Gender Queer Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Gender Queer. Here they are! All 100 of them:

If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend.
Charlotte Brontë (Shirley)
Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow. Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home.
Maia Kobabe (Gender Queer)
If I was gay, I wouldn't need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a coming-out party without people thinking I just want attention. I wouldn't have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts. People wouldn't say I'm 'just a slut' or 'faking it' or 'undecided' or 'confused.' I'm not confused. I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love. Love doesn't fit into boxes like that. It's blurry, slippery, quantum. It's only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible.
Leah Raeder (Black Iris)
Sometimes I feel like my brain is a machine built by someone who lost the instruction manual.
Maia Kobabe (Gender Queer)
That's one of the things that "queer" can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Tendencies)
Conformity requires us to minimize our differences for the greater good. We fear that if we don't conform, we will be abandoned, but there is no loneliness like having people only see you after you've erased yourself.
Alok Vaid-Menon (Beyond the Gender Binary)
I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to fear. I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to fear the word girl by turning it into a weapon they used to hurt me. I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to hate and eventually destroy my femininity. I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to fear the extraordinary parts of myself
Vivek Shraya (I'm Afraid of Men)
Bye bye binary. For gender, for sexuality, for everything. ... Lots of people can like lots of people. And could everyone please get over it and update their idea of normal.
Cath Crowley (Take Three Girls)
Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his extraordinary gift.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
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 (Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us)
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 (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)
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 (Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation)
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 (Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation)
Everyone around me - but especially girls - seemed to have access to information I lacked.
Maia Kobabe (Gender Queer)
We come to a corner where there are a few people protesting the festivities. I don't understand this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired. In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love with a gender. I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don't understand why it's so hard, when it's so obvious.
David Levithan (Every Day (Every Day, #1))
To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother. - Dedication, Todo Sobre Mi Madre
Pedro Almodóvar
Part of being trans, of being queer—not all of it, not for all people, but part—is in the re-imagining of what it is to be human. These are categories forged from the failure or refusal to acquiesce to majority rule.
C.N. Lester (Trans Like Me)
I remember when I first realized I never had to have children. It was like walking out of a narrow alley into a wide open field. I never have to get married. I never have to date anyone. I don’t even have to care about sex. These realizations were like gifts that I gave myself.
Maia Kobabe (Gender Queer)
I invented and named a lost male twin who had always felt like he should be a girl. If I could just find him we would finally both feel like whole complete people.
Maia Kobabe (Gender Queer)
That's one of the things that "queer" can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us who may at times be moved to describe ourselves as (among many other possibilities) pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedos, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or ... people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such.
Eve Sedgwick
I hurried out to the pond to catch polywogs in a jar. I leaned on my elbow and looked up close at the little frogs that climbed up on the sun-baked rocks. "Caw, caw!" A huge black crow circled above me in the air and landed on a rock nearby. We looked at each other in silence. "Crow, are you a boy or a girl?" "Caw, caw!" I laughed and rolled over on my back. The sky was crayon blue. I pretended I was lying on the white cotton clouds. The earth was damp against my back. The sun was hot, the breeze was cool. I felt happy. Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.
Leslie Feinberg (Stone Butch Blues)
What happens when we say something out loud? Does it become more real? Is it any less really when we keep it to ourselves?
Aimee Herman (Everything Grows)
Bisexuality has the potential to subvert the structure of the gender binary, since bisexuality is perceived as a type of desire that doesn't distinguish between people based on their genders.
Shiri Eisner (Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution)
The greatest barrier preventing us from fully challenging sexism is the pervasive antifeminine sentiment that runs wild in both the straight and queer communities, targeting people of all genders and sexualities. The only realistic way to address this issue is to work toward empowering femininity itself. We must rightly recognize that feminine expression is strong, daring, and brave - that it is powerful - and not in an enchanting, enticing, or supernatural sort of way, but in a tangible, practical way that facilitates openness, creativity, and honest expression. We must move beyond seeing femininity as helpless and dependent, or merely as masculinity's sidekick, and instead acknowledge that feminine expression exists of its own accord and brings its own rewards to those who naturally gravitate toward it. By embracing femininity, feminism will finally be able to reach out to the vast majority of feminine women who have felt alienated by the movement in the past.
Julia Serano (Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity)
[O]nce we give up on the idea that only heterosexuality is normal and that all human bodies are clearly either male or female, more and more kinds of bodies and desires will come into view. Perhaps also, one body may, in one lifetime, move through many identities and desires. The use of,queer’ then, is a deliberate political move, which underscores the fluidity (potential and actual) of sexual identity and sexual desire. The term suggests that all kinds of sexual desire and identifications are possible, and all these have socio-cultural and historical co-ordinates.
