Quotes About Gender

As a gender variant visual artist I access 'technologies of gender' in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist. An intentional mutation and intersex by design, (as opposed to diagnosis), in order to distinguish my journey from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their 'ambiguous' bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at 'normalization'. I believe in crossing the line as many times as it takes to build a bridge we can all walk across.

I think the way we look upon gender is that we're realizing that we're not that different, which is a good thing. The United States needs to come further with that. In the Scandinavian countries, we've come further when it comes to gender politics and how we look upon gender and how women are treated in general.

Someone who is experiencing gender dysphoria would be someone who feels that his biological sex doesn't match up with the gender that he feels. So, I might feel like I am a woman trapped in a male body, and you can imagine how horrible that would be to have that kind of experience or to think that you're a man trapped in a woman's body. It must be just a terribly difficult experience for those who experience gender dysphoria. But this is not anything to do with homosexual attraction or activity. It's a matter of one's self-perceived identity.

Men are enforced into a kind of silence about their gender; they're supposed to not think of it as a performance. That's the definition of manliness - that it's not a performance; it's being yourself, authentic. Whereas women have understood gender as performance. Men have not yet made that quantum leap, or rather they're making it in many ways, they're not thinking about it.

A lot of my effort is to get people to talk about gender in a new way and to see that sexism and gender issues are so ingrained in us.

If you are trying to live with and maintain ascendancy over same-gender attractions, the best way to do that is to have groups that define their members in terms other than same-gender attractions.

Every year I teach dozens of students at the University of Birmingham. Most of the students on the gender and sexuality courses are women. I guess this is because the boys don't think that gender applies to them: that it's a subject for girls.

I'm excited about representing my gender, but at the same time it doesn't matter. I wouldn't say my gender has been a disadvantage.

The gender prism is just descending upon us. For instance, when we're girls of nine or 10 we may be climbing trees and saying, "I know what I want. I know what I think." And then suddenly at 11 or 12, the gender role takes hold, and adults tell us, "How clever of you to know what time it is." It happens to boys, too and even sooner - between five and eight. Before that, boys cry and express uncertainty.

Nowhere have women been more excluded from decision-making than in the military and foreign affairs. When it comes to the military and questions of nuclear disarmament, the gender gap becomes the gender gulf.

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.

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.

Growing up we were secular Jews, but what I got out of Judaism at that time in my life was questions. Everything was a question. "Dad, is there a heaven? Is there a hell?" You never could get an answer. That informed a lot of my reasons for getting into Scientology, because they had all the answers. They said I was not my body, not my mind. I don't have a soul; I am an immortal soul. I've lived many lives and I'll live endlessly into the future, and as an immortal soul I have no gender.

Gender is a social construct, but everyone likes to cuddle.

I bring the experiences of women. As a daughter, as a mother, as a wife, as a sister. That is who I am. Those experiences are part of me. And it is part of our American journey that we have moved through so much of what used to hold people back because of gender, because of race.

The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.

When it comes to gender, marriage, family, work, and religion - we once thought of them as being fixed, but they're incredibly fluid. The same is true for love. Love was not something that was originally built between two equal partners in a relationship. It's something that's been hard-earned over time.

America cannot be America in the new century until it deals with these new questions of gender, including the trans issues, and the questions around faith and Islam.

I feel very lucky to have served under some great bosses. The majority of them were men, but I have also had a few women. In many ways, I feel like media is pretty neutral when it comes to gender.

I think the culture is changing. An example of that is that the commanders truly want the very best person for the job regardless of gender.

I love technology, and I don't think it's something that should divide along gender lines.

Our mothers are our most direct connection to our history and gender.

I think we're at a really rich and fertile time in the zeitgeist about paying attention to diversity of all kinds - racial diversity, gender diversity, making room for a continuum that is more inclusive.

A toy has no gender and no idea of whether a girl or boy is playing with it.

'Spice Girls' is about unifying the world - every age, every gender, everyone. It's woman power, it's an essence, a tribe.

