Olivier Theyskens Quotes

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.

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.

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 really little, it was very clear to me that I felt like a boy, and my friends were all boys.

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

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

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

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

I always felt like the male from the time I was a child. There wasn't much feminine about me.

I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body.

I woke up one morning with this song in my head, and the opening line of the song is, 'My name was Richard Nixon, only now I'm a girl.'

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.

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?

From the start. As early as - I felt I was in the wrong sex; I really did. I would go into my dad's room and put on his clothes.

Explaining to my children, especially my daughter, that I will be dressed as a woman, and will be playing a eunuch was a tough task.

I grew up believing I sounded like a boy.

I look like a dude and feel like a dude, and it sucks. But eventually I'll flip, and I'll present as female.

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.

This is what's hard: I know I'm legally a man, but I'm also male-minded, despite having the female appearance.

It's hard because the phrase 'woman trapped in a man's body' is thrown around a lot, but that's like shorthand. It's deeper than that. There's so much more to it.

Ever since I could form coherent thoughts, I knew I was a girl trapped inside a boy's body. There was never any confusion in my mind. The confusing part was why no one else could see what was wrong.

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.

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.

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

I was a tomboy as a kid - I was skinny and had cropped hair and was often mistaken for a boy - and up until I was about six, I had my own very fluid ideas of gender in that I believed that, somehow, an individual could choose whether or not s/he wanted to be a boy or a girl.