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“In a way, it didn't. They didn't start the fight. I did. That's the part only my therapist knows. I didn't mind that they spat at me and shoved into me as I walked across the football field on my way home. I'd learned to ignore that. I snapped and started the fight because they said something awful about Ever.
Irrational gallantry, maybe? I never asked for this type of masculinity, but there it was.”
― Marieke Nijkamp, Even If We Break

“We were boys who had created ourselves. We had formed our own bodies, our own lives, from the ribs of the girls we were once assumed to be.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix

“In a way, it didn't. They didn't start the fight. I did. That's the part only my therapist knows.
I didn't mind that they spat at me and shoved into me as I walked across the football field on my way home. I'd learned to ignore that. I snapped and started the fight because they said something awful about Ever.
Irrational gallantry, maybe? I never asked for this type of masculinity, but there it was.”
― Marieke Nijkamp, Even If We Break

“If I am in a state of becoming, it has no endpoint. I imagine replacing the memories of everyone I've ever spoken to with the impression that they have only ever seen me as a being clothed in light.
In the early part of the twentieth century, homophobes and eugenicists joined forces to study what they called inversion, an early term for homosexuality, gender nonconformity, and transness. They believed they could read and police queerness on the body.
Maybe this is why I don't want to make myself legible. I want to erase the meanings that have been ascribed to my breath, to my sweat, to my hair and fat and skin. I trace the green veins in my neck that branch down into my breasts as feathers. I am painting myself as the bird that, to the world outside this room, does not exist. I draw myself clothed in wings and tell myself that even the angels are sexless.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“He wanted to be a girl who wanted to be a girl, or a boy who was, in a way no one could question, a boy.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours

“Binders have become my protective layer, my second skin, my shield that makes me feel safe and more myself.”
― Tobly McSmith, Stay Gold

“I still believed I could will my body to become what my mind knew it should be: free and strong as a coil of brass wire. My chest and belly felt swollen and full, and every movement reminded me of how wrong I felt. I moved slower. A chasm had opened between me and my skin, as though I were fumbling around in a too-big pair of gloves. The only words I had back then were for what I knew I wasn't—a girl. But how to explain this feeling that my body was a tracing of something else, and not all the lines matched up?”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“There is nothing behind the door in my chest that should uncage the kind of feminine softness I should have, the kind you told me would settle into my chest and my hips. It never did.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“If you put on a dress once in a while, habibti, you will see the boys come running, eh?" Teta gets up from her chair and bends to tug off my hair tie. She uses her hands to let my long hair roll down over my back, then thumbs my chin to make me smile. "You are a beautiful girl. You never let us see."
I catch your eye, standing close by her side. And I do smile back, that false smile that I am supposed to make because now, as then, there is no room for me on this rooftop, and neither Teta nor Reem know the difference, because I have not smiled a real smile since the day the crows came to mourn their dead, and even my family no longer remembers the smile I lost.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“I feel the same thing I felt in the club in Bushwick: that sense not of shedding my body, as I almost did on the basketball court, but of growing into it the way a vine unfurls itself to inhabit a broken fence. I rub the soft, body places on the back of my skull. The remnants of moonflower leaves are laced into the black rings of hair on the floor. I have been the ghost of myself, but this has never been about waiting to be raptured out of my own body. If I am a fox-hearted boy, then so be it. Call me king of the foxes, king of untamable, unreadable things.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“Girl. Who are you hiding from?"
Sami means well. He means to include me in that sisterhood of femmes, a sacred circle to which Reem belongs. But it's a place I've never been at home. "Please don't call me that.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“We are seated across from a couple of pregnant women and their partners, who glance at us over their magazines. I can imagine that we make a strange pair, but it's the way they glare at me that makes me pause, as though I'm rude for appearing this way, with my square jaw and unreadable face, in a space where they had expected someone legible.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“I've tried to block out the awkward years of my puberty, but we've played this same what-if game before, you and me—what if it's just a matter of finding the right haircut, the right outfit, the right boyfriend, the right femininity. Maybe you were right in some way; you never gave in to expectations of what a woman should be.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“My body came with borders.

I've lost count of the times I wished I could share in sisterhood, could lay my head on an auntie's lap and know we bore the same weight. But I've borne a different burden, and I've borne it so long that, as I turn the barrette over in my hand, I don't yet have the heart to tell Aisha that I have tried all the ways I can think of to make myself fit in.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“I have been taught all my life that masculinity means short hair and square-toed shoes, taking up space, raising one's voice. To be soft is to be less of a man. To be gentle, to laugh, to create art, to bleed between the legs—I have been taught all my life that these things make me a woman. I have been taught all my life that to dance is to be vulnerable, and that the world will crush the vulnerable. I was taught to equate invincibility with being worthy of love. But here in the darkness of this abandoned subway platform, I can almost imagine a world big enough for boys like Sami and me to love each other, to dance and let the pain out of our bodies, to breathe and make love and be enough and be enough and be enough.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“He was so used to men's usage
and had so rejected women's ways
that little was lacking for him to be a man.
Whatever one could see was certainly male!
But there's more to this than meets the eye -
the he's a she beneath the clothes.”
― Heldris de Cornualles, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance

“Go to a chamber and learn to sew!
That's what Nature's usage wants of you!
You are not Silentius!"
and he replied, "I never heard that before!
Not Silentius? Who am I then?
Silentius is my name, I think,
or I am other than who I was.
But this I know well, upon my oath,
that I cannot be anybody else!
Therefore, I am Silentius,
as I see it, or I am no one.”
― Heldris de Cornualles, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance

“Why would you want to be one of them?" she says. ”How could you live with yourself?"
I've asked myself that so many times. How could I ever want to be a part of the section of humanity responsible for so much of my suffering? In what ways haven't men hurt me? But then again—in what ways haven't women? In what ways hasn't everyone?
I say, "I don't believe in original sin." Mary looks at me askance, frowning. “What they've done isn't my burden to bear. It's theirs.”
― Andrew Joseph White, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth