Kate Bornstein Quotes

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All quotes by Kate Bornstein: Culture Gender Identity Transgenders more...
  • I see fashion as a proclamation or manifestation of identity, so, as long as identities are important, fashion will continue to be important. The link between fashion and identity begins to get real interesting, however, in the case of people who don't fall clearly into a culturally-recognized identity.

    Kate Bornstein (2013). “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us”, p.13, Routledge
  • The real problem devolves around class lines once again: it's the street hormones that folks without insurance, or folks who are too young for prescriptions without parental okay, use. Sometimes those hormones can be pretty rough.

    "Interview with Kate". TV Series "P.O.V." ("Georgie Girl"), www.pbs.org. June 20, 2003.
  • When you're a Scientologist it's like the movie Goodfellas, where the gangsters hang out with only other gangsters. We only hung out with each other, so we knew we were saving the world.

    "'A Queer and Pleasant Danger': Kate Bornstein, Trans Scientology Survivor". Interview with Nicole Pasulka, www.motherjones.com. May 5, 2012.
  • I love the idea of being without an identity, it gives me a lot of room to play around; but it makes me dizzy, having nowhere to hang my hat.

    Kate Bornstein (2013). “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us”, p.49, Routledge
  • Gender is used as a control mechanism that's just wrong. Gender is never anything to struggle with; gender is something to play with. Once you're free of the rules that all these hierarchical, oppressive systems place on gender, that's the tricky part.

  • Both bisexuality and transgender are fluid notions of identity, while lesbian and gay are fixed identities. Some people believe that means there should be two movements: LG and BT. But then what're ya gonna do about SM players? And intersexed folks who want their own I in the alphabet soup of sex and gender related politics?

    "Interview with Kate". TV Series "P.O.V." ("Georgie Girl"), www.pbs.org. June 20, 2003.
  • Your life's work begins when your great joy meets the world's great hunger.

  • The current transgender movement is composed of a great number of factions, divided by those old favorites of class, race, age, language, region, and nationality.

    Source: www.pbs.org
  • I was obsessed, and like most obsessed people, I was the last one to know it.

    Kate Bornstein (2013). “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us”, p.69, Routledge
  • Sex is f-king, everything else is gender.

  • The first question we usually ask new parents is : “Is it a boy or a girl ?”. There is a great answer to that one going around : “We don’t know ; it hasn’t told us yet.” Personally, I think no question containing “either/or” deserves a serious answer, and that includes the question of gender.

    Kate Bornstein (2013). “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us”, p.56, Routledge
  • Let's stop 'tolerating' or 'accepting' difference, as if we're so much better for not being different in the first place. Instead, let's celebrate difference, because in this world it takes a lot of guts to be different.

  • To see cartoon-me positioned (alphabetically) amongst so many of my women heroes and role models ... well, I just broke down and cried. Happy tears. I surely hope that this one-of-a-kind collection of radical American women reaches the hands of all children who want to grow up and become amazing 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 not knowing there are options

    Kate Bornstein (2013). “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us”, p.61, Routledge
  • The transgender movement even divides itself up by gender, as many folks stick with their same trans-genders (female-to-male or male-to-female). Additionally, the movement gets strangely subdivided among, for example, male cross-dressers, sissy boys, butch women, femme dykes, drag kings, drag queens, transvestites, intersexed, transsexuals (post-op, pre-op, and non-op).

    "Interview with Kate". TV Series "P.O.V." ("Georgie Girl"), www.pbs.org. June 20, 2003.
  • Growing up we were secular Jews, but what I got out of Judaism at that time in my life was questions. Everything was a question. "Dad, is there a heaven? Is there a hell?" You never could get an answer. That informed a lot of my reasons for getting into Scientology, because they had all the answers. They said I was not my body, not my mind. I don't have a soul; I am an immortal soul. I've lived many lives and I'll live endlessly into the future, and as an immortal soul I have no gender.

