We deserve the same things that cis women do, the same things that other humans do, from our social lives to our families to love.
— Indya Moore
Laverne Cox, Isis King, Janet Mock, Our Lady J, Ryan Murphy, Steven Canals, the people I've met growing up, and even me - all have inspired me to see that it is possible to get far anywhere and that the capacity for positive and motivating influence is truly unlimited.
We have so many different television programs and various things that teach us about the lives of people we will never meet otherwise.
I wanted a stable job, and I wanted to feel like I was grounded with my family and to have personal relationships in my life that were healing and honest and genuine.
I think of makeup as more like a design, decoration, or jewelry. I mean, it's literally paint; it's art. I don't prefer to use it as concealing anything because it influences the illusion of standardized perfection.
I think 'Pose' is unique in that it's not just a trans story - it's about family. It's about love. It's about friendship and acceptance and really deconstructing humanity, and the ethical side of that, with how we treat people who are different than us.
I would love to see all agencies connect to models more for who they are and can be as opposed to what they've done.
Everyone that's ever seen 'Pose' who isn't trans or doesn't have any connection to the LGBTQ community has been given the opportunity to create empathetic relationships to the characters that they would not have otherwise been able to. That's super essential in helping counter homophobia and transphobia.
It's just really frustrating how people are just so selfish in this industry. It makes me very angry.
I get to decide how my body shows up in any space. When I'm walking into a place like the Globes, I want to make it very clear that how I show up is to further the freedom of everybody.
I want to be a conduit for healing.
My love is not measured in reciprocity. That's not the way I learned love.
It's the Met Gala - everyone is huge. It feels very hierarchical, and I get really nervous in hierarchical spaces because I feel like everyone deserves to feel just as special as everyone else, but that's just not the way it is in this business.
I'm really proud of the way that 'Pose' has brought people's families together and touched people's hearts and opened people's minds. It's really incredible to see. It's a show about love and family, and it highlights what it really means to have a family and to be a family and to love your family.
Religion has played a big part in eliminating the nuance in humanity. People began to believe things before they knew them. It stopped people from listening and learning with the patience and love of the God they believe in.
I always believed that clothes should be designed to conform to our bodies and not our bodies to conform to the clothing.
We will fight ignorance and a lack of information with information.
Binaries definitely keep us from progressing. Imagine if we didn't have political parties and just had people who worked together to improve the life quality of everyone.
As a black woman of trans experience, my position in this society leaves me really no choice but to stand for the intersectional identities I hold.
Human beings are addicted to power in an interesting way, and this is what makes a lot of people feel powerful: belittling people that are commonly belittled. I think if we understood that this was going on, that this was the mechanism at work within us, we wouldn't be that way.
People were so cruel because of the way I existed.
I'm not particular about makeup, but when I do wear it, I am partial to Fenty. That is what I own. I own it because it is partial to the various colors and shades of black women. It is one of the best cosmetic companies around as far as trying to remove toxins from makeup, and Rihanna is empathetic to the experiences of trans women.
As a black person of non-gender-conforming experience, my first existentially reciprocal and affirming experiences were in the New York ballrooms.
I have often been many companies' first experience with a gender-variant model. I am proud of that because I think I have broadened their horizons in my own way.
Both 'Saturday Church' and 'Pose' are incredible because they demonstrate something essential about survival. When you get pushed hard enough by certain circumstances, your survival mechanism kicks in, and you grow into the things that you need or are missing in your life.
Emotional information is very, very rich in influence. You're giving somebody something to connect with, to see themselves in.
My love is political. My body is political. I talk even when I don't speak.
I don't always feel seen.
We're standing on the shoulders of so many people who have already broken down so many barriers.
A lot of people are afraid to use their platforms because they don't want to lose anything they have - and that's OK. We don't all have to be activists, but I choose to do it because, really, what's the worst that could happen?
Narcissism is a strong word, but it is narcissistic to expect everybody in a culture to reflect your own image back at you.
Tradition is nothing but ancestral peer pressure.
I wanted to go to LaGuardia High School for acting, but my math grades weren't high enough. So I didn't get to go to a school that was geared toward the art that I was interested in because I wasn't good enough at math.
Our government is not protecting us. They are exploiting us.
If you tell a narcissist that someone is less than them in any way, they feel gratified; they feel very good about that.
In this world, people are violent toward people that they feel are conceptualized as smaller than them. It's an impulse that we have.
As a person of color, I feel like I'm socialized to feel like a remnant of poverty or something primitive, and I don't feel like that at all. I can be myself and be me.
'Pose' feels like a family. I love them all. It's just really beautiful to see everyone else evolve and trying to figure themselves out the same as I am.
I'll use shea butter to moisturize my skin, or coconut oil.
'Pose' has basically been a trip for everyone. We're all in different phases of our individual evolutions, but we've embarked on the journey together.
We rarely see cisgender heterosexual men in positions where they're nurturers. We only paint femmes, trans women, and cis women as nurturers, and because of toxic masculinity, men are taught not to be that way.
Even before 'Pose,' I was involved in activism and advocating for my community in various ways. I didn't see that stopping with my entry into this industry, but people are going to be afraid of what you're going to say. I'm going to bump heads with people that benefit from the oppression that they put trans people through.
I think Hollywood is an incredible tool to teach people. It brings stories and information to the television screen, to the movie theater screens, that people get to empathize with.
Everything I do is political.
People who have trouble finding acceptance and love in their life settle for whatever they can get.
I want more people to hear me and be part of the change that everyone would benefit from: the change we need so that people like me can be safe and happy.
I don't like following the rules - the patriarchal rules.
Historically, our culture has not made room for the nuances of humanity. People have not been kept safe: women, people of colour, queer people, transgender people.
I think 'Pose' is really a groundbreaking television show because we're telling stories about family and love through people that society has always believed were incapable of having that or being a part of that.
Slowly but surely, little by little, many different groups of vulnerable bodies and people have been targeted from since the beginning of time, from since the beginning of the construction of America and all the civilizations from around the world pre-colonially.