Nivedita Menon (Seeing Like a Feminist)
This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.
Sheila Jeffreys (Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective)
This is what happens when fear becomes stronger than need: The body becomes its own closet.
Alok Vaid-Menon (Beyond the Gender Binary)
And while it is okay to acknowledge that all kinds of women, whether white, Black, Indigenous, Latina, Asian, cis, gender nonconforming, trans, queer, bi, or straight might have different experiences, it's not cool to act as though transwomen are in some entirely separate category from the more general category of woman. That is something that feminism needs to be clear on - that it isn't feminism if all women's concerns, particularly the most marginalized women's concerns, aren't taken seriously.
Brittney Cooper (Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower)
The clearest metaphor I had for my own gender identity in college was the image of a scale. A huge weight had been placed on one side, without my permission. I was constantly trying to weigh down the other side. But the end goal wasn't masculinity - the goal was b a l a n c e.
Maia Kobabe (Gender Queer)
The intentional act of loving other brown queers is about healing, in a world that says we are not worthy, that things like pleasure and care and security and unconditional love are not for us.
Mia McKenzie (Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender)
As I pondered a pronoun change, I began to think of gender less as a scale and more as a landscape. Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow. Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home.
Maia Kobabe (Gender Queer)
To me, “queerness” is an alienation from a heteronormative code that governs bodies, genders, and their processes — sexuality, birth, death, and inheritance — in order to preserve social, economic, and political power for those who have it [and] to continue it into future generations.
Kazim Ali (Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire)
The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not.
Monique Wittig (The Straight Mind: And Other Essays)
If I'm more of a toy to be wound up than a man, can I write beautiful things?
Billy-Ray Belcourt (A History of My Brief Body)
[Why don't you identify as a trans man instead of nonbinary?] Because really, I want people to be confused about my gender at all times. I don't want a beard, and I don't want my voice to change. I don't want MORE gendered traits, I want LESS.
Maia Kobabe (Gender Queer)
If your organization is not formally committed to a policy of nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression or gender presentation in its employment practices, you should not expect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-nonconforming, queer, and/or questioning patients and families to feel safe seeking out your services.
Kimberly D. Acquaviva (LGBTQ-Inclusive Hospice and Palliative Care: A Practical Guide to Transforming Professional Practice)
If I could wave a magic wand and eliminate one term from the lexicon of racism discussion, it would be “reverse-racism”. It’s the go-to of every clueless person who can’t be bothered to take any time to understand anything about history or context. Every time I hear it, my faith in humanity diminishes. Use of that term is the easiest way to tell that someone has no idea what racism actually is. These are the same people who will, in response to a POC’s complex and nuanced understanding of racism, quote the dictionary definition to us. They can’t fathom that we know more about our own experiences than the dictionary. ‘Reverse-racism’ is not a thing. Tell your friends.
Mia McKenzie (Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender)
It is not enough to acknowledge your privilege. Acknowledging it will never make it better, will never, ever change anything. At some point, you must act against it. This is that point.
Mia McKenzie (Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender)
What I saw at Yale I have continued to see at campuses around the country. Everybody looks extremely normal, and everybody looks the same. No hippies, no punks, no art school types or hipsters, no butch lesbians or gender queers, no black kids in dashikis.
William Deresiewicz (Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life)
Letting down your guard can be really difficult, especially when you are black or brown and have been taught that letting down your guard is a sure way to not survive in a world that wants to kill you.
Mia McKenzie (Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender)
And in most queer communities, regardless of one's sex or identity, people who are more masculine in gender expression are almost always viewed as more valid and attractive than their feminine counterparts.
Julia Serano (Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive)
I’m almost 36, and I have learned that I don’t really need to “appreciate everyone’s point of view.” I mean, you can have politics that are opposed to mine. Fine. But if you do, we are not going to be friends.
Mia McKenzie (Black Girl Dangerous On Race, Queerness, Class and Gender)
But it does seem like I’m always the one who has to speak up and tell everyone how I’m different. I have to find a way to help them understand me, even though I don’t really understand them either. Having a gender? Why? Feeling like your body and who you are inside line up all the time? How? Identifying with other folks of your assigned gender as a kid, when I identified with things like extra-fluffy cumulus clouds and nebulas? What does that even feel like? I get nervous trying to explain myself sometimes. I get tired. I grow sharp edges where I didn’t think I had any. And I definitely get to the point where I just want to bury myself in baking and not deal with any of it.
A.R. Capetta (The Heartbreak Bakery)
The point is to make room for POC to prioritize their own well-being over the “education” of white people, which I don’t think we allow ourselves enough. White supremacy demands that we centralize whiteness at all times, even when we are supposed to be taking care of ourselves. I reject the idea that white people’s education about my experiences of racism is more important than my psychological well-being and my right to say no to that kind of engagement.
