Quotes About Gender

Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so that they no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves.

Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person's felt sense of gender was therefore "unreal." That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be. But I think I needed to pay more attention to what people feel, how the primary experience of the body is registered, and the quite urgent and legitimate demand to have those aspects of sex recognized and supported.

The fact that I'm a woman is as important to my work as a poet as the fact that Ahmad Shāmlu was a man was important to his work as a poet. Basically, gender shouldn't be viewed as an advantage in art. If a poem or a piece of writing is good, what difference does it make whether it's by a woman or a man? And, if it's bad, why should its writer's gender make it good?

There's a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they're mismatched. That's all it is. It's not complicated, it's not a neurosis. It's a mix-up. It's a birth defect, like a cleft palate.

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.

Success on the front of women's rights will look like a world not only with obvious advances - where no girl is denied access to education, for instance - but also one with more subtle changes in how we regard gender and gender stereotypes.

Stopped as attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequaltiy between men and women.

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.

Historians will look back on this era and how the Internet changed what we value, what we consider art, the way we think, the way we define what it means to be human. In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling describes the changes that occurred between about 1850 and 1920, due to the Industrial Revolution and the resulting migration of people from small communities to relative anonymity in cities. Because of that paradigm shift, ideas about what it means to be an individual underwent a transformation that leeched into all areas. Art, psychology, history, marriage, gender.

We live in an uncertain world and we want to believe that what a man is and what a woman is-I know that. And people don't want to critically interrogate the world around them. Whenever I'm afraid of something or I'm threatened by something, it's because it brings up some sort of insecurity in me. I think the reality is that most of us are insecure about our gender. They think, 'Okay, if there's this trans person over here, then what does that make me?

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.

Feminism is a belief that although women and men are inherently of equal worth, most societies privilege men as a group. As a result, social movements are necessary to achieve political equality between women and men, with the understanding that gender always intersects with other social hierarchies.

If so, I couldn't imagine how the opposite gender managed to get out of bed in the morning. They might be lovely to look at, but clear thinking wasn't their strong point.

In professions where the criteria of professionalism, expertise, good manners and ethics apply, the gender aspect, i.e., whether a person is a man or woman, is not relevant at all. What is important is that citizens' confidence in politicians and the politics is strong enough to make politicians proud of their profession.

Janet Mock's honest and sometimes searing journey is a rare and important look into la vida liminal, one that she manages to negotiate remarkably well, with grace, humor, and fierce grit. Mock doesn't only redefine what realness means to her, but challenges us to rethink our own perceptions of gender and sexuality, feminism and sisterhood, making this book a transcendent piece of American literature.

Stereotypes are ways of making extremely primitive and simple differentiations. Differentiations of gender, race, class, social status - so ordinary social life is very much built upon a whole repertoire of stereotypes we carry around. And those are immediately laminated onto people, and it isn't just visual.

Issues of the economy are profoundly affected by how you live out sexual orientation and gender identity.

There is no fullness of joy in the next life without a family unit, including a husband, a wife, and posterity. Further, men are that they might have joy. In the eternal perspective, same-gender activity will only bring sorrow and grief and the loss of eternal opportunities.

Not all bodies are born in male or female. There is a continuum of bodies and it seems to me that trying to persuade medical and psychiatrist establishments to deal with the intersex involves critique of the binary gender system. Similarly there continues to be extreme, sometimes very extreme violence against transgender people.

I hadn't thought about the balance in mood. You see that we did it in alphabetical order, so if there's any kind of shape, or any kind of flow, it's random. Gender...we didn't think much about it. It was sort of interesting to see that women often were choosing women and men often were choosing men. And sometimes they wouldn't and that was fun. I didn't know that I would be excited by that, until I saw it happen.

Gender or skin color does not of itself determine the nature of a person's thinking.

I don't care whether they're men or women, that's bullshit. A good writer can get into any gender, can get into any mouth. When I write I may be a Brando creep, or a girl laying on the floor, or a Japanese tourist, or a slob like Richard Speck. You have to be a chameleon when you're writing.

