William T. Vollmann Quotes

On my road to self-discovery, only certain terms were available - I didn't use 'trans' or 'transgender' until junior high school, but I was living as trans much earlier.

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.

Being transgender is more than just medical books and everything, procedures. It's something spiritual in which you're finding yourself and really discovering who you are and learning to love yourself.

I think I was scared of the drag thing, as a lot of gay boys are. It's sort of knocked out of you in junior high. I wouldn't find guys who were very feminine attractive. Then, doing 'Hedwig,' I got to be man and woman, really butch and really femme at the same time, and I realized, this is kind of the ideal.

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

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

A transvestite spends her entire life trying to look as feminine as possible and I have clearly spent mine celebrating my masculinity.

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.

I didn't know there were options like gender neutral or gender fluid. I later realized you could be a girl and dress like a guy.

Being transgender, like being gay, tall, short, white, black, male, or female, is another part of the human condition that makes each individual unique, and something over which we have no control. We are who we are in the deepest recesses of our minds, hearts and identities.

I'm pretty sure I'm a doppelganger for Alan Alda. I'm a trannie; I'm a man.

We're born man, woman and sexual beings.

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.

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.

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

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

I think when kids are younger, they don't have these preconceived notions of what a transsexual person is.

I spent so many years not understanding my own gender identity and not having the language for it, and not having those conversations, that now I'm so eager to talk about it. Then I learn more about myself and other people.

I always felt a bit different. When I'm with boys, I feel comfortable. When I'm with girls, I catch feelings. It's not anything I can control.

I originally thought I'd grow up to be a woman. I didn't question that when I was little.

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

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

I kind of dated a woman-ish, but there's just something about a man that's just masculine, and just there's things that women don't have that men do.

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