    "'A Queer and Pleasant Danger': Kate Bornstein, Trans Scientology Survivor". Interview with Nicole Pasulka, www.motherjones.com. May 5, 2012.
  • Sex work may be an illegal thing, but it's far from being a bad thing. Quite a few of us on the male-to-female side of the coin have done sex work. I've done it myself for a couple of years. It's a place we can make a living and have some fun doing it. It's a place we seem to fit in.

    "Interview with Kate". TV Series "P.O.V." ("Georgie Girl"), www.pbs.org. June 20, 2003.
  • There's a simple way to look at gender: Once upon a time, someone drew a line in the sans of culture and proclaimed with great self-importance, 'On this site, you are a man; on the other side, you are a woman.' It's time for the winds of change to blow that line away. Simple.

  • It's easy to fictionalize an issue when you're not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.

    Kate Bornstein, S. Bear Bergman (2010). “Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation”, p.86, Seal Press
  • I know and know of more than a few MTF's (male-to-female trannies) who've developed strange cancers. Myself, I've got a nice little case of Chronic Lymphocitic Leukemia (CLL).

    Source: www.pbs.org
  • The whole transgender movement idea is happening in waves around the world. Some areas of the world are further along politically than others. The economy has a lot to do with that, as does moral or religious climate.

    Source: www.pbs.org
  • I know I'm not a man-about that much I'm very clear, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably not a woman either, at least not according to a lot of people's rules on this sort of thing. The trouble is, we're living in a world that insists we be one or the other-a world that doesn't bother to tell us exactly what one or the other is.

    Kate Bornstein (2013). “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us”, p.18, Routledge
  • Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I'd learned to rise to it.

    Kate Bornstein (2012). “A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology, and leaves twelve years later to become the lovely lady she is today”, p.199, Beacon Press
  • Just across the ocean in, say Kenya or Tanzania, a two-gender system is vital for the survival of most of the folks who live there. Men do men's work, women do women's work, and so it all gets done and the jackals can't get into the hut and eat grandpa. So, the future of the transgender movement is like the future of all human rights movements: whatever the state of things in your area now, with some work it all gets a little bit better all the time, even if it is sometimes three steps ahead and two steps back.

    "Interview with Kate". TV Series "P.O.V." ("Georgie Girl"), www.pbs.org. June 20, 2003.
  • What is a man? What is a woman? And why do we have to be one or the other?

    "Gender Outlaws". Interview with Nancy Reynolds Nangeroni, Mariette Pathy Allen, www.gendertalk.com.
  • This Western culture of ours tends to sacrifice the full range of experience to a lower common denominator that's acceptable to more people; we end up with McDonald's instead of real food, Holiday Inns instead of homes, and USA Today instead of news and cultural analysis. And we do that with the rest of our lives.

  • The choice between two of something is not a choice at all, but rather the opportunity to subscribe to the value system which holds the two presented choices as mutually exclusive alternatives.

    Kate Bornstein (2013). “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us”, p.111, Routledge
  • You can support trans-positive legislation, tranny artists, and the inclusion of trannies in your neighborhood, schools, place of worship, whatever. For the long term? Join or initiate some good legal battles against the puritanical laws that exist around sex and gender.

    Source: www.pbs.org
  • Look, nearly everything in the culture says we're freaks. Doing sex work, we're desired; we can get rewarded for being what we've always wanted to be. What's so bad about that? My own notion is I wish sex work would be decriminalized (not legalized, please note the distinction) so that more trannies could get into the field if they wanted to and not get into trouble for it.

    "Interview with Kate". TV Series "P.O.V." ("Georgie Girl"), www.pbs.org. June 20, 2003.
  • There are Easter eggs in every book I've ever written. I think in the first one I called Scientology "Diabology," but I was scared, so I didn't tell many people what it really meant.

    "'A Queer and Pleasant Danger': Kate Bornstein, Trans Scientology Survivor". Interview with Nicole Pasulka, www.motherjones.com. May 5, 2012.
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 40 quotes from the Author Kate Bornstein, starting from March 15, 1948! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Kate Bornstein quotes about: Culture Gender Identity Transgenders