Mercedes Ruehl Quotes

Being transgender isn't a medical transition. It's a process of learning to love yourself for who you are.

It took me a long time to realise that I was a girl as a teenager. At that point I never really believed it. I looked like a boy for a long time. Now, finally, I feel like a woman.

I think it's really difficult for folks that aren't transgender to really wrap their mind around the feeling of having a gender identity that differs from their sex assigned at birth. But for me, it felt like a constant feeling of homesickness.

Number one, I don't understand a transgender. I don't understand. Is it a guy dressed up like a girl, or a girl dressed up like a guy?

From the start. As early as - I felt I was in the wrong sex; I really did. I would go into my dad's room and put on his clothes.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a boy. I really had gender issues.

When I was five, I came to understand that I was not a boy.

I remember, as a child, lying in my bed at night praying that I would wake up the next day and be a girl, to be my authentic self, and to just have my family be proud of me. I remember looking into the mirror struggling to say just two words, 'I'm transgender.'

I've always known exactly who I am. I was a girl trapped in a boy's body.

I was never going to become a beautiful, passable woman, and I was never going to be a man. It's a quandary. But the trans condition is a beautiful mystery; it's one of nature's best ideas.

I knew that I was trans when I was three years old. Well, I didn't know 'trans' because I didn't know there was a word for it, but I just knew that in my head and my heart that I was supposed to be a girl.

It's hard because the phrase 'woman trapped in a man's body' is thrown around a lot, but that's like shorthand. It's deeper than that. There's so much more to it.

It's something you're born with, and you realize that you're trapped in the wrong body. It's not like one day you're like, 'I want to be transgender!'

If someone's OK with being the 'transgender girl,' that's fine, but that's not me.

There are few things harder than being born into the wrong body.

I thought, transgender people are much worse off than I am. That's why they're willing to risk everything to be who they are. But the older I got, the harder it got to stay in my body.

In the first couple of years when you're transitioning you don't really fit into any gender, because you're changing over. You have to start getting electrolysis before you even start your therapy. But I think all the weird looks help to give you conviction in who you really are.

I always had this idea that, 'Sure, I wished I was a boy and felt more like a boy and all of that.' But I wasn't, so I would deal with it. And I for some reason thought there were other lesbians that felt that way and that was just part of that community.

I was born a girl; it just took me a little while to become one fully.

Being transgender is not just a medical transition.

Everyone else is following these male and female tracks that have already been set for them, but when you're trans there is no trail.

It's not a cis-man becoming a cis-woman. It's a trans person just being who they want to be. This is how I've always felt, and this is who I've always been. But so much focus is put on the transition or the change because it's so visible. But that's not even what it is... That's who that person's been and who they are now.

I was bought up as a boy. I don't blame my parents in the slightest since it was just an unfortunate timing in many ways, in other ways it was very fortunate. If I'd been born 20 years earlier, there wouldn't have been the surgical techniques to correct the deformity and by the time I was of an age, they did exist. I was very lucky.

The way I see things is that, I think that transgender people are super brave. If you're a female to male, male to female, if you're that brave to take control of your own body and make it however you want it to be, more power to you.

My parents started questioning me about whether or not I was transgender - whether or not I was trying to be a woman. It was a big argument.