56 Quotes by Kate Bornstein

Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I'd learned to rise to it.

I remember one Fourth of July evening in Philadelphia, about a year after my surgery. I was walking home arm in arm with Lisa, my lover at the time, after the fireworks display. We were leaning in to one another, walking like lovers walk. Coming towards us was a family of five: mom, dad, and three teenage boys. "Look it's a coupla faggots," said one of the boys. "Nah, it's two girls," said another. "That's enough outa you," bellowed the father, "one of 'em's got to be a man. This is America!

To attempt to divide us into rigid categories (You're a transvestite, and you're a drag queen, and you're a she-male, and on and on and on) is like trying to apply the laws of solids on the state of fluids; it's our our fluidity that keeps us in touch with each other. It's our fluidity and the principles that attend that constant state of flux that could create an innovative and inclusive transgender community.

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.

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

It’s easy to fictionalize an issue when you’re not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.

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.

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

I was obsessed, and like most obsessed people, I was the last one to know it.