Quotes by Kate Bornstein - Page 1

Sex is f-king, everything else is gender.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Kings
Gender
Sex
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…gender is not sane. It's not sane to call a rainbow black and white.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Black And White
Gender
Rainbow
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What is a man? What is a woman? And why do we have to be one or the other?
Kate Bornstein / Author
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Your life's work begins when your great joy meets the world's great hunger.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Hunger
Joy
World
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I was obsessed, and like most obsessed people, I was the last one to know it.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Lasts
Obsession
People
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Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I'd learned to rise to it.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Queens
Drag
Gender
Practice
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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 / Author
Easy
Issues
Way
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There's no such thing as hurting someone for their own good. There's only hurting someone for your own good.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Hurt
Hurting Someone
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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 / Author
Cute
Smile
Life Story
Shame
Stories
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‘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 / Author
Girl
Answers
Boys
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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 / Author
Giving
Ideas
Play
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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 / Author
Class
Numbers
Race
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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 / Author
Cancer
Littles
Nice
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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 / Author
Easter
Book
Thinking
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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 / Author
Gangsters
Saving
World
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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 / Author
Opportunity
Choices
Two
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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 / Author
Climate
Ideas
Religious
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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.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Acceptance
Differences
Tolerance
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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 / Author
Class
Real
Use
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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 / Author
Gender
Play
Struggle
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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 / Author
Children
Fall
Heart
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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 / Author
Artist
School
Sex
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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 / Author
Expression
Thinking
What Matters
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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 / Author
Men
Blow
Simple
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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 / Author
Couple
Fun
Sex
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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 / Author
Girl
Boys
Thinking
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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 / Author
Men
Choices
Two
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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.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Children
Growing Up
Hero
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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 / Author
Fall
Fashion
Real
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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.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Kids
Lonely
Sick
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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.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Home
Holiday
Real
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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?
Kate Bornstein / Author
Believe
Mean
Sex
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I have this idea that every time we discover that the names we're being called are somehow keeping us less than free, we need to come up with new names for ourselves, and that the names we give ourselves must no longer reflect a fear of being labeled outsiders, must no longer bind us to a system that would rather see us dead.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Giving
Ideas
Names
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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 / Author
Men
Justice
People
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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).
Kate Bornstein / Author
Kings
Queens
Boys
Example
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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.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Sex
Wish
Would Be
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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.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Dad
Mom
Brother
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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.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Allies
Important
Law
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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.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Dad
Growing Up
Heaven
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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.
Kate Bornstein / Author
Ocean
Men
Two
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Kate Bornstein Quotes - Page 1

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