Tar Hollow Trans Quotes

“Imagination as an act required vulnerability, required that I didn't seek to master what I perceived but to respond in ways that allowed me to move and be moved by all that I encountered.”
― Stacy Jane Grover, Tar Hollow Trans: Essays

“The origins of identity in terms of when it manifested in a person's life, or what place that identity, or experiences, traditions, and practices, holds in a person's life is not relevant to any sense of authenticity. What matters is that a behavior or practice or trait represents the vision a person has for themself and their future. And this backstory, the inner workings of how one comes to know oneself, does not need to be revealed for the sake of legibility. We don't need to know what's behind the closet or the barn door.”
― Stacy Jane Grover, Tar Hollow Trans: Essays

“The born-this-way narrative, at its worst, can be used to invalidate transgender existence by claiming that the way we are at birth constitutes the way we will always be. At its best, the assumption that children come to know their gender at an early age—and may only be able to articulate it later—allows for but limits transgender identity to a narrow acceptable framework. Those of us who did not identify as transgender from a young age are seen as suspect and questioned or even outright invalidated. Some will say we haven't done the work to connect our identity to our backgrounds, that we must've missed the signs of our true 'identity.' We were actually transgender all along.”
― Stacy Jane Grover, Tar Hollow Trans: Essays

“Community, as I've come to understand it, only complements capitalism. The groups I took part in were formed with a narrow range of ages, backgrounds, experiences, identities, beliefs, and activities. Inclusion within them was based on strict boundaries that were internally and externally enforced. I recognize that the communities I experienced in my home region were not communities at all, but scenes.”
― Stacy Jane Grover, Tar Hollow Trans: Essays

“We often can't perform or uphold the identity category, and if we step outside the boundaries of the group, or if we question the categories of group identification and their enforcement, we can be met with hostility. Internally, we come to feel that something is fundamentally wrong with us. We end up wanting what we want to want, no longer knowing what we want or need. We just do what fits the scene. We follow the rules and more division occurs, which capitalism wants.”
― Stacy Jane Grover, Tar Hollow Trans: Essays

“One must like drag, ball culture, the club scene, follow the lives of rich white women, be deeply involved in philosophy and politics, engage with specific films, books, music, and underground zines. There are histories and lineages we must learn and cite.”
― Stacy Jane Grover, Tar Hollow Trans: Essays

“The rhetoric that rural white women lacked womanliness because they were drudges who farmed the land was built on a long-held anti-Black and anti-Indigenous settler colonial logic that categorized those who lived close to and worked the land as less than human.”
― Stacy Jane Grover, Tar Hollow Trans: Essays