How to Understand Your Gender Quotes

“Outward focus is also a great way to resist the shaming, criticising, judging culture that we live in. We can gently but firmly point out that if our genders are difficult in our place and time in history, then it’s the world that’s flawed and needs to change, not us. Without this approach we might never have reached the point of gender equality we’re at now, because women would have simply focused on how to make themselves more feminine – according to patriarchal standards – instead of embracing feminism and demanding equal rights. Similarly, LGBTQ+ people might still be being imprisoned and treated with drugs or electroshock therapies, instead of occupying the place they currently do in many countries as equal citizens with heterosexual and cis people.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“Gender identities, expressions, roles, and experiences are not fixed and static. There is no ‘pure’ idea of gender, untouched by the impact of colonisation, globalisation, and technology. Learning about gender diversity in the past and present is not about trying to reclaim an idyllic past or exoticising specific bodies or cultural groups; rather, it is a reminder of the strength of diversity in human nature. No matter how hard we might have tried to suppress gender diversity, our varied identities, expressions, roles, and experiences keep re-emerging, claiming a little more space and room to breathe, reminding us that this is not a landscape that can be tamed and shaped into two parallel and distinct highways.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“For example, in the pre-Christian Roman Empire, the cult of the Phrygian deity Cybele was widespread. Her priestesses, called the Galli, were usually people who were assigned male at birth and presented in a feminine manner.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“Take time for YOU. What would it look like, in this moment, if you could meet some of your own needs? Do you even know what your needs are right now? Tune in and take care of this very important, primary, intimate relationship with yourself right now. When we can do this, we can also have more capacity to care for others. You are worth your time, care, and attention. Your needs have worth. You can take time to nurture and care for yourself. We’ll say it again: You are worth your time, care, and attention.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“Another important point to make is that just because an aspect of gender is fluid for somebody does not mean that they could easily choose for it to be otherwise. Often we might observe aspects of our gender shifting over time, but experience these changes as a path that we need to go down. It wouldn’t be easy – or even possible – to take another road, and if we are denied the possibility of going down that path, we can end up feeling a great deal of pain and discomfort. We need to be very careful not to give the impression that people could ever simply choose for their gender – or their gender journey – to be other than it is.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“So there’s a giant whistling void in our history across large swaths of the world, a void which might otherwise have yielded hundreds of years of custom, law, ceremony, ideas, and ideals about trans and genderqueer and non-binary lives. An artificial void, like there would be if you created the meanest black hole you can imagine – one that makes only that of which it disapproves of disappear completely.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“A few threads and fragments of our history have escaped and survived – a few poems, some paintings, a couple of legal decisions – and we cherish them. They feel like reassurance, like validity – we have always been here; this has always been a thing.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are