Janet Mock Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Being transgender is not just a medical transition.

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.

It's not a cis-man becoming a cis-woman. It's a trans person just being who they want to be. This is how I've always felt, and this is who I've always been. But so much focus is put on the transition or the change because it's so visible. But that's not even what it is... That's who that person's been and who they are now.

I think, for all trans people, it's not our only defining feature, but it is a defining feature.

I don't feel that I'm in the wrong body. I feel like this is the body I'm supposed to be in.

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.

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.

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.

People who don't have gender dysphoria aren't going to catch it by watching me dance on television.

Nature chooses who will be transgender; individuals don't choose this.

For all intents and purposes, I'm 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.

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.

I always had this idea that, 'Sure, I wished I was a boy and felt more like a boy and all of that.' But I wasn't, so I would deal with it. And I for some reason thought there were other lesbians that felt that way and that was just part of that community.

I think that it's important to say that trans people exist, and we are valid, whether we choose to transition or not. It's really up to anyone to decide what is going to make them feel the most like themselves.