“Why would I be gentle with myself when I was very clearly doing this thing — like so many other things in my life — wrong? No, I didn’t need gentleness. I needed more self-discipline, more conviction, more toughness. I needed to get my fucking shit together.”

“I wanted to be single so I could explore my sexuality. Instead I was exploring other people’s.”

Tinder is not a very good place for making friends.

“He gave me “the benefit of the doubt” that traffic was indeed too rough to allow me, a braless 25-year-old nervously driving a station wagon, to shift over.”

Ridesharing apps like Uber and Lyft are a great idea in theory, but in actuality they’re quite dangerous — for the passenger and the driver. I should know; I’ve been both.

“In fact, the strain of hiding my illness would likely have caused me to break down with even more frequency. How would she have coped with those dysphoric, hallucination-ridden breakdowns — and how would I have dealt with her uneducated reactions?”

“Real human change requires space to be honest with yourself, honest with others; a space that doesn’t exist when you’re trapped by necessity behind a fortress of self-protection. As the inmate Poussey in Orange replies when a correctional officer pressures her to speak openly during a group therapy session: “Does it ever occur to you that actually feeling our feelings might make it impossible to survive in here?”

“That being said, I’d like to live in a world someday where people don’t automatically assume my body looks and functions a certain way, that makes room for people like me and my experiences.”

“I hated my body and punished it, and it hated me and punished me back. Is that what happened? That’s the thing about getting sick the way I got sick: nailing it down.”

“When the doctor said that such and such a treatment was linked to health problems later in life, I didn’t even blink. I’ll hit 50 and keel over? Fine, I don’t care, get rid of these fucking pimples.”

I am not crazy; I am simply black, and queer, and butch, and transcultural, and therefore alone.

Intersex and queer identities sometimes match up in ways that we’re familiar with and that conform to our understanding of how these identities are commonly defined. Other times they don’t.

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

Hey there, Autostraddlers. I’m Claudia, and I’m intersex.

It’s that tie-straightening and sunglass removal feeling.

“I just don’t see why a woman would want to aspire to masculinity when she doesn’t like men.”

“So what do you do in bed, then?” they always ask, but what they mean is “I think I already know what you do in bed because you’re a butch who likes femmes, so I’ve made assumptions on your behalf.”

On our first day, the Professor stepped onto the floor of the auditorium and said, “Raise your hand if you had sex last night!”

“Coming out never ends, and for some of you it hasn’t even begun.”

“I called it sexual assault at first. Sexual assault seemed less damning, less permanent.”