There are still traces of discrimination against race and gender, but it's a lot different than when I started out. It just comes quietly, slowly, sometimes so quietly that you don't realize it until you start looking back.

We come from the future, essentially, because we have all these ideas about gender equality, sexual freedom, and these are not shared by the working class, the peasantry among whom we work.

When I started to internalize fat positivity and believe it, my response was the same one I had when I started to understand the scope of gender inequality: deep indignation.

Neither gender is routinely more jealous - although women are more willing to work to win back a lover, while men tend to flaunt their money and status and are more likely to walk out to protect their self-esteem or save face.

Hopefully, 21 years later, Judge Roberts possesses an openness with respect to issues of gender-based wage discrimination.

Hijras earn a living by egging, sex work, badhai or blessing. There are now transgenders in social work, the fashion industry, who have PhDs. I say, "Study, study, study." You need not wear a sari, and even our ancestors said you need not wear feminine attire to be part of the third gender. When I started bar dancing, nobody else was doing it. When I joined the social sector in 1999, there were no nonprofit organizations working for the rights of hijras in India. But I had to do it, I wanted my dignity.

Defining men as the perpetrators of all violence is a viciously immoral judgment of an entire gender. And defining women as inherently nonviolent condemns us to the equally restrictive role of sweet, meek, and weak.

I think anybody has, regardless of your gender, we all have equal value if you have value to bring and value to provide, you just have to be willing to use your voice.

We are undermining a generation's happiness by depriving them of national identity, religious identity, and gender identity

Right now, for many Americans, class is being foregrounded like never before because of the economic situation. It doesn't mean that race doesn't matter, or gender doesn't matter, but it means that right now in many people's lives, in the lives of my own family members, people are losing jobs, insurance.

It's truly hard to understand how liberal politicians, activists and journalists so consistently escape accountability for stoking the flames of racial disharmony while purporting to dampen them and for dividing our society along racial, gender, and economic lines while claiming to unite us.

Gender assignment is a "construction" and yet many genderqueer and trans people refuse those assignments in part or in full. That refusal opens the way for a more radical form of self-determination, one that happens in solidarity with others who are undergoing a similar struggle.

I want people to vote, I want them to pay attention. I want them to get up and go and vote and care about this country, inform themselves about the issues and I also want them to not vote for somebody just based on gender or race, based on qualification.

I think it's important for us to recognize that although historically black communities have been very progressive with respect to issues of race and with respect to struggles for racial equality, that does not necessarily translate into progressive positions on gender issues, progressive positions on issues of sexuality and in the latter 1990s we have to recognize the intersectionality, the interconnectedness of all of these institutions and attitudes.

The United Nations defines violence against women as any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.

[On gender-rating by insurance companies:] They say the reason they get to charge more is we have children. I would say having children is a socially useful act. Being female is not a preexisting condition.

I don't think about being male or female, I just behave naturally. I think in terms of excellence in science, not gender.

I think it is an accurate statement to say that some people consider feelings of same-gender attraction to be the defining fact of their existence. There are also people who consider the defining fact of their existence that they are from Texas or that they were in the United States Marines. Or they are red-headed, or they are the best basketball player that ever played for such-and-such a high school. People can adopt a characteristic as the defining example of their existence and often those characteristics are physical.

I wear non-gender-specific clothes. I just look silly in girls' clothes. I'm quite tall, and they're never the right cut for me - T-shirts and stuff are always too low-cut or too short. I've worn boys' clothes forever because girls' stuff never felt right for me.

The most significant moment will be when we stop referring to the hiring of qualified women (and racial, ethnic and religious minorities) as significant. In other words, when qualified people are hired without regard to race, gender, ethnicity, religious or other differentiating characteristics, that will be the most significant, indeed momentous, event of all.

The act of sport remains a human act, unrelated to gender.

My father values talent. He recognizes real knowledge and skill when he finds it. He is color blind and gender neutral. He hires the best person for the job, period.

I think that why the research and the data are so important is because you become so used to seeing the world one way that you don't even notice anymore. [Gender inequality] has this invisibility.