kavya ♡

“The question feels so patronizing: as if I’ve never thought about gender and how I choose to present myself, how I dress, how I stand, how I crop my hair short, and what this means. As if I’ve never thought about what it would be like to live as a man instead, the relief that would come from passing, with not having to face the everyday violence and humiliations of living in my body. As if I’ve never thought about how I don’t want that, how every cell in my body recoils at that thought of being a man, and yet how harrowing it is that the only way I can get out of my bed and make it through the day is by wearing masculinity on my body. As if I’ve never held dear my feminist rage, never thought about how I feel so politically aligned with womanhood and yet hate inhabiting it, hate it when my body is read as such. As if the only way to be trans is to transition to a binary gender, as if I can’t exist as I have been, in some space in between or beyond, using she or they pronouns and seething when people call me a woman and laughing when people tell me I should transition.”
― Lamya H., Hijab Butch Blues

“But what I've been noticing about people I haven't invited into my queerness is that it introduces a barrier between us. What do I talk to these people about? How do I share feelings and intimacies without revealing this huge part of myself? Who am I without this queerness that now pervades my life, my politics, my everything?”
― Lamya H., Hijab Butch Blues

“I'm sorry you had to put all your feelings to the side so you could help me."
"I'm not," she says fiercely. "I can, in fact, be mad at you and help you at the same time. It's called being emotionally nuanced.”
― Tess Sharpe, 6 Times We Almost Kissed [and One Time We Did]

“It was strange, she thought, how you could live all your life in a home defined by people who loved you and took care of you and shared ancestors with you and yet did not entirely see you, people whom you protected by hiding yourself.”
― Carolina De Robertis, Cantoras