18 Quotes by Kai Cheng Thom

That's the difference between hunger and love," she says. "Hunger is a story you get stuck in. Love's the story that takes you somewhere new.

That's the difference between love and hunger," she says. "Hunger is a story you get stuck in. Love's the story that takes you somewhere new.

your silence was exquisite: a many-faceted prison that gleamed like a dead crystal star with your voice trapped inside love me. love me. love me.

When you're a child trapped in a situation of physical or psychological deprivation, you learn shame as an efficient, elegant mechanism of survival: shame simultaneously shields you from the reality that danger is our of your control (since the problem is not that you're unloved and deprived; it's that you're Bad) and prevents you from doing or saying anything challenging that might provoke a threat.

Models of justice that centre punishment do not prevent abuse but only react to it, and they don't offer a pathway toward healing for either perpetrators or survivors. Nor do they acknowledge the dual reality that a great many perpetrators are themselves survivors.

When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, & activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier.

It's actually a very old archetype that trans girl stories get put into: this sort of tragic, plucky-little-orphan character who is just supposed to suffer through everything and wait, and if you're good and brave and patient (and white and rich) enough, then you get the big reward...which is that you get to be just like everybody else who is white and rich and boring. And then you marry the prince or the football player and live boringly ever after.

you are always disappearing in the hope of being seen. you are always shrinking to fit into someone else’s arms. you are collapsing ever inward, a galaxy trying to become smaller.

My father taught me how to kill a man with my bare hands. He was a martial arts expert back in the day, having grown up in an honest-to-god Shaolin temple and all, and he thought that punching and kicking stuff would make me a man. It didn't work out for him, but the skills have proven quite useful.