Patti Smith Quotes

As a kid, I was always mistaken for a girl. Before you reach that age where your sexuality starts to display itself, kids can look very androgynous, and I guess I leaned more toward the feminine. All those things were very hard, growing up, because you're trying to create an identity, and you're feeling shameful about the one that you're making.

By 12, my body had changed, although instead of blossoming into Cindy Mancini from 'Can't Buy Me Love,' I more closely resembled Chunk from 'The Goonies.' My inside world may have been filled with a poetic and vital feminine life force, but the outside world saw and told me otherwise.

I grew up believing I sounded like a boy.

It felt as if my body was, like, literally betraying me because I went from a very athletic, straight-up-and-down little kid to a very curvaceous woman, and it was just horrifying to me.

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.

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

I definitely struggle with a disillusionment towards my body and my gender.

Why must she dress that way? I think she's confused about her gender.

Maybe it's just L.A., but [high school girls] look like men, like they would have kids and s - t.

I don't want to play sex roles any more. I'm tired of being known as the girl with the shape.

When I was very young, I wanted to be a girl. I was jealous that girls got to be princesses and wear skirts. It tormented me. When I was 6, I even heard that you could change your sex, and I was very intrigued until the moment I realized that if I changed into a girl, I would be an ugly girl, and this is the last thing I wanted to be.

I was always just so feminine. I don't think anyone who ever met me would describe me as a man.

I'm too tall to be a girl. I'm between a chick and a broad.

As a little kid, I was convinced that I was a guy.

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.

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

Parenting girls makes you quite gender-conscious - it's almost impossible to fight the power of pink. It's not such a terrible thing to want to be a princess when you're five, but it would be nice if there were some other options.

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.

When I was a prepubescent child, I never really had experiences of gender dysphoria. This is not something that started until adolescence.

Toughening up, performing masculinity, pretending to enjoy things I didn't enjoy all enabled me to dodge the gender policing of the adults around me. But the way I really was - the swished hips, the Double-Dutching, the hair flips - seemed to always prevail and attract Dad's disdain.

I don't understand when you say I'm a man or I have a deep voice. I know I'm a female, so there's no question for me.

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.