I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.

Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron ... Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.

People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.

I think a lot of the time people assume that their values are universal. And they don't understand which aspects of their values are actually universal and which aspects are very specific.

If the Mormon Church still supported polygamy, and if it appeared to be a system that was not exploitative of women, I wouldn't feel that it's my place to forbid it.

I'm sure that if we had enough sophistication, someone could look at what my changes in brain structure were as I came to feel more deeply in love.

There is no question that abuse, drugs and exposure to violence at home can exacerbate someone's criminal tendencies enormously. But there are many, many criminals who don't come from that background.