56 Quotes by Kate Bornstein

The Gender Defender is someone who actively, or by knowing inaction, defends the status quo of the existing gender system, and thus perpetuates the violence of male privilege and all its social extensions. The gender defender, or gender terrorist, is someone for whom gender forms a cornerstone of their view of the world. Shake gender up for one of these folks, and you’re in trouble.

One answer to the question “Who is a transsexual?” might well be “Anyone who admits it.” A more political answer might, “Anyone whose performance of gender calls into question the construct of gender itself.

If we buy into categories of sexual orientation based solely on gender – heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual – we’re cheating ourselves of a searching examination of our real sexual preferences.

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.

The differences in the way men and women are treated are real. And the fact is this difference in treatment has no basis in the differences between men and women. I was the same person, and I was treated entirely differently. I got real interested in feminist theory – real fast.

Male privilege is, in a word, violence.

Moral codes are useful only when we have descended to needing them.

It’s healthier for your soul to live outside and above a degraded moral code than within and beneath one.

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.