", 2018 talk by Ashlee Marie Preston at TEDxPasadena"

“Growing up I felt underrepresented in mainstream media. I knew that someday I was going to change that by holding space for those that felt as I did. As women, those of color, and LGBTQ people, we’re often silenced while others speak as experts on our experiences. No one can tell our stories better than we can.”

“We don’t need an invitation to access our greatness.”

“What tends to happen in the LGBTQ community is that everything pertaining to the G part supersedes everything else. I decided to have a cake made with 77 photos of trans women under 35 who have lost their lives to transphobic hate because wedding cakes get more attention than black trans women in our community.”

“There’s already an attitude among perpetrators that you can’t rape or harass the willing. Society views trans women as sexual deviants, and many believe that we "ask for it" or "bring it on ourselves". As trans women we’re expected to function as sexual objects and an aide in satisfying the cis-hetero male libido. We’re demonized and criminalized as perverts out to trick and deceive cis hetero men; therefore anything that happens to us, we ‘had coming.”

“There’s a quote by Zora Neale Hurston: "All kinfolk ain’t kinfolk," meaning just because people are African-American does not mean they are working toward the betterment of the African-American community. And so my own version of that is: Everybody LGBTQ ain’t always for you.”

“I often made up these stories in my mind about people I idolized or wanted to be like. I always write happy endings for them and convinced myself that life would be so much easier if I could walk in their shoes. But I never realized that in those shoes their feet were scraped and bruised like mine.”