901 Quotes About Gender

I noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other.

I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons) the material of the literate.

Gender is a psychosocial virtual entity without location in a person's body. It solely exists in, and is perpetuated by, the society in which the person lives.

Girls are not passive by nature. They are only so because the culture demands they be.

Punishment [is] applied like a rabbit's foot, with as little regard to its efficacy.

I'm perfectly natural the way I am. Why can't you humans ever understand that I might not want to be afflicted with gender?

Gender is just one of many systems of oppression. The ultimate goal is to see how all systems are tied in a knot with the others and untie, unravel the knots of oppression. It's a spiritual journey more than a governmental one. It's about asking ourselves, 'Is this culture stopping me or anyone else from the free expression of sex and gender?' and if so, we have to act.

In this struggle for our freedom of expression, there comes a point when this gender system reveals itself to be not only repressive but silly. When we begin to see how ridiculous it is, we can try begin to dismantle it.

Many of us then thought that what we needed to do was to expand the category “women” so that it could embrace Black women, Latina women, Native American women, and so forth. We thought that by doing that we would have effectively addressed the problem of the exclusivity of the category. What we didn’t realize then was that we would have to rewrite the whole category, rather than simply assimilate more women in to an unchanged category of what counts as “women.