Mia McKenzie (Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender)
A text by a minority writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point of view universal. ('The Universal and the Particular')" ... In claiming the lesbian point of view as universal, she overturns the concepts to which we are accustomed. For up to this point, minority writers had to add "the universal" to their points of view if they wished to attain the unquestioned universality of the dominant class. Gay men, for example, have always defined themselves as a minority and never questioned, despite their transgression, the dominant choice. This is why gay culture has always had a fairly wide audience. [From the Foreword "Changing the Point of View" by Louise Turcotte]
Monique Wittig (The Straight Mind: And Other Essays)
The bonding of women that is woman-loving, or Gyn/affection, is very different from male bonding. Male bonding has been the glue of male dominance. It has been based upon recognition of the difference men see between themselves and women, and is a form of the behaviour, masculinity, that creates and maintains male power… Male comradeship/bonding depends upon energy drained from women.
Sheila Jeffreys (Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective)
I’m wondering how, for all these years, the church has gotten away with so many oppressive acts toward women, Indigenous peoples, Black people, other people of color, disabled people, immigrants, those who journey with depression or anxiety, those who grieve, and those who are gender nonbinary, transgender, or queer. Can we go to church and be angry? Can we go to church and be furious? Can we go to church and ask questions? Can we go to church and fight against what we believe is wrong within it? Absolutely. Those of us who are angry cannot wait for the church to give us permission, because white supremacy will never give the oppressed permission to be angry.
Kaitlin B. Curtice (Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God)
In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, ‘she’ is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of ‘woman’. The ancient, dimorphic form ‘he’, once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of ‘she’, during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to.
Samuel R. Delany (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand)
Doctors know nothing. Well. That's kind of unfair. Let's just say the world is unpredictable. Science is unreliable. It can't tell you who you are or what you'll want or how you'll feel. All these researchers are going crazy in their labs, trying to fit us into these little boxes so they can justify their jobs, or their government funding, or their life's work. They can theorize and they can give you a mean, median and mode but it's all standardized guesswork, made official by arrogance. You have to be pretty into yourself to think you can play a part in defining the identity of a bunch of people you don't know, of human beings with complicated shit going on in their bodies. They still don't know what certain parts of our brains do, they still don't know how to cure a common cold, and they say they know about sexuality, about gender. Well, you're not a man because you like football and you're not a woman because you're attracted to men and you're not a chick because you like to be the one who gives and you're not a dude because you like to receive or because sometimes you cry at dumb movies.
Abigail Tarttelin (Golden Boy)
White people, you need to get this: you are racist. You uphold white supremacy in big and small ways every day, whether you mean to or not. The first step is admitting that you are part of the problem. If you want to understand how and why, read a book. Read a hundred books. Take a workshop. Read as many books and take as many workshops as you need to be able to stop pretending it’s other white people and not you. Trust me. It’s
Mia McKenzie (Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender)
A note to my parents: Though I have struggled with being your daughter, I am so, so glad that I am your child.
Maia Kobabe (Gender Queer)
Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I'd learned to rise to it.
Kate Bornstein (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)
It’s a lot easier to see what’s irrational in another culture than it is to see it in our own.
Cheryl Chase (GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary)
Our God is gender-full.
Suzanne DeWitt Hall (Transfigured: A 40-day journey through scripture for gender-queer and transgender people (The Where True Love Is Devotionals))
I feel like my body is in a waiting room.
Aimee Herman (Everything Grows)
People who are profiled by cops as sex workers include, in disproportionate numbers, trans women, women of color, and queer and gender nonconforming youth. This isn't about policing sex. It's about profiling and policing people whose sexuality and gender are considered suspect.
Melissa Gira Grant (Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Jacobin))
One of the first significant, substantial purchases I made after starting testosterone, was a Compact Colt .45 1991 A1 automatic pistol. It's just about the best penis substitute I've ever waved at a sex partner. I love my gun. Can I get an a-a-ay-men? You better fucking believe I lo-o-ove my gun. I love to take it apart and put it back together and admire...oh,you sexy little death-machine...I suppose I oughta feel guilty or something, loving and fetishizing to the point of anthropomorphizing it it. But I don't. I won't either-don't matter to me whether or not I'm supposed to keep this a dirty little secret. I got a dick and I can kill you with it. Yeah, baby, trip my trigger, why dontcha. Heh.
Allen James (GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary)
Sexism occurs when we assume that some people are less valid or natural than others because of their sex, gender, or sexuality; it occurs when we project our own expectations and assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality onto other people, and police their behaviors accordingly; it occurs when we reduce another person to their sex, gender, or sexuality rather than seeing them as a whole, legitimate person. That is sexism. And a person is a legitimate feminist when they have made a commitment to challenging sexist double standards wherever and whenever they arise. An individual's personal style, mannerisms, identity, consensual sexual partners, and live choices simply shouldn't factor into it.
