Quotes About Gender

The word Hijra, she said, meant a Body in which a Holy Soul lives.

Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed. Was it to protect the grave from the women or the women from the grave?

Reverend Ipe realized that his daughter had by now developed a "reputation" and was unlikely to find a husband. He decided that since she couldn't have a husband there was no harm in her having an education.

D'you know why God made Hijras? It was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.

Rahel grew up without a brief. Without anybody to arrange a marriage for her. Without anybody who would pay her a dowry and therefore without an obligatory husband looming on her horizon.

Her tolerance of "Men's Needs," as far as her son was concerned, became the fuel for her unmanageable fury at her daughter.

He addressed Anjum without looking at her: "Do you have police permission to be here? Everybody must have permission to be here." She towered over him. His refusal to meet her eye meant he was squarely addressing her breasts.

and it's no accident that seven times as many women as men have had the operation.

When Glenda Jackson reveals that she has never been in a relationship with a man in which he hasn't raised his fists to her, I don't know whether this tells us more about the contemporary male or about Glenda Jackson.

Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly inferior capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.

I wasn't cute or passive enough to be femme, and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be butch. I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.

our sons must become men – such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully ours have what they have learned from us, and a howness to forge into their own image.

I have always wanted to be both man and woman...to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and be entered--to leave and to be left--to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving.

No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.

rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression.

For women raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation. In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives depended upon the good will of patriarchal power. The anger of others was to be avoided at all costs because there was nothing to be learned from it but pain, a judgment that we had been bad girls, come up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And if we accept our powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us.

It has been said that Black men cannot be denied their personal choice of the woman who meets their need to dominate. In that case, Black women also cannot be denied our personal choices, and those choices are becoming increasingly self-assertive and female oriented.

Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.

This jugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion or affirmation of self is an attack upon my self—or that my defining myself will somehow prevent or retard your self-definition. The supposition that one sex needs the other's acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons towards a common goal.

Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men

Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, trapped in dependency and fear.

The supposition that one sex needs the other's acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons toward a common goal.

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns.

Men avoid women's observations by accusing us of being too visceral.