around all of that, even if I wasn't actively expressing it.

Transsexuals are amazing. You have all the great stuff in one place.

Some people's gender identity conforms to the sex they were assigned at birth, and some people's identity doesn't. That realization was certainly very freeing for me - and could be very freeing for other people.

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

Me feeling ambiguous about my gender identity has been a lifelong feeling, certainly.

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.

I was in the seventh grade when I first began to identify as trans and express my gender identity as a girl. My social transition began with growing my hair and wearing clothes and makeup that made me feel like Destiny's Fourth Child.

I spent so many years not understanding my own gender identity, not having the language to talk about it, and not feeling safe in many environments to talk about it.

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.

When gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals come out, their friends and families, for the most part, understand what it feels like to love and to lust. Cisgender people have more of a challenge when it comes to transgender identities. I discovered that analogy of homesickness in conversations with my parents, in trying to bridge that empathy divide.

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.

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.

When I realised I was transgender I was so afraid of what my transition would do to everyone else in my life and how they would react to it and would I be rejected?

For all intents and purposes, I'm a woman.