Julia Serano (Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive)
This country sees race and sexuality as mutually exclusive. You are black or you are gay. You are brown or you are a lesbian.  White people are the only people allowed to be complex enough to be queer. Because white is the default, the normal, the expected, white people can be anything, and more than one thing simultaneously.
Mia McKenzie (Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender)
Hey, I wonder what the public would say if they knew two queer scientists were the ones trying to explain human sexuality to the much-romanticized atargati. There’s something else they’ll probably leave out of the book.
S.L. Huang (The Little Homo Sapiens Scientist)
Passing means that bisexuals are completely dependent upon their partners for successful bisexual passing....passing can never be done individually, as it necessitates being seen with other peoples (as "passing accessories").
Shiri Eisner (Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution)
There was a muchacha who lived near my house. La gente del pueblo talked about her being una de las otras, “of the Others.” They said that for six months she was a woman who had a vagina that bled once a month, and that for the other six months she was a man, had a penis and she peed standing up. they called her half and half, mita’ y mita‘, neither one nor the other but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted. But there is a magic aspect in abnormality and so-called deformity. Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to posess supernatural powers by primal cultures’ magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift. There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the heiros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
For folks who have that casual-dude energy coursing through their bloodstream, that's great. But gays should not grow up alienated just for us to alienate each other. It's too predictable, like any other cycle of abuse. Plus, the conformist, competitive notion that by "toning down" we are "growing up" ultimately blunts the radical edge of what it is to be queer; it truncates our colorful journey of identity. Said another way, it's like living in West Hollywood and working a gay job by day and working it in the gay nightlife, wearing delicate shiny shirts picked from up the gay dry cleaners, yet coquettishly left unbuttoned to reveal the pec implants purchased from a gay surgeon and shown off by prancing around the gay-owned-and-operated theater hopped up on gay health clinic steroids and wheat grass purchased from the friendly gay boy who's new to the city, and impressed by the monstrous SUV purchased from a gay car dealership with its rainbow-striped bumper sticker that says "Celebrate Diversity." Then logging on to the local Gay.com listings and describing yourself as "straight-acting." Let me make myself clear. This is not a campaign for everyone to be like me. That'd be a total yawn. Instead, this narrative is about praise for the prancy boys. Granted, there's undecided gender-fucks, dagger dykes, faux-mos, po-mos, FTMs, fisting-top daddies, and lezzie looners who also need props for broadening the sexual spectrum, but they're telling their own stories. The Cliff's Notes of me and mine are this: the only moments I feel alive are when I'm just being myself - not some stiff-necked temp masquerading as normal in the workplace, not some insecure gay boy aspiring to be an overpumped circuit queen, not some comic book version of swank WeHo living. If that's considered a political act in the homogenized world of twenty-first century homosexuals, then so be it. — excerpt of "Praise For The Prancy Boys," by Clint Catalyst appears in first edition (ISBN # 1-932360-56-5)
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation)
The Anti-Stereotype Sonnet Black is not evil. White is not trash. Brown is not illegal. Muslims don’t crash. Women ain't weak. Jews ain't greedy. Men ain't playboys. Queer ain't sickly. Hijab is not oppression. Hourglass ain't beauty. Faith is not delusion. Atheists don't lack morality. Assumptions only reveal shallowness. Beyond stereotypes lies humaneness.
Abhijit Naskar (I Vicdansaadet Speaking: No Rest Till The World is Lifted)
If I am in a state of becoming, it has no endpoint. I imagine replacing the memories of everyone I've ever spoken to with the impression that they have only ever seen me as a being clothed in light. In the early part of the twentieth century, homophobes and eugenicists joined forces to study what they called inversion, an early term for homosexuality, gender nonconformity, and transness. They believed they could read and police queerness on the body. Maybe this is why I don't want to make myself legible. I want to erase the meanings that have been ascribed to my breath, to my sweat, to my hair and fat and skin. I trace the green veins in my neck that branch down into my breasts as feathers. I am painting myself as the bird that, to the world outside this room, does not exist. I draw myself clothed in wings and tell myself that even the angels are sexless.
Zeyn Joukhadar (The Thirty Names of Night)
I’ve said it before: it’s hard being a black woman in the world. It’s hard being any kind of black person. Any kind of woman. Add queerness to the mix, and life becomes an amazing kind of struggle, one filled with enormous losses and small triumphs.
