History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Historically, if you look back at the struggle to end slavery, the struggle to gain womens' right to vote, the labor movement - these were big social transitions in which there was a movement on the ground in which a lot of people died, but it also took an independent political party.
In order to bring about the transition from the condition of the present to another newly resolved on, every reform should be allowed to proceed as much as possible from men’s minds and thoughts
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
Being transgender is not just a medical transition.
When this government [Chiang Kaishek's] finally fell there was no one ready to teach the Chinese the human way of life.
I never went out. I was not the guy at the club. I was almost scared of going to the club. All of a sudden, I found myself working with certain artists from L.A. and hanging out in L.A. and being introduced to a whole new lifestyle... and getting in trouble with them.
I feel like the most fascinating parts of a trans life take place after the decision to transition. They take place when you're in this new body, in this new life, and you start realizing things.
I had gone from writing alone, not talking to anyone, to suddenly being in a room filled with not only people but actual celebrities.
When you transition, it's a long process. Some people are so, like, ignorant about it. They're like, 'Oh she's a girl tomorrow.' It's not like that. You have to literally, you take all this medication. It's really hard on your body.
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?
Fraud really thrives in moments of great social change and transition. We're in the midst of a technological revolution. That gives con artists huge opportunities. People lose their frame of reference for what can and can't be real.
There've always been people in the borderland between childhood and adulthood. That state is not a matter of chronological age. It's a matter of understanding that you can accept a future that has been defined by the previous generation, or you can reject it and make something new.
New York has become almost a third-world country. When I was growing up it was mostly a Euro-American country. And it wasn't until LaGuardia was elected in 1933 that Italians were even considered Americans. We're at a great transition point in terms of population, demographics, and what it means to be a human being.
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 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.
The roles that men and women play are no longer the standard traditional roles of way back when but are those of two very individual people living their lives. I think it's been a hard transition in society - just take a look at the divorce rate - to figure out what that means now. How do you resolve that?
If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.
The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life.
We in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred towards women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.
The 'Grace of Kings' isn't a narrative about a return to some golden age, to a lost status quo ante. It portrays a dynamic world in transition, where the redistribution of power is messy, morally ambivalent, and only lurches toward more justice.
I think we're in a 1970s-level moment of social transition and they're always full of upheaval. As violent and deranged as we can be to each other and to other species, we've got nothing on tsunamis, hurricanes or tornadoes.
In my father's time - he was in college during many transitions in the late 1930s - they had great institutional loyalties... to his college, eventually the navy, the Democratic Party and certain ideals of our country. Those are the things that became broken with my generation.
We are obliged to have white people to administer the law; the black people have a good deal of sense but they do not know the law. If the government keep the masters away altogether it would not do to leave the colored men here alone; some white men must be here not as masters, but we must take the law by their word and if we do not we must be punished. If you take all the white men away we are nothing. Probably with the children that are coming up no white men will not be needed. They are learning to read and write– some are learning lawyer, some are learning doctor, and some learn minister; and reading books and newspapers they can understand the law; but the old generation cannot understand it. It makes no difference how sensible they are, they are blind and it wants white men for the present to direct them. After five years they will take care of themselves; this generation cannot do it.
I look like a dude and feel like a dude, and it sucks. But eventually I'll flip, and I'll present as female.
