100 Gender Identity Quotes
Following is our list of gender identity quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about gender.
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Famous Gender Identity Quotes
There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender... identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results. — Judith Butler
Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being. — Judith Butler
Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself. — Judith Butler
People of all sexes have the right to explore femininity, masculinity-and the infinite variations between-without criticism or ridicule. — Leslie Feinberg
Identity is not inherent. It is shaped by circumstance and sensitivity and resistance to self-pity. — Dorothy West
Transgenderism is a mental health disorder. — Vivek Ramaswamy
The sense of identity provides the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly. — Erik Erikson
Ultimately, the transgender question is about more than just sex. It's about what it means to be human. — Russell D. Moore
Nature chooses who will be transgender; individuals don't choose this. — Mercedes Ruehl
Treat gender dysphoria as a mental health disorder. — Vivek Ramaswamy
I learned a lot more about transgender people. It's not a choice, but a physiological condition that has to do with the size of the hypothalamus part of the brain. — Mercedes Ruehl
Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong... It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum not as two opposing sets of ideals. — Emma Watson
IT IS TIME THAT WE ALL SEE GENDER AS A SPECTRUM INSTEAD OF TWO SETS OF OPPOSING IDEALS. — Emma Watson
Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed. — Judith Butler
As anyone who is gay will confirm, being that way is not something you become, it is a set of emotional and physical responses that just are. — Lance Loud
Short Gender Identity Quotes
- Committing yourself is a way of finding out who you are. A man finds his identity by identifying. — Robert E. Terwilliger
- Gender fluidity is not really feeling like you're at one end of the spectrum or the other. — Ruby Rose
- My sexuality is not a phase. I am who I am. — Cara Delevingne
- My identity is very clear to me now, I am a black woman. — Lena Horne
- Transgender discrimination is the civil rights issue of our time — Joe Biden
- For all intents and purposes, I am a woman. — Bruce Jenner
- In a sense I portray myself in a very androgynous way, and I love androgyny. — Lady Gaga
- The transgender community deserves the dignity and respect that most people take for granted. — Ed Murray
- There is a certain androgyny to my appeal. — Ellen Barkin
- A toy has no gender and no idea of whether a girl or boy is playing with it. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Gender Identity Image Quotes
Gender Issues Quotes
I wish we lived in a world where how you looked or what you wore wasn't an issue for men or women, and it's by and large not an issue for men, so I wish it wasn't an issue for women, but it is. — Nicola Sturgeon
How about we get rid of separate bathrooms for boys and girls? Gays and straights share the bathroom with zero issues. We need to put an end to the sexist pooping policies of yesterday. The only way to achieve gender equality is to start crapping in front of each other. — Daniel Tosh
There is a clear difference between sexist parody and parody of sexism. Sexist parody encourages the players to mock and trivialize gender issues while parody of sexism disrupts the status quo and undermines regressive gender conventions. — Anita Sarkeesian
I'm more interested in a feminism that ends discrimination for all people. It's not just about a woman becoming the CEO of a company or something. It's connected to racism and classism and gender issues that go beyond the binary. — Kathleen Hanna
But let me tell you, this gender thing is history. You're looking at a guy who sat down with Margaret Thatcher across the table and talked about serious issues. — George H. W. Bush
So when I was about 13 or 14, I realized I was attracted to women and then made the assumption that I was a lesbian, and didn't realize that that wasn't the case. It was the fact that I was a man and a heterosexual man. The issue wasn't my sexual orientation, but rather my gender identity. — Chaz Bono
Hopefully, 21 years later, Judge Roberts possesses an openness with respect to issues of gender-based wage discrimination. — Olympia Snowe
I think there's so many things happening, whether it's gender inequality or immigration, there's just so many issues happening around the world where not doing anything makes you guilty. — Lilly Singh
Every woman I know, particularly the senior ones, has been called too aggressive at work. We know in gender blind studies that men are more aggressive in their offices than women. We know that. Yet we're busy telling all the women that they're too aggressive. That's the issue. — Sheryl Sandberg
The most important thing is to have a more open and honest dialogue about gender issues. — Sheryl Sandberg
Gender Quotes
When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose. — Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us. — Angela Davis
Women should be treated as human beings, not as domestic animals. — Averroes
You don't fall in love with a gender, you fall in love with a person. — Andy Biersack
Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance. — Kofi Annan
... that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today. — Judith Butler
