Quote of the Day

perfection is a eugenic ideal. love people for who they are, not what you think they should be.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Your Wound / My Garden, p. 53

Quote of the Day

not all knots need to be untied. you are not for

everyone, you are for you. how devastating.

how gorgeous.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Your Wound / My Garden, p. 53

Quote of the Day

beneath every supremacy lives insecurity

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Your Wound / My Garden, p. 48

Quote of the Day

i used to think that if i "toned it down" i would be taken

more seriously.

but then i realized:

you will always find a way to discredit me.

we both know:

this was never about what i looked like,

it was always about what you felt like.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Your Wound / My Garden, p. 47

Quote of the Day

contrary to popular belief,

i am not a character in your novel.

i am not an actor in your tv show.

i am not a statue in your courtyard.

i belong firmly and irrevocably to myself.

the only opinion about my appearance that matters is my own.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Your Wound / My Garden, p. 47

Quote of the Day

i am not interested in legitimacy. / legitimacy is a circus that requires me to convince others / of what already is. / i have more important things to do with my time. / does the ground have to authenticate itself to the feet? / does water have to substatiate itself to the tongue? / i have nothing to prove. / my dignity is not up for debate. / i accept myself. / and that is not only enough, / it is everything.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Your Wound / My Garden, p. 47

Quote of the Day

we do not live in the present / we live in the promise / after all: this is the promised land / where power is conferred not from the ability to deliver, / but rather from the ability to promise delivery

this distinction is both as vital & as scarce / as a ventilator

i suppose the better unit of measurement would be: / the promise

how many promises does it take / to turn a crisis into campaign strategy? / how many promises does it take / to make the coffin your fault, not their misdoing?

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Your Wound / My Garden, p. 36

Quote of the Day

He who controls the word controls the world.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Your Wound / My Garden, p. 17

Quote of the Day

I write with the curiosity and vigilance of a scientist.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Your Wound / My Garden, p. 5

Quote of the Day

I was terrified that when I came into myself, I would lose everything.  Instead, I found myself.  I found the connection I had been searching for my entire life: people who loved me for me and not my category; beauty in my individuality, not my obedience.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary, p. 62

Quote of the Day

"You are not normal.  You have a disorder that needs to be fixed."

It's important to understand the difference between being "normal" and being "normative."  Being normal means that a numerically significant amount of something is found in a group.  For example, if you select a random group of students, chances are a large percentage will be wearing sneakers.  This is normal.  Being normative is about what gets elevated by society to a position of power.  Normativity looks like a specific sneaker brand being upheld as the best.  Normativity, then, is about value judgment and shouldn't be used interchangeably with normal.  It's not that gender non-conforming people aren't normal, it's that we aren't considered normative.  Gender diversity is a natural attribute of human expression, not an illness that needs to be fixed.  Gender non-conforming people face considerable distress not because we have a disorder, but because of stigma and discrimination.  There is nothing wrong with us, what is wrong is a world that punishes us for not being normatively masculine or feminine.  Increasing acknowledgement of this reality is why groups like the World Health Organization, the World Medical Association, and the American Psychological Association have formally depathologized gender-diverse identities.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary, p. 40-41

Quote of the Day

There are as many ways to be a woman as there are women.  There are as many ways to be a man as there are men.  There are as many ways to be nonbinary as there are nonbinary people.  This complexity is not chaos, it just is.  We do not need to be universal to be valid.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary, p. 60

Quote of the Day

When we say that women give birth, we neglect that some women are not capable of giving birth while some trans men and nonbinary people are.  The gender-neutral alternative "people who give birth" holds all of these realities just like the gender-neutral "siblings" includes brothers, sisters, and nonbinary siblings.  Using gender-neutral language isn't about being politically correct, it's just about being correct.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary, p. 47

Quote of the Day

"You are making everything about gender.  Stop bringing it up if you want it to go away."

This is ironic because we are actually trying to make gender less relevant.  It's curious where society locates the blame.  What about the gender-reveal parties, the birth certificates, the gendered sections at clothing stores, the driver's licenses, all the ways that society imposes gender on us all?  When things like this are normalized, they become invisible and we don't even question them.  Critiquing gender is not the same thing as creating gender.  Not talking about it won't make gender inequality go away; in fact, that's precisely how this injustice persists.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary, p. 44

Quote of the Day

"This gender nonbinary and gender-fluid thing is just a new youth Internet fad.  There are only two genders."

While the actual words might be new, living beyond the gender binary is not.  Indigenous people and people outside the Western world have long existed outside of the gender binary: two-spirit among American Indians, hijra in South Asia, waria in Indonesia, muxe in Mexico, just to name a few.  In many of these societies, people living outside of the binary were and continue to be recognized as leaders.  It's not that these people do not exist, it's that they have been erased to make the Western gender binary seem like the only option, and not a particular and specific cultural worldview.  What is regarded as masculine and feminine is not set in stone but actually shifts across time, culture, and space.  Even in the Western world, pink was once considered a masculine color and heels were actually first worn by men!

 -- Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary, p. 39-40

Quote of the Day

The selective outcry over new words to describe gender and sexuality -- amidst the thousands of words that are added to the dictionary every year -- is about prejudice, not principle.  If these people are so averse to change, why aren't they outlawing the use of bingeable or taking more public stances on the use of the Oxford comma?

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary, p. 39

Quote of the Day

They say that gender non-conforming people, in particular, are caught up on some new fad: that we are inventing language, identities, pronouns, and genders.  But language and grammar have always been developed to meet the needs of the society.  Consider words like selfie and welp, which have recently been added to the dictionary.  This is actually the purpose of language -- to give meaning to concepts as they evolve.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary, p. 38

Quote of the Day

Common sense is what happens when a particular point of view is regarded as the status quo because it's held by the people in power, not necessarily because it is right.  These perspectives are told so often that we begin to see them as universal truths.  We accept the fact that this is the way things are and have always been.  For large periods of history, it was "common sense" that Black people and people of color were inferior and that this supposed inferiority justified discrimination, genocide, and slavery.  Just because an opinion is widely held does not make it right.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary, p. 37

Quote of the Day

In order to even get a seat at the table, people have to believe that you exist.  When it comes to gender non-conforming people, we are still at square one -- still having to argue that we are real.  What's never questioned here is, whose standards of authenticity are we being held up to in the first place?

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary, p. 37

Quote of the Day

Power can be defined as the ability to make a particular perspective seem universal.  Control is how power maintains itself; anyone who expresses another perspective is punished.  Arguments against gender non-conforming people are about maintaining power and control.  Most can be grouped into four categories: dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope.  These are strategies that people use to make the gender binary seem like a given, not a decision.  It's important to understand how they work in order to imagine otherwise.

-- Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary, p. 36