Quotes About Gender

Women, he sneered, what are they good for? Laundry and fucking. Ramsay wondered if Gerrit had actually met Nellie. His mother seemed good for neither of those activities, but then Nellie wasn't really a woman, she was an element, like iron.

he wanted a son so he could teach him all the things he knew, as well as how to learn all the things he didn´t know. he couldn´t teach his daughter anything, she knew more than he did already.

Amelia thought the word "boyfriend" sounded ridiculous when it was applied to a forty-five-year-old woman. When it was applied to herself.

It was a woman's job to try and improve a man. It was a man's job to resist improvement. That was the way the world worked, always had, always would.

Powerful men needed their women to be unchallenging, the home should not be an arena for intellectual debate.

You can't have it both ways," one of her girlfriends said. "Tough and tender, men are like steaks, it's one or the other." Tough and tender, a contradiction in terms, Hegelian synthesis.

What had happened to women? Jackson wondered. They made him feel almost prudish. (Obviously not prudish enough to have resisted the dubious charms of one of them.) More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.

Men fell down. Women stood up.

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 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?

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.