Ivan E. Coyote QUOTES

1 " I am a rare species, not a stereotype. "

2 " I am not trapped in the wrong body; I am trapped in a world that makes very little space for bodies like mine. "

― Ivan E. Coyote , Tomboy Survival Guide

3 " So here it is. My friends call me he, or they. The government and most of my family call me she. The media calls me she, because I don’t trust them enough to request that they do anything else. My lovers call me sweetheart. Or baby. Somewhere in all of that I find myself. "

― Ivan E. Coyote

4 " Bullies are almost always outnumbered by the bullied. We just need to organize. "

― Ivan E. Coyote

5 " You deserve so much more than just to be tolerated. You deserve to be loved for exactly who and what you are right now. This, of course, is a double-edged sword. This also means you must return the favor. Learn more about racism and sexism and ableism, too. You, unfortunately, are probably already well aware of how much homophobia can hurt, inside and out. Learning more about how different kinds of oppression work and where they intersect will help you build better bridges with others and create a safe and respectful...culture for everyone. Bullies are almost always outnumbered by the bullied. We just need to organize. "

― Ivan E. Coyote

6 " If being a man is something that required a person to tick off a bunch of boxes, not many people would make it through. "

― Ivan E. Coyote , Gender Failure

7 " You don’t have to look a certain way to be a tomboy. Don’t let anyone tell you that, ever, and please don’t find that here in my words. Tomboy thrums in your heart. It’s in your head. It’s what is holding your spine in place. It can’t be hidden by a haircut. It’s not about nail polish or not. It’s running right now in your veins. If it is in you, you already know. Tomboy blood is so much bigger than the outside of you. "

― Ivan E. Coyote

8 " Some thoughts on heaven? I have this theory that heaven is different for everyone. It has to be, or it wouldn’t be heaven. My grandmother’s heaven? In her heaven she doesn’t have to share the remote with anyone, and it is Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune on all the time, with nary a rerun ever, and the old lady always wins the big money and a trip to Europe to tour a castle or somewhere warm but not too hot with nice churches. In her heaven your knees don’t hurt and your back doesn’t hurt and you get to be whatever age was your favourite age to be and you still have all your teeth and there are bingo games right after dinner and raspberry hard candies and no one ever has to do the dishes. In my gran’s heaven, you can still have yourself a proper smoke in the living room and it doesn’t ruin the new paint job and the lawn never gets too long and the foxes don’t chase the birds off the birdfeeder. In her heaven, a nice bit of cheese won’t give you the bad stomach and real men don’t beat their wives or fuck their children, and every day is payday, and the Friday of a long weekend. Floors wax themselves, but you still get to hang the laundry, but only if you feel like it. "

― Ivan E. Coyote , Tomboy Survival Guide

9 " I became something I had no name for in solitude and only later discovered the word for what I was and realized there were others like me. "

― Ivan E. Coyote

10 " I want you to know that it is not always easy to love me. That sometimes my chest is a field full of landmines, and where you went last night, you can’t go tomorrow. There is no manual, there is no road map, no help line you can call; my body does not come with instructions, and sometimes even I don’t know what to do with it. This cannot be easy. But still, you touch me anyway. "

― Ivan E. Coyote

11 " I realize that the English language is sadly devoid of names for people like me. I try to cut the world some slack for this every day. All day. And the day after that, too. But the truth is that every time I am misgendered, a tiny little sliver of me disappears, A tiny little sliver of me is reminded that I do not fit ... I remember that the truth of me is invisible, and a tiny little sliver of me disappears. Just a sliver, razored from the surface of my very thick skin most days, but other times right from my soul, sometimes felt so deep and other days simply shrugged off, but still. All those slivers add up to something much harder to pretend around. "

― Ivan E. Coyote , Gender Failure

12 " I didn't know why it made my heart sing loud to itself that a stranger thought I was a boy. It just did. Made me feel like he could look inside me and see some part of the truth of me in there.
But it did make me inexplicably sad that a stranger could see me, and my own family could not. "

― Ivan E. Coyote , Tomboy Survival Guide

13 " So I get a little tired of having to swallow my lived experience to be force-fed someone else's what-ifs. I get tired of my safety coming second. I get tired of the realities of trans and gender non-conforming people's lives being overshadowed and ignored in favour of a boogey-man that might be lurking in the ladies' room. I get really tired of being mistaken for a monster. I get tired of swallowing all these bathroom stories and smiling politely. But the last thing I can do is allow myself to get angry. Because if I get angry, then I am seen as even more of a threat. Then it's all my fault, isn't it? Because then there is a man in the ladies' room, and for some reason, he's angry. "

― Ivan E. Coyote , Gender Failure

14 " books: Nancy Drew, Harriet the Spy, Encyclopedia Brown, and later, anything with even a passing mention of sex in it: Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret, and those Clan of the Cave Bear books, the whole Flowers in the Attic series. But mostly we were obsessed with a book called The Chrysalids. We "

― Ivan E. Coyote , Tomboy Survival Guide

15 " I told her to come right out and ask me what she was asking me. So she asked me if I still had my breasts, or if I was planning to have a breast augmentation, or if I wanted to have a penis constructed, or my penis removed. It was only then that I realized she didn’t know what sex or gender I had been assigned at birth, so she couldn’t even be sure what I might want removed or added on to me, but still. She had to know. She just had to ask. "

― Ivan E. Coyote , Gender Failure

16 " Please rate the strength of your feelings from one to five, one meaning you feel not very strongly about it all, to five meaning you have very strong feelings about me getting top surgery. Now, please fold up your answers and put them in your pocket. Please keep them to yourself, as I will try to do with my feelings about your breasts. Thank you so much for participating. "

― Ivan E. Coyote , Gender Failure

17 " That Ivan. They always were such a dreamer. "

― Ivan E. Coyote , Gender Failure

18 " Some of us have hard roads, but the Lord never gives anyone a burden without also giving them a gift. Your job is to find out what that gift is and use it, y'hear me? God doesn't make mistakes. Never forget that. You are exactly who God meant you to be. "

― Ivan E. Coyote , Tomboy Survival Guide

19 " It’s strange, the things you miss. Me, I miss the way she used to wear her socks to bed and then pull them off with her toes. I would find them hidden in the sheets when I made the bed in the morning, crumpled into little black balls, covered in dog hair. It used to drive me nuts, but not anymore, in retrospect. Now it seems kind of adorable. "

― Ivan E. Coyote , The Slow Fix

20 " Any knowledge of homosexuality I might have had would have gone back to Victorian times. All those novels. You probably skirted under my radar, because you weren't wearing hoop skirts and high button boots. "

― Ivan E. Coyote

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