Carmen Carrera Quotes

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.

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

Hormone blockers changed and saved my life.

It's funny. Some people now are like, 'Why would you transition? Why can't you just be comfortable how you were born?' That was my logic, but at a certain point, I realized that I was born uncomfortable.

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.

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 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 achieved my personal dream and completed my transition to be able to live life as a woman.

Being transgender is not just a medical transition.

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.

Luckily for me the public have known me before my transition and I've always had the same body type.

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

Feeling comfortable with your body as you go through a transition is not easy, and honestly, as a trans person on hormones or after surgery, you just don't really know what your results will be, how you'll finally look. Managing all of that is a challenge.

I was in the seventh grade when I first began to identify as trans and express my gender identity as a girl. My social transition began with growing my hair and wearing clothes and makeup that made me feel like Destiny's Fourth Child.

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.

On May 6, 2013, I started hormone replacement therapy and began transitioning. I was very depressed, which is not uncommon for people with gender dysphoria. Two hours after my first estrogen injection, my depression went away for the first time in my life.

You can really learn from Donahue. I didn't know you could be a woman in a man's body. You go out and you can't parallel park.

This is the amazing thing about you. Had I not known anything about your story, I would have absolutely not a clue that you had ever been a boy - a male. Which makes me absolutely believe you always should have been a woman.

When I realised I was transgender I was so afraid of what my transition would do to everyone else in my life and how they would react to it and would I be rejected?

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.

When I told my parents that I was starting my transition, my Dad said, 'Well that makes so much more sense 'cause I never saw you any other way and now it totally works.'

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.

I always knew I was a man, always felt that I was a man, always wanted to be a man.

I thought, transgender people are much worse off than I am. That's why they're willing to risk everything to be who they are. But the older I got, the harder it got to stay in my body.

I feel so much more comfortable that I've ever been. I've felt male as far back as I can remember.