Top 43 Kate Bornstein Quotes
#1. 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.
Kate Bornstein
#2. There are more and more visibly weird and freaky people in the world these days, and it's high time we stop carrying forward the junior high school dynamic of excluding them all from our lives or worse ... nailing them to some cross.
Kate Bornstein
#3. Your life's work begins when your great joy meets the world's great hunger.
Kate Bornstein
#4. You can have great autonomy in the things you choose to learn and pursue on your own time. When you're learning things that interest you, challenge you, and make life worth living, getting an education can be blissful and stimulating.
Kate Bornstein
#5. 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.
Kate Bornstein
#6. Let's stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.
Kate Bornstein
#7. 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.
Kate Bornstein
#8. Let's stop "tolerating" or "accepting" difference, as if we're so much better for not being different. Instead, let's celebrate difference, because in this world it takes a lot of guts to be different and to act differently.
Kate Bornstein
#9. 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.
Kate Bornstein
#10. 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.
Kate Bornstein
#11. ... gender is not sane. It's not sane to call a rainbow black and white.
Kate Bornstein
#12. 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.
Kate Bornstein
#13. We have looked for myths that include us in great novels, music, the latest comic book, or even some stupid advertising campaign. We'll look *anywhere* for a mythology that embraces people like ourselves.
Kate Bornstein
#14. Definitions have their uses in much the same way that road signs make it easy to travel: they point out the directions. But you don't get where you're going when you just stand underneath some sign, waiting for it to tell you what to do.
Kate Bornstein
#15. Those times when I couldn't stand what I was, and I didn't know how I could possibly be something else.
Kate Bornstein
#16. 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.
Kate Bornstein
#17. We can't ignore right-wing demagogues who insist that the word of the doctor who proclaims a child's sex at birth somehow holds more sway over the reality of the body than the word of the person who inhabits it. - Gwendolyn Ann Smith
Kate Bornstein
#18. There's no such thing as hurting someone for their own good. There's only hurting someone for your own good.
Kate Bornstein
#19. 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.
Kate Bornstein
#20. The differences in the way men and women are treated are real. And the fact is this difference in treatment has no basis in the differences between men and women. I was the same person, and I was treated entirely differently. I got real interested in feminist theory
real fast.
Kate Bornstein
#21. We just want to identify the "real" freaks, so we can feel closer to normal. In reality, not a single one of us is so magically normative as to claim the right to separate out the freaks from everyone else. We are all freaks to someone. Maybe even - if we're honest - to ourselves.
Kate Bornstein
#22. 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.
Kate Bornstein
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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.
Kate Bornstein
#26. What is a man? What is a woman? And why do we have to be one or the other?
Kate Bornstein
#27. I was obsessed, and like most obsessed people, I was the last one to know it.
Kate Bornstein
#28. 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.
Kate Bornstein
#29. 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
#31. My grandmother told me something I've never forgotten. 'Never fuck anyone you wouldn't want to be.' -audience member
Kate Bornstein
#32. I honor anybody who wants to be a man and do the work of becoming a man. I honor anyone who mindfully becomes a woman. That's cool. But, I really don't get how there's only two choices. There's no two of anything else in the entire universe; why should there only be two genders? I don't get it.
Kate Bornstein
#33. When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience - with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions - completely off the hook. - Scott Turner Schofield
Kate Bornstein
#34. Happy is a poor word for someone who's trying to live a rainbow-colored life in a black-and-white world.
Kate Bornstein
#35. 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
#36. 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.
Kate Bornstein
#37. 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
#38. Disney will never make a movie about my life story, and that's a shame
I'd make a really cute animated creature.
Kate Bornstein
#39. 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).
Kate Bornstein
#41. No matter how your world falls apart-and honey, that's what happens: we all build ourselves a world, and then it falls apart-but no matter how that happens, you still have the kind heart you've had since you were a child, and that's all that really counts.
Kate Bornstein
#43. Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I'd learned to rise to it.
Kate Bornstein
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