Mia McKenzie (Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender)
The most prevailing concern of These Violent Delights, of course, is the kind of toxic and identity-consuming romantic friendship that many queer people experience in their teens. While obsessive love is clearly not bound by gender or orientation, there is, I think, a dialectic of both wanting and wanting to be that is specific to same-gender relationships of this kind. My own experiences of these relationships felt like another latent threat I carried inside me, one that fed off my alienation from the outside world by affirming it.
Micah Nemerever (These Violent Delights)
I have never identified with how people see me. I have a great big universe of stuff inside of me. None of it is gendered. None of it. I love who I am. It’s only on the other side of my skin where the pain begins. But I will not negotiate anymore. I am proud to be Queer.
Hannah Gadsby (Ten Steps to Nanette)
Androgyny doesn't look a certain way, though gender is ingrained in society such that liberal readings are applied to everyone, sprinkling gender on everything from haircuts to careers to alcoholic beverages. In this way, presentation, when considered for the purpose of legibility feels futile... As long as I am subjected to this unconsented reading of my body, I will desire nothing more than facelessness
Sachiko Ragosta (It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror)
Good-girl-gone-queer Lindsay Lohan, divorced single mother Britney Spears, Caitlyn Jenner with her sultry poses, Kim Kardashian having the gall to show up on the cover of Vogue with her black husband: All of them are tied to the tracks and gleefully run over, less for what they've done than for the threat they pose to the idea that female sexuality fits within a familiar and safe pattern. If control over women's bodies were the sole point of the trainwreck, that would be terrifying enough. But it's only the beginning: Shame and fear are used to police pretty much every aspect of being female. After you've told someone what to do with her body, you need to tell her what to do with her mind.
Jude Ellison S. Doyle (Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why)
Punk has been portrayed as music by and for angry white males, but in its inception, it was a rebellion against all rock cliches. Gender, ethnic, sexual and class taboos were all challenged by our early punk community and that is a story which is not very often told. People of color, queer folk, women—all were present from the very beginning of Punk.
Alice Bag
The queer woman's gender identity is tenuous and can be stripped away from her at any moment, should it suit some straight party or another.
Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House)
Trans folks are often expected to embrace a narrative that makes cis people comfortable--something simple and linear that upholds their binary understanding of gender transition.
Zena Sharman (The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care)
The queer woman’s gender identity is tenuous and can be stripped away from her at any moment, should it suit some straight party or another.
Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House)
You survived. And because you survived, you now had a shot at more than just staying alive. You had a shot now at getting free. But that thing that you learned when you were five was not then and is not now designed to help you be free. It is designed only to help you survive. And, in fact, it keeps you from being free. You need to figure out what this thing is and work your ass off to un-learn it. Because the things we learn to do to survive at all costs are not the things that will help us get FREE. Getting free is a whole different journey altogether.
Mia McKenzie (Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender)
Fathers and doctors of the church like Origen and Augustine recognized that language is too limited to adequately describe God. There are no words which can capture the being which loved so much that it exploded into energy and matter. But humans are designed to seek understanding, and language creates form for incomprehensible concepts, and so we apply human ideas to a God who is not human.
Suzanne DeWitt Hall (Transfigured: A 40-day journey through scripture for gender-queer and transgender people (The Where True Love Is Devotionals))
This costume she's been so desperate for me to wear. It's all right here, covering me up. [...] I'm in drag right now. I'm a homo right now. This is worse than a Halloween costume because its not funny.
M.E. Girard (Girl Mans Up)
In a sane world, love and sex would not divide by gender. We could love like and unlike beings, love them for a variety of reasons. The battered adjectives for homosexuality -- queer, lesbian, gay -- would disappear and we would only have people making love in different ways, with different body parts. We are too far gone with overpopulation to insist that procreation be an immutable part of desire. Desire needs only itself, not the proof of a baby. We would do well to baby each other instead of making all these unwanted babies that no one has time to nurture or to love. At this point in my life, I am blessed by my friendships with women. I make no distinction between my gay and straight women friends. I hat the very terms, feeling that any of us could be anything -- if we were to unlock the full range of possibilities within.
Erica Jong (Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir)
She follows her nose and stands once more before the doors of a quintessential dilemma. Male or Female. Here is her paradox. A staccato voice seems to challenge her, berate her. Hombre or Mujer. Mann or Frau. Homme or Femme. Gentleman or Lady. Com on, decide. She knows them all. She is them all. Not fluid or all-encompassing, gathering the harvest of the reaping fields, but fractured and split and bleeding. Her inner core weeping out of itself. There is nothing for hermaphrodites. It's too confusing. The words rattle around in her earbones, androgynous and humming. How can she choose? She cannot choose. To choose is to sunder.
Mark O'Flynn (The Last Days of Ava Langdon)
You can gender products and books all you like, and then you get that grandmother who drinks Coke Zero and the queer liberal celebrity who’s a gun nut; people are just too damn messy to fit into neat little boxes.