In language gender is particularly confusing. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English? — Marlene Dietrich
One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings. — Franklin A. Thomas
Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it. — Thomas Sowell
Most of the time, you can beat a woman in an argument. — Tucker Carlson
Gender Roles Quotes
The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself. — Louise Bourgeois
What I do know is that traditional gender roles are very real and flipping the norm is difficult for even the strongest, funniest, smartest men. — Patti Stanger
When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that weve taken on a role or were acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world. — Judith Butler
If parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out. — Marian Wright Edelman
For a man to say, "I have to leave work now because I need to do something with my kids," it's sometimes viewed as a career killer. He doesn't have the right drive. So when they depart from their gender roles, they face some of the same restrictions. — Gloria Steinem
Power relations between men and women must change profoundly, men must be partners in the pursuit of gender equality, in their decision-making roles, as heads of state, CEOs, religious and cultural leaders, and as partners and parents. — Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics. — Randall Munroe
people share a common nature but are trained in gender roles. — Lillie Devereux Blake
Perhaps we could push beyond these legalistic gender roles if we spent less time worrying about “acting like men” and “acting like women,” and more time acting like Jesus. — Rachel Held Evans
What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary — Simon Baron-Cohen
People Writing About Gender Identity
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 Judith Butler |
170 | 1159 |
 Vivek Ramaswamy |
53 | 1 |
 Mercedes Ruehl |
13 | 131 |
 Emma Watson |
250 | 1469 |
 Leslie Feinberg |
17 | 150 |
 Dorothy West |
10 | 123 |
More Gender Identity Quotes
And yet politicians reject a law that would require schools to inform parents if their kids change their gender identity at school. — Vivek Ramaswamy
True peace must be anchored in justice and an unwavering commitment to universal rights for all humans, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, national origin or any other identity attribute. — Desmond Tutu
A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied. — Dan Savage
Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. — Judith Butler
All through life there were distinctions - toilets for men, toilets for women; clothes for men, clothes for women - then, at the end, the graves are identical. — Leila Aboulela
Homophobia's just one form of abjection, and wherever you have a marker of deviance - skin colour, gender, gender identity, disability - you get the same mechanisms of prejudice. — Hal Duncan
To all trans youth out there, I would like to say respect yourself and be proud of who you are. All human beings deserve equal treatment no matter their gender identity or sexuality. To be perceived as what you say you are is a basic human right. — Andrej Pejic
If you find yourself in a relationship or even a friendship with someone who's conflicted with their gender identity, just be kind. This is not a life choice. This is something that you are born with. This is like being born with a gene for being tall, short, black, white, gay, straight - it's not a choice. — Linda D. Thompson
In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity. — Camille Anna Paglia
I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect. — Kate Zambreno
In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity. — Camille Paglia
Part of the core information that I've been purveying is that identity politics is a sick game. You don't play racial, ethnic, and gender identity games. The Left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let's say, and the Right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride. I think they're equally dangerous. — Jordan Peterson
Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108) — Cornel West
We are undermining a generation's happiness by depriving them of national identity, religious identity, and gender identity — Dennis Prager
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
The image of God, then, involves gender identity and complementarity. God created gender in duality as male and female. — Andrew Comiskey
Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of. — Andrew Solomon
Our kids just aren't living in the same generation, and if they're not introduced to gender identity as a problem, they won't internalize them as a problem. Which isn't to say they won't meet bigotry in their lives. — Maggie Nelson
Perception, after all, is not simply a matter of what you believe about yourself, it all encompasses what others think about you, and what has been thought of you historically. I say we can pay attention to those other dimensions of our identity - class, gender, sexual orientation, geographical region - while at the same time understanding how our historically produced racial identity continues to serve, or undercut us. — Michael Eric Dyson
Why would one's identity be a matter of feelings? I think that that's a misuse of terms, philosophically. Identity is mind independent. It's something that is objective, regardless of how you feel. So, the term gender identity seems to me to be something of an oxymoron. It's not really about one's identity. It's rather a matter of one's self-perception or one's feelings about oneself. — William Lane Craig
