Quotes from Kate Bornstein

When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience - with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions - completely off the hook. - Scott Turner Schofield

There's no such thing as hurting someone for their own good. There's only hurting someone for your own good.

Given any binary, it's fun to look for some hidden third, and the reason why the third was hidden says a lot about culture. The choice between two of something is not a choice at all, but rather the opportunity to subscribe to the value system which holds the two presented choices as mutually exclusive alternatives. Once we choose one or the other, we've bought into the system that perpetuates the binary.

While railing against the manufactured prerequisites of womanhood or manhood, we need to avoid manufacturing our own prerequisites. The non-operative journey and the objection to it illustrate just one area in which we need to open our thinking to other journeys while expecting that others respect our own. - Mercedes Allen

We have looked for myths that include us in great novels, music, the latest comic book, or even some stupid advertising campaign. We'll look anywhere for a mythology that embraces people like ourselves.

Definitions have their uses in much the same way that road signs make it easy to travel: they point out the directions. But you don't get where you're going when you just stand underneath some sign, waiting for it to tell you what to do.

Try This: Imagine the world as a place where anyone can safely and even joyfully express themselves the way they've always wanted to. Nothing about the bodies they were born with or what they choose to do with those bodies – how they dress them, or decorate, or trim or augment them – would get people laughed at, or targeted, or in any way deprived of their rights. Can you imagine a world like that?

What is a man? What is a woman? And why do we have to be one or the other?