Najat Vallaud-Belkacem Quotes

Transgender people really are misunderstood.

It's such a private thing. It's a huge decision. It's not like you wake up one day and say, 'Oh, I'm going to change my sex - won't that be fun?'

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.

We're born man, woman and sexual beings.

Either men cannot be women or there is not such thing as a woman.

True transgenders do hypermasculine things.

The first thing that's really important to understand, just when approaching the topic of transgender people, is that the sex you're assigned with at birth is not the same as your gender identity.

The transgender bathroom thing - it's just so obvious that people are scared of what they don't understand. It's like, 'I don't want to deal with the fact that some people might have been born in the wrong body.'

Put simply, barring transgender people from restrooms consistent with their gender identity doesn't help anyone, and continuing to allow transgender people to access those restrooms doesn't hurt anyone.

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 love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?

Transgender discrimination is the civil rights issue of our time

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

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.

Gender is between your ears and not between your legs.

It's very important to me that people accept me as a transgendered female. But it's ridiculous to a lot of people and I understand that.

Inherent differences between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual’s opportunity.

It's actually one of the hardest things for trans people, is to go to the bathroom.

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

Transgender women especially feel like we have to fit the binary system to a T in order to not be recognized as trans.

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

I can say with confidence that my trans/transfeminine identity emerges as the most heavily problematized aspect of my lived experience. My transness is not a problem on its own but problematized by a society that reviles it, hates it, fails to understand it - or does not wish to.

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 remember, as a child, lying in my bed at night praying that I would wake up the next day and be a girl, to be my authentic self, and to just have my family be proud of me. I remember looking into the mirror struggling to say just two words, 'I'm transgender.'