Quotes from Kate Bornstein

There are more and more visibly weird and freaky people in the world these days, and it's high time we stop carrying forward the junior high school dynamic of excluding them all from our lives or worse . . . nailing them to some cross.

Those times when I couldn't stand what I was, and I didn't know how I could possibly be something else.

In this struggle for our freedom of expression, there comes a point when this gender system reveals itself to be not only repressive but silly. When we begin to see how ridiculous it is, we can try begin to dismantle it.

The standards of beauty in America's über-culture are purposefully set too high so that we will buy anything in our frantic scramble to become attractive. We are meant to feel crushed, inadequate, and less-than so that we'll buy more and more things in the vain hope of fixing ourselves.

The Gender Defender is someone who actively, or by knowing inaction, defends the status quo of the existing gender system, and thus perpetuates the violence of male privilege and all its social extensions. The gender defender, or gender terrorist, is someone for whom gender forms a cornerstone of their view of the world. Shake gender up for one of these folks, and you're in trouble.

As an exercise, can you recall the last time you saw someone whose gender was ambiguous? Was this person attractive to you? And if you knew they called themselves neither a man nor a woman, what would it make you if you're attracted to that person? And if you were to kiss? Make love? What would you be?

Are you breaking some either/or cultural law, just by being who you are? If so, you're not alone.

It's healthier for your soul to live outside and above a degraded moral code than within and beneath one.

It doesn't really matter what a person decides to do, or how radically a person plays with gender. What matters, I think, is how aware a person is of the options.

Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I'd learned to rise to it.

I remember one Fourth of July evening in Philadelphia, about a year after my surgery. I was walking home arm in arm with Lisa, my lover at the time, after the fireworks display. We were leaning in to one another, walking like lovers walk. Coming towards us was a family of five: mom, dad, and three teenage boys. Look it's a coupla faggots, said one of the boys. Nah, it's two girls, said another. That's enough outa you, bellowed the father, one of 'em's got to be a man. This is America!

When God says no to your harmless desires, it's time to get another God.

Male privilege is assuming one has the right to occupy any space or person by whatever means, with or without permission. It's a sense of entitlement that's unique to those who have been raised male in most cultures - it's notably absent in most girls and women.

Male privilege is, in a word, violence.

One answer to the question Who is a transsexual? might well be Anyone who admits it. A more political answer might, Anyone whose performance of gender calls into question the construct of gender itself.

If we buy into categories of sexual orientation based solely on gender--heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual-- we're cheating ourselves of a searching examination of our real sexual preferences.

Moral codes are useful only when we have descended to needing them.

Personally, I think no question containing either/or deserves a serious answer, and that includes the question of gender.

No matter how your world falls apart—and honey, that's what happens: we all build ourselves a world, and then it falls apart—but no matter how that happens, you still have the kind heart you've had since you were a child, and that's what really counts. And I will always be here for you, my butzalah. I love you, Katherine.

Our spirits are full of possibilities, yet we tie ourselves down to socially-prescribed names and categories so we're acceptable to more people. We take on identities that no one has to think about, and that's probably how we become and why we remain men and women.

We are entitled to our anger in response to this oppression: our anger is a message to ourselves that we need to get active and change something in order to survive.

It doesn't really matter what a person decides to do, or how radically a person plays with gender. What matters, I think, is how aware a person is of the options. How sad for a person to be missing out on some expression of identity, just for now knowing there are options.

trivial. But consider a list of items that differentiate females from males. There are none that always and without exception are true of only one gender. —Kessler and McKenna, Gender: An

Isn't it amazing the lengths we'll go to in order to maintain the illusion that there are only two genders, and that these genders must remain separate?