Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

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.

It's funny. Some people now are like, 'Why would you transition? Why can't you just be comfortable how you were born?' That was my logic, but at a certain point, I realized that I was born uncomfortable.

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

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

I knew at a very early age, about 6 years old, that there was something different about me. But being young and not being exposed to people who had gender dysphoria, or role models that you see on TV today, I didn't know what it was.

Everyone's journey to coming out as transgender is different. For me, I've know that I'm transgender my entire life.

The weirdest thing I've seen is someone who was a male, and he changed one half of his face to be female.

I couldn't remember when I'd stopped willing to be trans and started wanting to be trans. If there were a difference, I'd forgotten it.

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

On my road to self-discovery, only certain terms were available - I didn't use 'trans' or 'transgender' until junior high school, but I was living as trans much earlier.

People say, ''I'm a woman trapped in a man's body'' or ''I'm a man trapped in a woman's body,'' but I say ''I'm trapped in a body.''

I was born with the wrong body, being feminine by gender but male by sex, and I could achieve completeness only when the one was adjusted to the other.

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.

When I told my parents that I was starting my transition, my Dad said, 'Well that makes so much more sense 'cause I never saw you any other way and now it totally works.'

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.

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.

For the longest time, I thought I was a boy. I really did. I wore boys' clothes, played tag football.

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?

Being transgender is not just a medical transition.

When I was a prepubescent child, I never really had experiences of gender dysphoria. This is not something that started until adolescence.

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.

Luckily for me the public have known me before my transition and I've always had the same body type.

Being transgender is more than just medical books and everything, procedures. It's something spiritual in which you're finding yourself and really discovering who you are and learning to love yourself.

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.

For my entire life, I've wrestled with my gender identity.