Perfume Genius Quotes

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

For the longest time, I thought I was a boy. I really did. I wore boys' clothes, played tag football.

The thought of being a boy makes me cringe. I just couldn't do it.

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

I think once I was in high school - I had boyfriends and stuff like that, but I think when I was younger, I went through a period where I looked like a boy, and people thought I was a boy.

When I was born, there was a very isolated idea of what it meant to be a man or a woman, and you belonged to one gender or the other.

Hardly nobody gets to live two genders in their life.

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.

As you get older it's more confusing. Suddenly, there's more pressure to fit in to your assigned gender.

When childhood ended, I had to suppress feminine characteristics and try and be a boy. I didn't want to grow up at all because it meant becoming someone else.

What interested me, was that as we age, those seemingly unbreakable barriers that define us, our gender, they begin to crack, to blur; they're not absolutes anymore.

I've struggled with gender norms my whole life, always feeling like I wasn't black-and-white; I was in this gray area, and gray areas really scare people because you can't define them.

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?

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

I never get to forget who I am, my gender identity.

Seeing myself as female every time I look in the mirror is painful in a way I will never be able to describe.

Everyone else is following these male and female tracks that have already been set for them, but when you're trans there is no trail.

I don't know what I am if I'm not a woman.

I've never had a highly developed sense of being female. The sexuality has either been stopped, or else it's been an exaggerated P J Harvey kind of sexuality.

I grew up believing I sounded like a boy.

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

When I was five, long before I understood what the word 'gender' meant, I would always tell my mother that I wished I were a girl.

Transgender people really are misunderstood.

I feel like there's no such thing as gender.

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