Gender Failure Quotes

“I realize that the English language is sadly devoid of names for people like me. I try to cut the world some slack for this every day. All day. And the day after that, too. But the truth is that every time I am misgendered, a tiny little sliver of me disappears, A tiny little sliver of me is reminded that I do not fit ... I remember that the truth of me is invisible, and a tiny little sliver of me disappears. Just a sliver, razored from the surface of my very thick skin most days, but other times right from my soul, sometimes felt so deep and other days simply shrugged off, but still. All those slivers add up to something much harder to pretend around.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“So I get a little tired of having to swallow my lived experience to be force-fed someone else's what-ifs. I get tired of my safety coming second. I get tired of the realities of trans and gender non-conforming people's lives being overshadowed and ignored in favour of a boogey-man that might be lurking in the ladies' room. I get really tired of being mistaken for a monster. I get tired of swallowing all these bathroom stories and smiling politely. But the last thing I can do is allow myself to get angry. Because if I get angry, then I am seen as even more of a threat. Then it's all my fault, isn't it? Because then there is a man in the ladies' room, and for some reason, he's angry.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“Gender-neutral fashion does not start and end with the masculine for me.”
― Rae Spoon, Gender Failure

“I told her to come right out and ask me what she was asking me. So she asked me if I still had my breasts, or if I was planning to have a breast augmentation, or if I wanted to have a penis constructed, or my penis removed. It was only then that I realized she didn’t know what sex or gender I had been assigned at birth, so she couldn’t even be sure what I might want removed or added on to me, but still. She had to know. She just had to ask.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“When I decided to retire from the gender binary, the narrative that I had about being a man stuck in a woman's body didn't make sense anymore, unless I was a gender-neutral person who'd been stuck in a man's body stuck in a woman's body all along. I started to consider that I was not essentially a gender, and that bodies should not be gendered based on the rigid binary system. I decided that my gender and sexuality had been a fluid narrative that I had constructed based on the options that I was given. I had not been a man or a woman for any reason other than that I had believed that I was one. Now that I had the option of opting out of the binary, the story could expand and evolve to include that identification as part of my history.”
― Rae Spoon, Gender Failure

“I pressed send and left Grindr open on my phone for a while. After fifteen minutes when there was no response, I closed it and tried to forget about the conversation. After twenty-four hours and still no response, I started to understand that the clear rejection was based on my being trans.
- How to Be Gay When the Gays Won’t Have You -
Rae Spoon”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“...words are always imperfect, words are just sounds we make with our mouths that point our minds to think of things that cannot be fully described in words anyway. I am a writer, so I know where words fail us. A name is not a person, it is just what we have agreed to call them.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“If being a man is something that required a person to tick off a bunch of boxes, not many people would make it through.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“Please rate the strength of your feelings from one to five, one meaning you feel not very strongly about it all, to five meaning you have very strong feelings about me getting top surgery. Now, please fold up your answers and put them in your pocket. Please keep them to yourself, as I will try to do with my feelings about your breasts. Thank you so much for participating.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“The thing about failing as a girl is that I did want to succeed. I wanted to be liked and accepted like anyone, but it wasn't like learning how to play the guitar or to roller-blade. It was something that was always just out of my reach, something I could never really learn to do well, no matter how much I practiced.”
― Rae Spoon, Gender Failure

“Throughout the interactions I've had over the past ten years, I've learned that the gender binary is more of a comedy skit than a fact. People read each other, assign identifiers, and then play out a script accordingly.”
― Rae Spoon, Gender Failure

“First I had to meet her, and see if she would be game.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“I felt fiercely, sometimes irrationally protective of Rae, which was often maddening, because there was really no way I could effectively shield them from these multitudes of daily indignities.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“That Ivan. They always were such a dreamer.”
― Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure

“Suddenly choice came crashing in like a great wave. It was right in front of me, embodied by my new friends.”
― Rae Spoon, Gender Failure