Quotes from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

The key to getting out of a bad relationship is being able to imagine something more fulfilling. --D. Travers Scott

A lot of people are afraid of critique because they think it means you aren't supporting them. For me, the most important thing in any kind of relationship is the critical engagement.

Every time a trick hangs up on me, I gain a renewed faith in humanity—someone really cares!

U.S. society, after all, continues to be starkly segregated along class and race lines, never allowing people to have the sort of interactions necessary to undo prejudices, stereotypes, and oppressions.

cruise the ones in the flesh, not the ghosts on the internet

For people who might struggle to survive at basic levels, it may be more fulfilling to claim an identity like butch, which does not necessarily require engagement with institutions like medicine or academia, which have historically sought to kill, pathologize, or ignore people of color and poor people (and queers). Most transgender scholarship leaves little room for groups of people or ways of being that do not fit a narrow definition of what is scholarly enough or trans-gressive enough.

I realize that I will always find respite amongst the migrants, the refugees, the expatriates, the homeless, the pirates. I will always be the fence-sitter. I will pass as I see fit and fail to pass when I was really hoping I would and refuse to pass when it serves my purposes.

Now I think about how much shutting off was required, just to exist in day-to-day experience. You couldn't express shock at everyone dying right in front of your eyes, because shock felt like a form of cruelty. So you would act like everything might be okay, even when nothing was okay.