“Towards the end of the night you fall and tear the skin on your knee. But you pop back up and keep skating. You’re relieved. Now that you’ve fallen once you know you’ll be okay.”

“Presenting as male every day hurts. When the ship is in port, it’s not as bad; I grow to hate coming in to work, but once the day ends I can go home and be myself. When we’re underway, it’s worse. I’m stuck being ‘him’ all day, every day. Sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks… once, for months.”

“I was terrified that I was going to receive a bunch of angry phone calls from parents or a visit from the overly religious principal as a result of word getting out that I didn’t fit the heteronormative cookie cutter mold that all of the other teachers at the school did.”

“It took watching I Don’t Wanna Be A Boy to show me that the negative attitudes towards trans women have always been pervasive in society, that from 1994 to 2016 there hasn’t been much change in how society views us. But it also taught me that we share a sisterhood of sorts. No matter what time and what place, trans women of color are connected by our similar experiences.”

“There’s an annoying song that’s only playing all the way through all day long on some days. Others, I can barely hear the chorus, and others I can’t hear it all. But every day, I know that that song will be there again one day, maybe even tomorrow, maybe even later that same day. And I hate this song.”

“I decide I’ll test the durability of a BB cream by Tarte at thousands of feet in the air, then feel ashamed at worrying so much about how I look, then feel the dread again, that all this might go completely wrong, not because I’ll fall to my death, but because I’ll be reduced to my past.”

“Trauma wasn’t meant to happen at 9 a.m. on that August morning. Not when I was running on time, and somehow missed the long line for the day’s first cup of coffee. Nothing could have warned me that the meticulous construction of my person would be unraveled while my peers watched from their own cocoons of solitude.”

“But, like embracing the woman I am, I couldn’t stay back from the allure of the waves. The pull of my trans-ness and queerness, of course, would always be stronger, the strongest impulses I have ever known. The sea, like them, was a place that represented a kind of forbidden love. I needed to overcome my fears or I would feel that I was holding myself back from living authentically.”

“Why is it that trans women of color have to experience so much violence to remember that they have each other’s back?”

It’s as if I had just discovered a new color and now had this entirely new dimension to my life. I was able to paint a holistic portrait of what I wanted the rest of my life to look like.

“One morning, while I was applying my new lighter makeup, I accidentally put too much banana powder on which created a shroud of ashy yellow veil all around the center of my face. I stopped and stared back at my reflection. I looked absolutely foolish. Here I was relishing in this depigmentation of my beautiful ebony skin that I no longer looked like myself.”

Was I so far from the idea of trans in her head, that there was no way I could be “one of them”? Or did she refuse to make the association because there was something so wrong with being a trans woman that she could never be attracted to one?

“I once had a life where I could go blocks, miles, months without a stranger standing in my way, saying, ‘Hey girl, where you goin’ in such a hurry?’ I want to take my personal space bubble to the shop and have it re-inflated to its original size, but that chapter of my life seems to be done.”

My transgender wife and I are both people with a lot of serious challenges to face, and we chose to confront those challenges as a team. That’s not heroism. It’s love.

Ever since I went to a Halloween party at my friend’s church youth group in 6th grade, I’ve been almost inseparable from my Christian identity. But on November 4th, 2012, my heart was all the way down in my toes as I got ready to go to church for the first time as a transgender lesbian.

“I paid a dude to knock me unconscious, peel back my face, and cut out chunks of my skull and jaw.”

“I am an adoptee,” I explained through my tears. “I need to find my parents. I have waited all my life for this moment. I’m supposed to leave tomorrow, but I can’t go without knowing my family is fine. Please help me!”

“I did extremely well in any video games with dating elements, like Persona 4, but virtual dating and real dating are two very different things. I could master playing as someone else, but as the old cliché of dating advice often goes, I needed to be myself.”

“Our commitment was never in question. I just hadn’t faced the possibility that I could be, not someone’s boyfriend, but their girlfriend. That was the part I had to think about.”

“Not only do I have to deal with the crippling dysphoria that comes from having a body that I often don’t even recognize as my own, I also have to deal with the cultural misogyny that tells me that a woman can’t be as big and fat as I am and still be desirable.”