Kate Bornstein Quotes

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.

…gender is not sane. It's not sane to call a rainbow black and white.

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.

My own take on the word "transgender" is that it's an umbrella term for anyone who breaks any rules, laws, guidelines or protocol of gender. So, to really be an ally, it's important that you recognize and embrace your own transgender nature. Really, I haven't met a single person who doesn't break some rule of gender. In other words, we will assimilate you. Resistance is futile.

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.

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.

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.

Your life's work begins when your great joy meets the world's great hunger.

There's no such thing as hurting someone for their own good. There's only hurting someone for your own good.

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.

What is a man? What is a woman? And why do we have to be one or the other?

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.

‘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’.

We grew up creating this whole world view for ourselves because it's not there in the culture. What am I? And I have to build this world view in the absence of books, radio and television, anything, even conversation, Mom or Dad or brother or sister or friends. I have to build a world view of who I am or I go stark, raving mad. Every transsexual in the past has had to do this.

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.

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.

Sex is f-king, everything else is gender.

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

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 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.

Disney will never make a movie about my life story, and that's a shame--I'd make a really cute animated creature.

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.

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.

I was a lonely, frightened little fat kid who felt there was something deeply wrong with me because I didn't feel like I was the gender I'd been assigned. I felt there was something wrong with me, something sick and twisted inside me, something very very bad about me. And everything I read backed that up.