Aleksandr Voinov (Lone Wolf (Bluewater Bay #4))
Just because she saw that the vagaries of capitalism, patriarchy, gender norms, or consumerism contributed to facial dysphoria didn't mean she had developed immunity to them. In fact, a political consciousness honed on queer sensitivity simply made her feel guilty about not having managed to change her deeply ingrained beauty norms. Call her a fraud, a hypocrite, superficial, but politics and practice parted paths at her own body.
Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby)
If we’re being completely honest, I don’t even think you should have to be “a couple” in the classical sense to get married. I want people to be able to marry as many of their platonic friends as they want. If I’m Phoebe (and I am), why shouldn’t I be able to marry both Monica and Rachel? I mean we all (basically) live together, we’re functionally co-dependent, and we all find Ross obnoxious. Sounds like marriage material to me . . .
Jacob Tobia (Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story)
The scriptures were written by men in eras when the idea of masculinity and power went hand in hand. When reading the Bible, it’s easy to conclude that God is a man. But how can the force that brought all things into being be constrained by gender? Legalistic Christians demand that biological sex and gender are one and the same. But God doesn’t have a body. He created biology, but doesn’t inhabit it as we do. So how can God be a man?
Suzanne DeWitt Hall (Transfigured: A 40-day journey through scripture for gender-queer and transgender people (The Where True Love Is Devotionals))
Our body-minds tumble, shift, ease their way through space and time, never static. Gender transition in its many forms is simply another kind of motion. I lived in a body-mind assigned female at birth and made peace with it as a girl, a tomboy, a dyke, a queer woman, a butch. But uncovering my desire to transition—to live as a genderqueer, a female-to-male transgender person, a white guy—challenged everything I thought I knew about self-acceptance and love.
Eli Clare (Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure)
Fundamental to a radical and lesbian feminist politics is the understanding that 'the personal is political'. This phrase has two interrelated meanings. It means that the political power structures of the 'public' world are reflected in the private world. Thus, for women in particular, the 'private' world of heterosexuality is not a realm of personal security, a haven from a heartless world, but an intimate realm in which their work is extracted and their bodies, sexuality and emotions are constrained and exploited for the benefits of individual men and the male supremacist political system. The very concept of 'privacy' as Catharine MacKinnon so cogently expresses it, 'has shielded the place of battery, marital rape, and women's exploited labor'. But the phrase has a complementary meaning, which is that the 'public' world of male power, the world of corporations, militaries and parliaments is founded upon this private subordination. The edifice of masculine power relations, from aggressive nuclear posturing to take-over bids, is constructed on the basis of its distinctiveness from the 'feminine' sphere and based upon the world of women which nurtures and services that male power. Transformation of the public world of masculine aggression, therefore, requires transformation of the relations that take place in 'private'. Public equality cannot derive from private slavery.
Sheila Jeffreys (Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective)
Some misperceive “difference” to refer only to people of color, “race” to refer only to black men, “sexuality” to queer people, “gender” to white women, “class” to those with have inherited wealth or those who live in poverty, and so on. And notice black women are hardly considered on the continuum at all. Whether or not we see ourselves in terms of these groups, we all participate in these consciously and unconsciously created constructs (or delusions, if you see them in that way).
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel (The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender)
Minority world is a term denoting the geographical areas and countries usually imagined as the “West” (west of what?). It corresponds with the term majority world, which comes to replace the use of the problematic term “third world.” It allows us to keep in mind that, while minority-world thinkers have been busy pathologizing sex, gender, and desire, many majority-world societies have long had mainstream, socially acceptable patterns of practices and behaviors that minority-world people might understand as “queer.
Shiri Eisner (Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution)
The assumption that femininity is always structured by and performed for a male gaze fails to take seriously queer feminine desire. The radical feminist critiques of femininity also disregarded the fact that not all who are (seen as) feminine are women. Crucially, what is viewed as appropriately feminine is not only defined in relation to maleness or masculinity, but through numerous intersections of power including race, sexuality, ability, and social class. In other words, white, heterosexual, binary gender-conforming, able-bodied, and upper- or middle-class femininity is privileged in relation to other varieties. Any social system may contain multiple femininities that differ in status, and which relate to each other as well as to masculinity. As highlighted by “effeminate” gay men, trans women, femmes, drag queens, and “bad girls,” it is possible to be perceived as excessively, insufficiently, or wrongly feminine without for that sake being seen as masculine. Finally, the view of femininity as a restrictive yet disposable mask presupposes that emancipation entails departure into neutral (or masculine) modes of being. This is a tenuous assumption, as the construction of selfhood is entangled with gender, and conceptions of androgyny and gender neutrality similarly hinge on culturally specific ideas of masculinity and femininity.
