Alvah Bessie Quotes

I think once I was in high school - I had boyfriends and stuff like that, but I think when I was younger, I went through a period where I looked like a boy, and people thought I was a boy.

Explaining to my children, especially my daughter, that I will be dressed as a woman, and will be playing a eunuch was a tough task.

I originally thought I'd grow up to be a woman. I didn't question that when I was little.

Mum is the girliest of them all, but she ended up with me, the tomboy.

I'm the youngest of four siblings and the baby of the family. My family just treated me like anyone else growing up. They taught me that everyone has a special and unique trait about them, and that mine is that I have a girl brain and a boy body.

I kind of dated a woman-ish, but there's just something about a man that's just masculine, and just there's things that women don't have that men do.

I realize that they giggle and I actually laugh, that they show their cleavage and I have none to show, but just so you know, I am also a girl. I'm one of the three wise MEN. And it's gay to think that James Bond is hot.

On Madonna: She's a gay man trapped in a woman's body.

When I was very young, I wanted to be a girl. I was jealous that girls got to be princesses and wear skirts. It tormented me. When I was 6, I even heard that you could change your sex, and I was very intrigued until the moment I realized that if I changed into a girl, I would be an ugly girl, and this is the last thing I wanted to be.

To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

As someone who has always felt at times pretty genderless because of my size, it interests me to challenge ideas of prejudice and femininity, and what it is to be a woman.

As a little kid, I was convinced that I was a guy.

I always felt like the male from the time I was a child. There wasn't much feminine about me.

Not only am I physically and emotionally attracted to women, I also wonder what being a woman would be like.

I was a tomboy as a kid - I was skinny and had cropped hair and was often mistaken for a boy - and up until I was about six, I had my own very fluid ideas of gender in that I believed that, somehow, an individual could choose whether or not s/he wanted to be a boy or a girl.

If I hadn't been born a woman, I would have certainly been gay.

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 born, there was a very isolated idea of what it meant to be a man or a woman, and you belonged to one gender or the other.

Being a parent of a boy who wants to wear sparkles and grow his hair long - especially when you don't know where it's all going to go - it's hard stuff. I'm not being politically incorrect in acknowledging that, am I?

Some people look gender non-conforming because they want to look that way - they don't want to conform to society's expectations.

I want parents out there to know that it's totally natural for kids to make believe and play games. It does not mean your child is going to be transgendered. And even if it were true, why is it such a horrible thing?

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

My secret world had been invaded, and the attractive figure of Tiptree - he did strike several people as attractive - was revealed as nothing but an old lady in Virginia.

As a result of 50 years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits... the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied.

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.