Becoming Nicole Quotes

“Lesson number one: “Sexual orientation is who you go to bed with,” he told Spack. “Gender identity is who you go to bed as.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“I believe we don’t choose our stories,” the poet and author Honor Moore once said. “Our stories choose us….And if we don’t tell them, then we are somehow diminished.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“Who we are is inseparable not only from who we think we are, but from who others think we are.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“It is that incongruity between body and mind that is the source of a tortuous physical alienation. As much as cisgender persons may like or dislike their bodies, and engage in altering or enhancing them, they don't deny their bodies are their own. It's a knowledge so intimate that it remains largely subconscious. When it comes to that physical self, for a transgender person every waking moment, every conscious breath, is a denial of who they truly are. For these people their bodies are at odds with their ideas of themselves, or their ideas of who they should be. They are estranged from the very thing that sustains them in the world, and there is no way to reconcile this conflict through psychological counseling or behavioral conditioning. There is only one way out of the alienation, and that's to make the body congruent with the mind.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height….The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” —1 SAMUEL 16:7”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“Dignity, self-respect, the right to be treated as an equal, that’s what everyone wants. But Du Bois knew that those who are alienated from the community of man because of color (or, one might add, because of sexual orientation or gender) have a much harder path, because the alienated, the differentiated, the misfits of society must bear the burden of a single unspoken question on the lips of even the most polite members of society: “What does it feel like to be a problem?”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“The philosopher Charles Taylor once wrote: Each of us has an original way of being human: Each person has his or her own “measure.”…There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s life. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“We live in liminal time, each moment sliding into the next, the future into the present, the present into the past. We believe all things are possible, and that there are always more stories to be written.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“People, nowadays, always expect others to solve their problems and answer their questions. It’s juvenile….Who would know more about your life’s ultimate meaning than you? Think about it. Every choice you make, every thought that runs through your head, they are all yours. Every instant of your life is determined by you.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“Who we are is inseparable not only from who we think we are, but from who others think we are. We are touched and loved, we are appreciated or dismissed, praised or scorned, comforted or wounded. But before all else, we are seen. We are identified by others through the contours and colors and movements of our bodies.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“Before love, before loss, before we ever yearn to be something we are not, we are bodies breathing in space—-“turbulent, fleshy, sensual,” Walt Whitman once wrote. We are inescapably physical, drawn to the inescapably human. But if we are defined by our own bodies, we are entwined by the bodies of others.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“other words, our genitals and our gender identity are not the same. Sexual anatomy and gender identity are the products of two different processes, occurring at distinctly different times and along different neural pathways before we are even born. Both are functions of genes as well as hormones, and while sexual anatomy and gender identity usually match, there are dozens of biological events that can affect the outcome of the latter and”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“Make your first punch count, don’t ever quit on your team, never point a gun at someone unless you’re prepared to use it, try to return things in better condition than when you borrowed them (cleaned, oiled, and tuned up), and never, ever drink while playing cards.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“Even when things were going well, it wasn’t about the danger of slipping up so much as the sense of always having to hold back.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown. —Marcel Proust, Time Regained”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“and people over here are trying to take mine away.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“Both of them knew that the Christian Civic League of Maine was not only vehemently anti-gay and anti-transgender, they were politically active and media savvy.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“He didn’t want to think about his son being gay. It was fine if the sons of other fathers were gay, because he had no problem working with gay people or his children having gay friends. He just didn’t want that for his son.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“Gender dysphoria is the state of unease that results when a person’s sexual anatomy doesn’t match up with his or her inner sense of gender.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“They'd spun the stories of their lives. And when it was all unspooled it all made sense, and the knots in their hearts were freed.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“The plea to hold off on surgery is based on the belief that sex assignment is a cultural pressure, not a biological one. Being intersex, Chase said, shouldn't be likened to being malformed or abnormal or freakish, and so surgical remedy shouldn't be the first thing doctors recommend.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“When ships are wrecked in storms, Ariel collects the artifacts left behind—a teapot, dinner plates, a man's pipe, and a sewing thimble—and spirits them away to a secret cave. For her, the most ordinary items used by humans are objects of beauty, because they symbolize something she is not but badly wants to be.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“As we grow and mature and become self--conscious, we are taught that appearances—-who we are on the outside—-aren’t nearly as important as who we are on the inside. And yet beauty beguiles us. Human beings are unconsciously drawn to the symmetrical and the aesthetic.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“People, nowadays, always expect others to solve their problems and answer their questions. It’s juvenile….Who would know more about your life’s ultimate meaning than you? Think about it. Every choice you make, every thought that runs through your head, they are all yours. Every instant of your life is determined by you. So”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“The operation would be expensive, about $20,000, but Wayne and Kelly had set aside the money from their portion of the $75,000 that had been awarded the family in its lawsuit against the Orono School Department.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“Spack put them at ease by making one thing perfectly clear: Gender identity is in the brain, not the anatomy, and there are many, many things that can happen to a developing brain to change or alter how a child will develop, including a child’s gender identity.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“In the past (and often still), parents would take their female-identified male child to doctor after doctor, only to be told the child needed intensive therapy or should be delivered to a psychiatric hospital.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“When it comes to that physical self, for a transgender person every waking moment, every conscious breath, is a denial of who they truly are.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“Scientists have identified more than twenty-five genes that are involved in creating differences in sexual development. With the advancements in DNA sequencing, they are uncovering an enormous range of variation in these genes as well.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family

“There was some inscrutable pain behind his eyes. He seemed tense and anxious, as if his heart was in knots and he didn’t know how to untie them.”
― Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family