Manon Hedenborg White (Double Toil and Gender Trouble? Performativity and Femininity in the Cauldron of Esotericism Research)
It's difficult to make the argument that one female fist inserted into one male ass--or, for that matter, dozens or even hundreds of fists inserted into as many asses--can really make a difference for, say, lesbian mothers fighting for custody of their children. -Katherine Raymond
Carol Queen (PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality)
I understood intersectionality—the way that white supremacy props up patriarchy props up poverty props up environmental destruction props up white supremacy again—on a gut level, even if I didn’t know to call it “intersectionality” yet. I understood that sex workers are often stigmatized, barred from claiming their full humanity, by sexist culture and feminist movements alike. I understood that the idea of “The Closet” applied to so much more than just queer people, that we are all in a closet of one kind or another. And, contrary to all of my actions since, I understood that high heels and back problems were, in fact, related. What stands out to me most is that, at the age of seventeen, I seem to have understood the full stakes of what I was doing. I understood that by challenging gender norms and conventional masculinity, I was challenging, well, everything. Through challenging the idea of manhood, of being “a good man,” of “manning up,” I was burrowing deep into the core of power, privilege, and hierarchy. On a gut level, I understood that my freedom and liberation were wrapped up with those of so many others who were facing oppression.
Jacob Tobia (Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story)
Usually, I don't check myself out in the mirror. Mostly because without clothes on, I weird myself out. Maybe everyone thinks they look funny naked. My body is fine, I guess, but I wouldn't want anyone to see it. [...] When I have my clothes on, I feel normal. When my clothes aren't on, it's like I lose something important about myself. When I think about someone else seeing me like this, it feels like they'd actually be seeing some other person. Like it wouldn't be me they'd be looking at. It's not like I want to be looking at a boy's body in the mirror. It's just that a girl's body is so... girl.
M.E. Girard (Girl Mans Up)
They [heterosexual cis women] are accepted in the straight mainstream way more readily than I [trans woman] will ever be. But they are marginalized in their day-to-day lives because they are feminine. To argue that they are reinforcing the binary, or the patriarchy or the hegemonic gender system, because they are conventional feminine (as opposed to subversively feminine) essentially implies that they are enabling their own oppression. This is just another variation of the claim that rapists make when they insinuate that the woman in question was 'asking for it' because of what she was wearing or how she behaved.
Julia Serano (Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive)
My conversations with people who are just beginning to understand and include transsexual and transgender people in their plans or programs lean heavily on this. For them, the very fact of a transsexual who is a real student at their school or client of their agency can be new and surprising. But for queers and transfolk, who have institutionalized an additional set of queerly normative genders, it can sometimes be difficult to hear that we, too, must expand. If butch daddies want to crochet, if twinkly ladyboys are sometimes tops in bed, if burly bears can do BDSM play as little girls, if femme fatales build bookcases in their spare time, these things, too, are not just good but great. They bring us, I believe, wonderful news: news that gendered options can continue to explode, that the chefs in the kitchen of gender are creating new and imaginative specials every day. That we, all of us, are the chefs. Hi. Have a whisk.
S. Bear Bergman
Maimed, mad and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift. There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like pother queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the comig together of opposit qualities within.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera : La Nueva Mestiza)
For people who might struggle to survive at basic levels, it may be more fulfilling to claim an identity like butch, which does not necessarily require engagement with institutions like medicine or academia, which have historically sought to kill, pathologize, or ignore people of color and poor people (and queers). Most transgender scholarship leaves little room for groups of people or ways of being that do not fit a narrow definition of what is scholarly enough or trans-gressive enough.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity)
And on that subject why was it that the smartest people mostly missed that point? By nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means. The proof? Real youth and old age. Because often old men's voices grow high and reedy and they take on a mincing walk. And old women sometimes grow fat and their voices get rough and deep and they grow dark little mustaches. And he even proved it himself—the part of him that sometimes almost wished he was a mother and that Mick and Baby were his kids.
Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)
It's through the drag performers' explosive outfits and gestures, their overdrawn faces and voices, their tabooed trespass if gender, that this relief through extravagant spectacle, is manifest. As much as they are useful, paid, and empowered as a vital service in a society where to be queer is still a sin, the drag queens are, for as long as the dead lie in the open, an othered performance. Their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response.
Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
But since we’re on the topic of identity and narrative voice - here’s an interesting conundrum. You may know that The Correspondence Artist won a Lambda Award. I love the Lambda Literary Foundation, and I was thrilled to win a Lammy. My book won in the category of “Bisexual Fiction.” The Awards (or nearly all of them) are categorized according to the sexual identity of the dominant character in a work of fiction, not the author. I’m not sure if “dominant” is the word they use, but you get the idea. The foregrounded character. In The Correspondence Artist, the narrator is a woman, but you’re never sure about the gender of her lover. You’re also never sure about the lover’s age or ethnicity - these things change too, and pretty dramatically. Also, sometimes when the narrator corresponds with her lover by email, she (the narrator) makes reference to her “hard on.” That is, part of her erotic play with her lover has to do with destabilizing the ways she refers to her own sex (by which I mean both gender and naughty bits). So really, the narrator and her lover are only verifiably “bisexual” in the Freudian sense of the term - that is, it’s unclear if they have sex with people of the same sex, but they each have a complex gender identity that shifts over time. Looking at the various possible categorizations for that book, I think “Bisexual Fiction” was the most appropriate, but better, of course, would have been “Queer Fiction.” Maybe even trans, though surely that would have raised some hackles. So, I just submitted I’m Trying to Reach You for this year’s Lambda Awards and I had to choose a category. Well. As I said, the narrator identifies as a gay man. I guess you’d say the primary erotic relationship is with his boyfriend, Sven. But he has an obsession with a weird middle-aged white lady dancer on YouTube who happens to be me, and ultimately you come to understand that she is involved in an erotic relationship with a lesbian electric guitarist. And this romance isn’t just a titillating spectacle for a voyeuristic narrator: it turns out to be the founding myth of our national poetics! They are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman! Sorry for all the spoilers. I never mind spoilers because I never read for plot. Maybe the editor (hello Emily) will want to head plot-sensitive readers off at the pass if you publish this paragraph. Anyway, the question then is: does authorial self-referentiality matter? Does the national mythos matter? Is this a work of Bisexual or Lesbian Fiction? Is Walt trans? I ended up submitting the book as Gay (Male) Fiction. The administrator of the prizes also thought this was appropriate, since Gray is the narrator. And Gray is not me, but also not not me, just as Emily Dickinson is not me but also not not me, and Walt Whitman is not my lover but also not not my lover. Again, it’s a really queer book, but the point is kind of to trip you up about what you thought you knew about gender anyway.
Barbara Browning
INTRODUCTION TO GENDER AND SOCIETY The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir A classic analysis of the Western conception of the woman. Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks A primer about the power and potential of feminist action. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Feminism redefined for the twenty-first century. QUEER THEORY AND INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM Gender Trouble by Judith Butler A classic, and groundbreaking, text about gender and the boundaries of identity. Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein A 1990s-era memoir of transition and nonbinary identity. This Bridge Called My Back ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa A collection of essays about the intersections between gender, class, sexuality, and race. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde A landmark collection of essays and speeches by a lauded black lesbian feminist. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston A memoir of growing up as a Chinese American woman. MODERN HISTORY How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor A history of the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical black feminists operating in the 1960s and 1970s. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts Investigative reportage about the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski An LGBT history of the United States, from 1492 to the present. CONTEMPORARY QUESTIONS Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus by Vanessa Grigoriadis An exploration of the effects of the sexual revolution in American colleges. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin A book about the shifting power dynamics between men and women. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay Essays about the author’s experiences as a woman and our cultural understanding of womanhood. All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister An investigation into the lives of twenty-first-century unmarried women. GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN FICTION Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown A groundbreaking lesbian coming-of-age novel, originally published in 1973. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin A classic of morality and desire, set in 1950s Paris, about an American man and his relationship with an Italian bartender. Angels in America by Tony Kushner A Pulitzer Prize–winning play about the Reagan-era AIDS epidemic. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson A coming-of-age and coming-out novel about a woman growing up in an evangelical household.
Tom Perrotta (Mrs. Fletcher)
What have you done to allow yourself to express your preferred gender identity? Have you been "cross-dressing" in private? Have you gone out "dressed"? Engaged in any other activities (such as theatre, sports, etc.) that allowed you to express your feminine or masculine self? How do you feel when you are dressed in the clothes you like? Do you like how it makes you look? Do you just like the feel of the fabric? Is it sexually arousing? Do you dress primarily for comfort and relaxation? What were you told about being gay or lesbian growing up? What were the attitudes of the people around you, and how were those conveyed? Were you called queer or gay? How did you feel about that? Did you know anything about transgender people growing up? What images did you come across? Transvestite stereotypes? Jerry Springer? Do you know anyone now who's transgender? What stories have you heard or read? What are your sources of information about transgender life? What are your own thoughts, feelings, prejudices about gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people? Do you ever find yourself not wanting to associate with, or be associated with, others in the community? Who are you uncomfortable with? Can you identify where those prejudices came from?
Anne L. Boedecker (The Transgender Guidebook: Keys to a Successful Transition)