A Girlhood Quotes

“I couldn’t rely on my mouth to say the right pronoun—even as I tried to slow down and be more intentional. There is the linguistic act of changing pronouns. We don’t realize how linked a pronoun is to a person and the built-up memories of that person. There is also the kinetics of saying a pronoun—what the mouth itself has learned to do automatically has to be undone and retrained.”
― Carolyn Hays, Letter to My Transgender Daughter: A Girlhood

“At the first trans health conference I ever attended, a parent asked about long-term health risks for people taking hormones. The doctor gave a full assessment of issues
that trans men face; many of them mimic the risks that would be inherited from father to son if they'd been born male, now that testosterone is a factor.
"What about trans women?" another parent asked.
The doctor took a deep breath. "Those outcomes are murkier. Because trans women are so discriminated against, they're at far greater risk for issues like alcoholism, poverty, homelessness, and lack of access to good healthcare. All of these issues impact their overall health so much that it's hard to gather data on what their health outcomes would be if these issues weren't present."
This was stunning-a group of people is treated so badly by our culture that we can't clearly study their health. The burden of this abuse is that substantial and
pervasive. Your generation will be healthier. The signs are already there.”
― Carolyn Hays, A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter

“Each time I offered boyhood, you rejected it. It was simple and easy for you. But for our culture, it was radical.
What I was just beginning to understand in a blurry intuitive way, a series of sketches, watercolors without edges, is that you are dangerous.
Of course, you're just being. You're not doing anything. But from my viewpoint, I see how it can appear, which is something like this: By rejecting boyhood and therefore
manhood, you have rejected the patriarchy. It's like someone who's been offered an endless feast of power, an all-you-can-eat buffet of privilege, and you've said, blithely,
"No thanks." Some may see it as turning your nose up at the great gift of power. By claiming girlhood, you've upended what our culture values most: men, manliness,
prowess, strength, dominance. How dare you?”
― Carolyn Hays, A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter

“We are the collective beneficiaries of suffering that was turned into an expression that expands who we are, each and all of us, and expands what our humanity can accomplish. Maybe they were trying to save themselves, but with their creations and innovations, they help save all of us.”
― Carolyn Hays, Letter to My Transgender Daughter: A Girlhood

“I wish someone had told me that through my own self-inquiry, and my own unique experience , my empathy would deepen, my compassion would expand, my gratitude for being alive would be huge.”
― Carolyn Hays, A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter

“...being trans works like a miner sifting for gold. You might lose some people along the way, but not the golden ones”
― Carolyn Hays, A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter

“If a child has a problem that’s only a problem when they go into the outside world, then that child doesn’t have a problem. The outside world has a problem.”
― Carolyn Hays, A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter

“I believe that hidden girl will continue to grow inside of you…I imagined the trans person who transitions later in life being reunited with that self. They finally get to know the girl they were but never fully got to be. She existed, of course. She was there all along.”
― Carolyn Hays, A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter

“I imagine what it must feel like to try to exist less and less. Why keep looking in a mirror that shows you only a distortion of yourself? To avoid the pain or being sent the wrong way, one might hope not to be seen at all. And start to disappear.”
― Carolyn Hays, A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter

“We never send someone out on a mission to discover what’s beyond us or the vastness of what’s within us and have them return to report, “Actually, we found less.”
― Carolyn Hays, A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter

“Jon Richards has this to say: "I kind of hate the idea of disclosure in the sense that it presupposes that there is something to disclose."..."It reinforces their assumption that there is a secret that is hidden and that I have a responsibility to tell others and that presupposes that the other person might have some kind of issue or problem with what's to be disclosed. And that their feelings matter more than mine.”
― Carolyn Hays, A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter

“Joy is a kind of rebellion. Within that rebellion, a mother’s pride can be a mutiny. My love for you is riotous.”
― Carolyn Hays, Letter to My Transgender Daughter: A Girlhood

“I always wonder how much the heart can take,” she said, “and then I see how much the heart can take.”
― Carolyn Hays, Letter to My Transgender Daughter: A Girlhood

“We’re not healthy when it comes to motherhood, as a culture. We denigrate it then sanctify it. Mothers are martyrs and saints. We’re to be trotted out, given our little accolades, and then told to recede. We’re cutesified, commodified, erased. There are pedestals and pits of damnation. We rarely talk about the realism of it all. It’s something governments—made up largely of men—want to control.”
― Carolyn Hays, Letter to My Transgender Daughter: A Girlhood