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

Categorized in : Thinking Boys Girl

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

tolerance differences acceptance

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

Kate Bornstein

gender rainbow black-and-white

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

allies important law

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

choices opportunity two

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

Kate Bornstein

hurting-someone hurt

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

Kate Bornstein

hunger joy world

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

gender struggle play

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

heart children fall

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

issues easy way

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

fashion real fall

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

simple blow men

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

dad mom brother

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

justice men people

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

Kate Bornstein

men

‘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

girl answers boys

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

growing-up hero children

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

play giving ideas

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

queens kings boys

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

race class numbers

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

real use class