FROM YOU DON’T KNOW DICK: COURAGEOUS HEARTS OF TRANSSEXUAL MEN (1997) - trans men discussing what it means to be trans and a man
Stephan: Being a transsexual man is different. It’s truly different. I didn’t grow up a boy. I can’t go to all the same places as those guys have been and will go. And yet turn it around and put me into a group of women, where I used to fit into that, and I don’t fit there anymore either.
Max: Some of us feel like we become man and then we kind of leave being transsexuals behind, because it’s a transition place. And I understand that, but I think what really happens, what I feel really happens, is more sort of a shifting of identity. You know, where man becomes more important at some point than transsexual. And it’s not so much that you give up the transsexual and you take on the man, it’s just that the man part of that compound becomes more important.
James: But I don’t like the term “genetic men” as opposed to transsexual men. Because I’m genetic too. And we don’t know where transsexuality comes from. It could be genetic, who knows.
Stephan: I think the transgendered community has to live with an ambivalence and ambiguity that most other people don’t have to live with. Maybe biracial people live with it in another way. And that’s where I live. I live in this ambiguous, ambivalent place.
Michael: I might be totally wrong about this, but it seems to me that transsexuals are the only ones that really know what’s happening on both ends of the [male and female] spectrum [of experiences].
Max: I don’t know at all what it is to be a woman, and in some ways I do know. Both things are true. That is the strange nature of this, and the power of this ultimately, I think, is that two things that simultaneously cancel each other out can be true at the same time, and are true.
Michael: Now I’m kind of accepting my history as a female, the female part of it. The part of my life that I lived as a female outwardly, and I kept the little boy inside – somehow I kept him alive, and he stayed alive until I could bring him out.