The idea that feminism is a 'battle of the sexes' about blaming all men and setting up a 'gender war' is a handy, controversial media hook. But it doesn't reflect reality.

Scientists who do deny their politics—who claim to be objective and unemotional about gender while living in a world where even boats and automobiles are identified by sex—are fooling both themselves and the public at large.

It's in everyone's best interest to help close the gender gap in the sciences.

When I first got on the internet as a tween, I wasn't comfortable showing up in social spaces. I didn't have a loud voice. As a function of my youth and gender, I wasn't given a voice at the dinner table, and nor maybe should I have been. But I thought I wanted one, and I was able to have it online. I wasn't a great talker, but I found these other skills. And when this stuff is described as "not real writing" or "bad for my brain" or whatever, it just seems like it's from people who wanted to keep their place at the dinner table.

The gender gap looks at this point like it's going to favor the president, particularly among white suburban women. I certainly think it's going to be an issue. But I think the single most important thing in this election will be turnout.

I dont think gender is aesthetically defining for me.

When I hear Obama speak he just seems really sincere and he just seems like somebody who actually has his heart and his motivation in the right place. Forget about color or race or gender or whatever, he's got his heart in the right place.

The legalization of drugs, a proliferation of a public health approach to drug use and drug addition, a compassionate mental health system. And can we just say gender equality and the end of mass incarceration and the final shedding of the vestiges of a slave-based nation? Can we have that, too? Can I have it all?

Now my mom designs to resign so she runs for US senate, and now at 67 my mom just launched a new company called Women's Leadership Live, she is the cofounder and CEO, and it's all about empowering women to be successful in business however they define success. When you have a role model like that you really don't ever look at gender as an issue and it's about owning your place and taking charge of your role, regardless of what you look like.

So much were employers of wage-labor unenthusiastic about proletarianization that, in addition to fostering the gender age division of labor, they also encouraged, in their employment patters and through their influence in the political arena, recognition of defined ethnic groups, seeking to link them to specific allocated roles in the labor-force, with different levels of real remuneration for their work. Ethnicity created a cultural crust which consolidated the patterns of semi-proletarian household structures.

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.

I don't think people should have boundaries put on them, by themselves or society or another gender, because it's our birthright to experience life in whatever way we feel best suits us.

Parenting is about being competent and responsible. It's not about gender, necessarily.

My upringing did influence me to a certain extent. I grew up going to private school, and we'd have these really cute uniforms, but you'd only have so much sway over how you could "customize" them. I would line my blazers, I would dart my skirts, I'd change the buttons, I would do anything I could to make them unique. And when I started designing, I found myself referencing those roots. I love a sort of preppy, gender-bender vibe. I wanted to incorporate the feel of menswear into the looks. That definitely comes from my private school days.

Almost everything about American society is affected by World War II: our feelings about race; our feelings about gender and the empowerment of women, moving women into the workplace; our feelings about our role in the world. All of that comes in a very direct way out of World War II.

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.

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.

Children who have been very sadistically abused over the long-term are able to dissociate, some of them are able to dissociate as a way of surviving and inventing someone to whom this doesn't happen. And so therefore, they invent within themselves different personalities who have life histories of their own. Many people invent an opposite gender personality as well.

There's been a sort of mini-revolution, an uprising, as was long overdue, about these subject matters: ethnicity and gender equality.

I have brought him [my son] up to think that purity and virtue are both masculine and femanine gender, and that God's angels are not necessarily all she ones.

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.

…gender is not sane. It's not sane to call a rainbow black and white.

What transsexuality emphatically is not is a 'lifestyle,' any more than being male or female is a lifestyle. Gender is many things, but one thing it is surely not is a hobby. What it is, more than anything else, is a fact.

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.

Right now, if there's a gender gap problem, it's not Ronald Reagan with women; it's with Walter Mondale with men.

The problem with the way we discuss gender is that it tends to be "Let's sympathize with women" or "Let's sympathize with men."