Quotes About Gender

See that's the thing about men and sex. Thinking doesn't usually enter into it - Luther That explains so much - Grace

We are all transsexuals, just as we are biological mutants in potentia. This is not a biological issue, however: we are all transsexuals symbolically.

Men escape from female sexual demands into androgyny or transvestism - women hide from male demands in modesty or sorcery.

With Parity, International Women's Day and, more recently, the Chiennes de Garde, and, more generally, with every claim to victimal difference, women are making themselves a collective laughing stock, alongside gays, with their demand for a bourgeois, legal, marital status.

But why should they blame her? They should blame the men who won't let her alone

The men compete in what they do; the women in what they make,' she said, then smiled, 'including babies, though that is a very subtle competition, and nearly everyone thinks she is the winner.

I'm no use to anybody,' I say. 'I'm a cérébrale, can't you see that?' Thinking how funny a book would be, called 'Just a Cérébrale or You Can't Stop Me From Dreaming'. Only, of course, to be accepted as authentic, to carry any conviction, it would have to be written by a man. What a pity, what a pity!

As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.

What sex are you?" Doesn't matter does it? After all that's your problem." If I keep you, what will happen?" You'll have a difficult, different time." Is it worth it?" That's up to you.

Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.

Everyone assumed it had to be some sort of biography, because if you are a woman and use yourself as a character, it has to be some sort of confessional, whereas if you're a man, you're actually doing some post-modern play on the novel, some critique on identity with lots of references to Foucault.

Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.' 'And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead.

Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?

He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work. It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife.

Women are just planets that attract the wrong species.

I'm a woman. And I'm a man. That's how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn't do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.

When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father.

Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said -- and I will never forget it -- When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.

She had been a career woman all her life. She noted there was no such thing as a career man. She had made her choices. No regrets. But there were losses. There always were.

A woman who slaves for a man does not have a marriage; she has a master.

Now if I was aping men, she'd have every right to be disgusted. As far as I was concerned, men were something you had around the place...not particularly interesting, but quite harmless.

I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be.

These two images put together explain why men find women so threatening . The world comes out of your body and...' (he was waving the Mona Lisa at me) 'we have no idea what's in your head. Do you know how frightening that is?

I reassured myself as best I could. The minister was a man, but he wore a skirt, so that made him special. There must be others, but were there enough? That was the worry. There were a lot of women, and most of them got married. If they couldn't marry each other, and I didn't think they could, because of having babies, some of them would inevitably have to marry beasts.