Nicole Maines Quotes

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.

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

Also, I had read a book called She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, written by a professor who had gone through transgender surgery, but it took this person well into his thirties to come to terms with the absolute necessity of having to do it.

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

I am transgender. I knew that I was for as long as I can remember.

From the moment I could express myself, I acted like a stereotypical girl and insisted that I was a girl. I wasn't just a boy who liked girly things - I knew I was a girl.

For all intents and purposes, I'm a woman.

I figured out who I was very early on - actually, at the age of 13, with the help of the Internet - so I knew that a transition, becoming a woman, was always something I needed to do.

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

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.

The problem with the spectrum that is trans-ness and where people like Caitlyn Jenner lie, transitioning and being trans is more than a physical thing. Transition is a process.

I had always known I was female, since I was 7 years old.

I look like a dude and feel like a dude, and it sucks. But eventually I'll flip, and I'll present as female.

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.

Ever since I could form coherent thoughts, I knew I was a girl trapped inside a boy's body. There was never any confusion in my mind. The confusing part was why no one else could see what was wrong.

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

For me, having a gender identity that was different from my sex assigned at birth and that wasn't seen by society felt like a constant feeling of homesickness - that unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach.

I don't know that I had context for being trans until I moved to Rochester, New York, to pursue my dream of acting, and started going to drag shows. I had never seen a transsexual before, and I didn't yet fully understand my own identity.

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.

Some people say I appeared on the Phil Donahue show to tell 'my' sex change story but I've never appeared on his show for any reason... not even as a member of the studio audience.

When I was really little, it was very clear to me that I felt like a boy, and my friends were all boys.

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

There were definitely songs in the past that were me dealing with living this gender dysphoria, and sometimes they were really direct and no one picked up on it - but oftentimes, they were more veiled in metaphor.

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.