Trans Visibility Quotes

I grew up at a time in Hawaii where there were trans women around, so there were visible role models for me. At the same time, as a low-income trans girl of color, there were so many things that I didn't have access to. I didn't have access to a great education. I didn't have access to affordable healthcare.

There are no trans roles, and if there are, they go to Jared Leto or Eddie Redmayne or Elle Fanning... Will there ever come a point where I could play a woman in a realistic, naturalistic drama and have there not be the word 'trans' in the script?

There are a whole bunch of people - Republicans or sports fans or reality TV fans - who probably would never have recognized that they have trans people in their world. Caitlyn Jenner really is thinking about the movement and saving lives, so I know that her intentions are honorable.

When I saw that Laverne Cox was on the cover of 'Time' magazine, I totally lost it. It was a coup for the girls!

Sometimes it feels like people can't wrap their head around the notion that an 'androgynous' trans woman with shorter hair could be beautiful.

I'd never have imagined it when I was younger. A trans woman on the cover of 'Time?' That is unfathomable to the 15-year-old me.

What I'm really excited for is to see the evolution of trans characters and see more diverse stories be told, so that every time we're on screen, we're not really playing the part of educator and having to explain the experience to the audience, because it will have already been normalized.

For me, I know I am a trans activist and I try my best to stand up when the time is right, but at the same time, I don't always want to be considered transgender around my friends and people at my daughter's school. I just want to be considered a woman.

When I was young, I didn't see anyone who was trans like me anywhere in the movies.

People are identifying not only with the trans movement, but also the Pfefferman family. What I am noticing is people are coming up on the street and talking about their life and their family, and they say, 'Your family is just like mine.'

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.

To see a trans body in this ideal space - on a cover, in an ad - these are spaces that have immense cultural power to dictate what is beautiful, what is glamorous, what is aspirational, what is sexy, what is clean. That can be very powerful and helpful in the de-stigmatization of trans bodies.

My only bookings this week came from within my friends. Trans people have been central to New York’s art and fashion scene for nearly as long as those ‘scenes’ have existed as we know them. It’s about time that this reality was represented on the city’s runways.

It took me about a year to understand and to feel the support from the transgender community.

We can be whoever we want. We can do whatever we want. We can be superheroes, because in many ways we are. We've had trans representation in television for a while, but it hasn't been the right representation.

I don't want the same trans story to be told over and over again. I don't want people to get stuck on this very western idea of what it means to be transgender.

I'm loving the fact that Hollywood is telling trans stories.

'Clocked' means someone sees you for being transgender.

Respectable transwomen were not as visible and very unclear in how they defined themselves. I had no one to look up to, pre-transition.

When I first appeared in the media, it was rare to see trans people on TV, and young trans kids were unheard of.

It seems only fitting that we have a trans superhero for trans kids to look up to. I wish there was a trans superhero when I was little.

Trans people should be able to fall in love and sing love songs too, and have that be just as valid. You turn on the radio and every other song is some guy singing about some girl who broke his heart, or vice versa. And there's not a lot of trans representation with that.

Society doesn't tell you that you can be trans.

I am a trans woman. My sisters are trans women. We are not secrets. We are not shameful. We are worthy of respect, desire, and love. As there are many kinds of women, there are many kinds of men, and many men desire many kinds of women, trans women are amongst these women. And let’s be clear: Trans women are women.

People ask me all the time, 'What is it like being on set for a show about trans people?' And this is a state of normalcy to me.