What does it mean to be an American today? The question of that is always pointing at now. It allows someone to say what lens that will be through. A lot of my work has been about identity in different ways. Part of that for me falls into the question of gender identity certainly but also about what it means to be an American theater artist. — Will Davis
My conception around being a woman in 2016 has definitely been shifting over the past year, because I feel like I'm proud of womanhood, and I feel attached to it, and at the same time I'm someone who doesn't believe in having a gender binary, and so often times I separate those two concepts in my mind - the concept of being a woman and the concept of being a girl or being female, being kind of attached to a certain gender identity. — Amandla Stenberg
I do think that people have a desire to talk about issues they may have wanted to avoid before. I've never had so many random conversations with people where they're so ready to talk about race, gender, sexual identity, or things that are happening in politics. — Sasheer Zamata
Issues of the economy are profoundly affected by how you live out sexual orientation and gender identity. — Amber Hollibaugh
I think we all are born inside of our parents' narratives. We stay there for a good while. We are taught their narratives about everything: their marriage, the world, God, gender, identity, etcetera. Then, at some point, our own narrative develops too much integrity to live inside that story. We don't ever fully escape it, but we move into our own stories. — Melissa Febos
In some states, a very small number of states, it is illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of their gender identity, transgender identification. In the vast majority, it is perfectly legal. — Allyson Robinson
Is that really the issue [of bathrooms and gender] we want to be pushing leading up to a momentous election like this one? It's that shortsightedness that comes from identity politics. — Steve Inskeep
I really lucked out with that song ["As Cool As I Am"]. Men were becoming much more comfortable with all the different facets and parts of their identity, including their gentler, funnier, sillier, nurturing parts. They started showing up. There was so much exploration of gender at that time. Women were showing up with the range of ways of being female in the world and men were showing up with the range of being male in the world. — Dar Williams
Cross-dressing is more of a set of actions or behaviors and not synonymous with gender identity (straight, gay, bisexual, transgender, among others). — Steven Petrow
Is there a term that one might use rather than say that one is homosexual? Is there a different physical gender and symbolic dimension? I'm thinking of Adrienne Rich's notion of the lesbian spectrum. It's not as if sexual identity is binary: one must be either homo or hetero. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim
To parents who find a child's disclosure about sexual or gender identity challenging, I always urge what I'd call "moderated" honesty. If you can't say "I love you," then say something like, "I'm going to need some time to digest this news." Buy time this way. And then think. — Steven Petrow
It doesn't occur to so many people that if you don't have a clear heterosexual, gender confirming identity that there are parts of day-to-day life - like using a bathroom or getting your clothes - that just aren't going to be as easy. — Lena Dunham
I'm really lucky because my sister is a real activist soul and also hyper-intellectualized in this way that's really allowed me to wrap my mind around some of the bigger intellectual concepts and really understand the language around identity in the gender nonconforming community. — Lena Dunham
I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender. — Jess Row
The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate. — Jess Row
We had the fun of being outlaws. But there's a whole generation now coming up with new gender identities. For this generation of kids who don't think that being gay is anything special, they might be more interesting than any of us. — Dale Peck
The scene at a certain time was definitely boys; those huge warehouses were kind of violent parties, even. I think people in your immediate community made a nightlife scene that actually did break down gender roles and were along different lines of identity that had to do with race and experience in the '90s, rather than gender. — Le1f
There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply exactly the person who wants to read what I have written... — Will Self
There is definitely a way in which women are raised to be less proactive, less business-oriented, and less willing to jump into creative no man's land. I think media has more of an influence on how we perceive gender identity than anything else. — Sayings
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
I know people want me to sort of defend myself, to sit here and be like, 'I'm a boy, but I wear makeup sometimes.' But, you know, to me, it doesn't really matter. I don't really have that sort of strong gender identity-I identify as what I am. The fact that people are using it for creative or marketing purposes, it's just kind of like having a skill and using it to earn money. — Andrej Pejic
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