Quotes About Gender

Today, girls are pressured to dress and behave in an overtly sexual way, despite the conventional understanding that a "slut" is a woman who does just that. In this milieu, calling oneself a "slut" doesn't allow you to wrest the term away from those who would use it to judge and control women. Rather, it just confirms negative stereotypes of what it means to be female. You're merely adding ammunition to the arsenal.

Calling a female a slut even in a seemingly benign context ultimately results in a policing not only of the specific female involved but of all females everywhere.

While women once acquired relationship skills to "hook," "snare," or "catch" a husband who would provide access to economic security and social status, the position of contemporary women has not changed that radically. Much of our success still depends on our attunement to "male culture," our ability to please men, and our readiness to conform to the masculine values of our institutions.

Men are often (though not always) the pursuers for sex, just like women are often (though not always) the pursuers for conversation.

You know, Quincy Jones was a great mentor, but he was a man in a man's world. Fortunately he's a very sensitive man and a beautiful human being, and even though he was 14 or 15 years older than me, he's a capable human being and has great communication skills.

Guys do not have a genetic blueprint that allows them to understand or love sports.

Under the English common law doctrine known as jure uxoris, upon her marriage a woman's property and titles held in her own right became her husband's as well. Therefore, it was not a stretch of the imagination to fear that any man Mary married would become king of England in fact as well as in name.

That's when I began passing as a man. Strange to be exiled from your own sex to borders that will never be home.

When I was really small I thought I'd do anything to change whatever was wrong with me. Now I didn't want to change, I just wanted people to stop being mad at me all the time.

The shades of gender in her voice were intricate, like mine.

All the girls and women looked pretty much the same, so did all the boys and men. I couldn't find myself among the girls. I had never seen any adult woman who looked like I thought I would when I grew up. There were no women on television like the small woman reflected in this mirror, none on the streets. I knew. I was always searching.

From that moment on I was her butch and she was my femme.

I stared far back into my past and remembered the child who couldn't be catalogued by Sears. I saw her standing in front of her own mirror, in her father's suit, asking me if I was the person she would grow up to become. Yes, I answered her. And I thought how brave she was to have begun this journey, to have withstood the towering judgments.

But no one can deny that rigid gender education begins early on in life—from pink and blue color-coding of infant outfits to genderlabeling toys and games. And those who overstep these arbitrary borders are punished. Severely. When the steel handcuffs tighten, it is human bones that crack.

You were showing him your muscle?" I froze, wondering how much she had seen. She smiled. "Sometimes it's better to let boys think they're stronger," she told me.

Too many of us as trans people have experienced something similar to the 'Miss or Mrs.' query - except it feels much more demeaning. It's the address I call 'Mamsir.' You know what I mean: 'Here's your change, ma'am, I mean sir, I mean ma'am, I mean sir.' It's debasing and embarrasses both people and anyone else who is listening. I despise the class subordination that resides in those once-mandatory forms of address, as well.

Are you a guy or a girl? I've heard the question all my life. The answer is not so simple, since there are no pronouns in the English language as complex as I am, and I do not want to simplify myself in order to neatly fit one or the other.

Strange to be exiled from your own sex to borders that will never be home

The existence of overt homosexuality threatens to compromise an essential aspect of American sentimental life: the camaraderie of the locker room and ball park, the good fellowship of the poker game and fishing trip, a kind of passionless passion, at once gross and delicate, homoerotic in the boy's sense, possessing an innocence above suspicion.

Recognition of the harm that patriarchy has caused to people and the planet does not mean that men are wrong and women are right; rather it is a call for new organizational forms and for relishing gender differences within a context of equality.

A man above thirty cannot enter into the wild visions of an enthusiastic girl.

I am a woman : — tell me not of fame !

Women are beautiful when they're young, and not after. Men can still preserve their sex appeal well into old age.... Some men can maintain, if they embrace it ... cragginess, weary masculinity. Women just get old and fat and wrinkly.

Blue screen of death: she'd crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.