Kate Bornstein famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Differences #Being Different #World
â€¦gender is not sane. It's not sane to call a rainbow black and white.
-- Kate Bornstein

#Black And White #Rainbow #Gender
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
The first question we usually ask new parents is : â€œIs it a boy or a girl ?â€. There is a great answer to that one going around : â€œWe donâ€™t know ; it hasnâ€™t told us yet.â€ Personally, I think no question containing â€œeither/orâ€ deserves a serious answer, and that includes the question of gender.
-- Kate Bornstein

#Girl #Thinking #Boys
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

#Struggle #Play #Gender
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

#Children #Growing Up #Hero
I was obsessed, and like most obsessed people, I was the last one to know it.
-- Kate Bornstein

#People #Lasts #Obsession
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

#Real #Home #Holiday
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

#Men #People #Justice
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

#Names #Ideas #Giving
Is it a boy or a girl ?â€. There is a great answer to that one going around : â€œWe donâ€™t know ; it hasnâ€™t told us yet.
-- Kate Bornstein

#Girl #Boys #Answers
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 #Way #Easy
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

#Lonely #Kids #Sick
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

#Opportunity #Two #Choices
Your life's work begins when your great joy meets the world's great hunger.
-- Kate Bornstein

#Joy #World #Hunger
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

#Thinking #What Matters #Expression
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

#Children #Fall #Heart
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

#Blow #Simple #Men
Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I'd learned to rise to it.
-- Kate Bornstein

#Queens #Practice #Gender
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

#Cute #Stories #Shame
There's no such thing as hurting someone for their own good. There's only hurting someone for your own good.
-- Kate Bornstein

#Hurt #Hurting Someone
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 #Ideas #Giving

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