Quotes About Diversity

As we say in this part of the world," he said to the Discovery, "there's nowt so queer as folk.

How useful Mr. Carver's Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.)

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.

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 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!

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

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?

And then I found out that gender can have fluidity , which is quite different from ambiguity. If ambiguity is a refusal to fall within a prescribed gender code, then fluidity is the refusal to remain one gender or another. Gender fluidity is the ability to freely and knowingly become one or many of a limitless number of genders, for any length of time, at any rate of change. Gender fluidity recognizes no borders or rules of gender.

To attempt to divide us into rigid categories (You're a transvestite, and you're a drag queen, and you're a she-male, and on and on and on) is like trying to apply the laws of solids on the state of fluids; it's our our fluidity that keeps us in touch with each other. It's our fluidity and the principles that attend that constant state of flux that could create an innovative and inclusive transgender community.

How's this: Is it possible, do you think, to be queer when you haven't had sex in years? Or how about his one: Are words themselves a danger in the defining of community? Can we solve the problem of suffocating identity politics by allowing anyone at all to define the identities being politicized? Or would a better solution be the abandonment of politicized identities in favor of the politics of values?

It is bizarre to treat all differences as oppositions

Let nothing human be foreign to me

It's kind of a strange church and I thought Winn-Dixie would fit right in.

people who could read. All

It was Harif who'd taught him to see that Saracens, Jews and Christians were following but different paths to the one God.

No longer would the Post write such lines as one identified by Chal Roberts in his history of the paper: "Sam Jones, 24, Negro, was arrested for larceny yesterday." Overnight, he eliminated "freebies"—trips paid for by the government and free tickets for anything. Also, after just a few weeks on the job, he called in the police reporter, Al Lewis, to ask if he was having parking

It goes in streaks. But some things never go out of fashion.' Hunger artists, fat folks, giants, and dog acts come and go but real freaks never lose their appeal.

The more people we exclude, the more people will want to join. That's what exclusive means.

Everybody is somebobdy and I chanllenge anybody to deny it.