38+ Kate Bornstein Quotes On Education, Beauty And Nonbinary

Kate Bornstein is an American author, playwright, performance artist, and gender theorist. Bornstein is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. Their works explore gender identity, transgender issues, and queer culture. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Kate Bornstein on education, life, beauty.

Top 10 Kate Bornstein Quotes

1. 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.
2. There's no such thing as hurting someone for their own good. There's only hurting someone for your own good.
3. Your life's work begins when your great joy meets the world's great hunger.
4. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ There is a great answer to that one going around: ‘We don’t know; it hasn’t told us yet’.
5. Disney will never make a movie about my life story, and that's a shame--I'd make a really cute animated creature.
6. Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I'd learned to rise to it.
7. There are Easter eggs in every book I've ever written. I think in the first one I called Scientology "Diabology," but I was scared, so I didn't tell many people what it really meant.
8. The current transgender movement is composed of a great number of factions, divided by those old favorites of class, race, age, language, region, and nationality.
9. 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.
10. 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.

Kate Bornstein Short Quotes

• What is a man? What is a woman? And why do we have to be one or the other?
• …gender is not sane. It's not sane to call a rainbow black and white.
• Sex is f-king, everything else is gender.
• I was obsessed, and like most obsessed people, I was the last one to know it.

Kate Bornstein Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

The first question we usually ask new parents is : “Is it a boy or a girl ?”. There is a great answer to that one going around : “We don’t know ; it hasn’t told us yet.” Personally, I think no question containing “either/or” deserves a serious answer, and that includes the question of gender. — Kate Bornstein

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

I honor anybody who wants to be a man and do the work of becoming a man. I honor anyone who mindfully becomes a woman. That's cool. But, I really don't get how there's only two choices. There's no two of anything else in the entire universe; why should there only be two genders? I don't get it. — Kate Bornstein

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

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

You can support trans-positive legislation, tranny artists, and the inclusion of trannies in your neighborhood, schools, place of worship, whatever. For the long term? Join or initiate some good legal battles against the puritanical laws that exist around sex and gender. — Kate Bornstein

The whole transgender movement idea is happening in waves around the world. Some areas of the world are further along politically than others. The economy has a lot to do with that, as does moral or religious climate. — Kate Bornstein

Both bisexuality and transgender are fluid notions of identity, while lesbian and gay are fixed identities. Some people believe that means there should be two movements: LG and BT. But then what're ya gonna do about SM players? And intersexed folks who want their own I in the alphabet soup of sex and gender related politics? — Kate Bornstein

We grew up creating this whole world view for ourselves because it's not there in the culture. What am I? And I have to build this world view in the absence of books, radio and television, anything, even conversation, Mom or Dad or brother or sister or friends. I have to build a world view of who I am or I go stark, raving mad. Every transsexual in the past has had to do this. — Kate Bornstein

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

My own take on the word "transgender" is that it's an umbrella term for anyone who breaks any rules, laws, guidelines or protocol of gender. So, to really be an ally, it's important that you recognize and embrace your own transgender nature. Really, I haven't met a single person who doesn't break some rule of gender. In other words, we will assimilate you. Resistance is futile. — Kate Bornstein

The transgender movement even divides itself up by gender, as many folks stick with their same trans-genders (female-to-male or male-to-female). Additionally, the movement gets strangely subdivided among, for example, male cross-dressers, sissy boys, butch women, femme dykes, drag kings, drag queens, transvestites, intersexed, transsexuals (post-op, pre-op, and non-op). — Kate Bornstein

Look, nearly everything in the culture says we're freaks. Doing sex work, we're desired; we can get rewarded for being what we've always wanted to be. What's so bad about that? My own notion is I wish sex work would be decriminalized (not legalized, please note the distinction) so that more trannies could get into the field if they wanted to and not get into trouble for it. — Kate Bornstein

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

I know and know of more than a few MTF's (male-to-female trannies) who've developed strange cancers. Myself, I've got a nice little case of Chronic Lymphocitic Leukemia (CLL). — Kate Bornstein

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

The real problem devolves around class lines once again: it's the street hormones that folks without insurance, or folks who are too young for prescriptions without parental okay, use. Sometimes those hormones can be pretty rough. — Kate Bornstein

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

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

Sex work may be an illegal thing, but it's far from being a bad thing. Quite a few of us on the male-to-female side of the coin have done sex work. I've done it myself for a couple of years. It's a place we can make a living and have some fun doing it. It's a place we seem to fit in. — Kate Bornstein

Life Lessons by Kate Bornstein

1. Kate Bornstein's work emphasizes the importance of challenging societal expectations and norms in order to create a more inclusive and accepting world.
2. She encourages people to be open-minded and to embrace their own unique identities, regardless of gender or sexuality.
3. Her work also emphasizes the power of self-love and acceptance, and encourages people to be kind and compassionate towards others.