It is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed to — Transgender

"While numerous surgical interventions can be considered GAS, the procedures have been broadly classified as breast and chest surgical procedures, facial and cosmetic interventions, and genital reconstructive surgery. Prior studies have shown that GAS is associated with improved quality of life, high rates of satisfaction, and a reduction in gender dysphoria. Furthermore, some studies have reported that GAS is associated with decreased depression and anxiety.8 Lastly, the procedures appear to be associated with acceptable morbidity and reasonable rates of perioperative complications."

"The preoccupation with transition and surgery objectifies trans people. And then we dont get to really deal with the real lived experiences. The reality of trans peoples lives is that so often we are targets of violence. We experience discrimination disproportionately to the rest of the community. Our unemployment rate is twice the national average; if you are a trans person of color, that rate is four times the national average. The homicide rate is highest among trans women. If we focus on transition, we dont actually get to talk about those things."

"Several studies demonstrate a decrease in sexual desire after initiation of estrogen and antiandrogen medications. Prevalence of low sexual desire ranged from 32% to 73%, but the percentage of those experiencing distress from low sexual desire or hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) was 22% in a study of 214 trans women after medical and surgical affirmation. This distress associated with low sexual desire is a key marker for HSDD, a diagnosis often paired with depression."

"To be trans is an experience bound up with economic struggle. There cannot be one without the other."

"When we talk about trans people, we’re usually referring to individuals who were either recorded as male at birth but who understand themselves to be women (trans women) or, vice versa, were recorded as female at birth but who understand themselves to be men (trans men). Not all trans people, however, find simply moving between the pre-existing categories of man and woman satisfactory, accurate or desirable. Such trans people, who are less well understood, generally unsettle mainstream society more than trans men and women, because they challenge not only the prevailing idea that birth genitals and gender are inseparable, but also the idea that there are just two gender categories. Often, these people are accused of making up their experience out of a need for attention or a desire to feel special – though in reality the political, economic and social costs for such ‘non-binary’ trans people (who don’t straightforwardly see themselves as men or women) can be immense."

"Evidence suggests that less than 1% of transgender people who undergo gender-affirming surgery report regret. That proportion is even more striking when compared to the fact that 14.4% of the broader population reports regret after similar surgeries. For example, studies have found that between 5% and 14% of all women who receive mastectomies to reduce the risk of developing breast cancer say they regretted doing so. However, less than 1% of transgender men who receive the same procedure report regret. These statistics are based on reviews of existing studies that investigated regret among 7,928 transgender individuals who received gender-affirming surgeries. Although some of this prior research has been criticized for overlooking the fact that regret can sometimes take years to develop, it aligns with the growing body of studies that show positive health outcomes among transgender people who receive gender-affirming care."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"