Quotes About Gender

I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.

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.

It seems to me that "Gender trouble" will always be important to try and open up our ideas of what gender is. So, I don't know if it's revolutionary, but maybe it still has something to say to those issues.

I'm not suggesting that all men are beautiful, vulnerable boys, but we all started out that way. What happened to us? How did we become monsters of feminist nightmares? The answer, of course, is that we underwent a careful and deliberate process of gender training, sometimes brutal, always dehumanizing, cutting away large chunks of ourselves. Little girls went through something similarly crippling. If the gender training was successful, we each ended up being half a person.

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.

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.

Genitive is a funny word because it means "from," but it also is the gender in European languages for objects: the masculine, feminine, and neuter. So if you have a genitive present, there's room for everybody to fit in. I just did a project in Vienna about rock, paper, scissor; you change the gender and it simply changes the whole thing. Rock is no longer a male. It doesn't function the same way.

U.N. Women was created due to the acknowledgement that gender equality and women's empowerment was still, despite progress, far from what it should be. Transforming political will and decisions, such as the Member States creating U.N. Women, into concrete steps towards gender equality and women's empowerment, I think is one of the main challenges.

We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually its a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.

When I moved to the United States [from Asia] in 2001, I experienced a more rigid concept of gender, but somehow I was allowed to change my name and my gender marker. Why is there that paradox? How do I get those two things to be the same?

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.

Marriage should be between a spouse and a spouse, not a gender and a gender.

On the most recent battles on health insurance reform, the women led the battle to end gender discrimination by the insurance companies [where] women paid more and got less of a benefit, and also the whole issue of prevention.

I'm not convinced that what are traditionally considered to be male energies or qualities or female energies or qualities really have as much to do with gender as many people think they do.

Recognition of the harm that patriarchy has caused to people and the planet does not mean that men are wrong and women are right; rather it is a call for new organizational forms and for relishing gender differences within a context of equality.

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

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.

Even though I grew up in an area of England that was more conservative than my personal politics and my family's personal politics, I grew up with a lot of guy friends. There was no real difference between us. When I moved to London, it really became apparent that gender was going to make a mark. I started experiencing sexual intimidation and aggression. People coming up to women on the streets and telling them how hot they are and what they wanted to do to them. For me, that was shocking coming from a village. I thought intersexuality was a great way of exploring that shock.

American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.

With women, you always have to make an educated decision to figure out what they're thinking. It's not one that's necessarily sympathetic, always. Of course, we're all human beings, but the gender thing is big thing. And a great thing.

Almost all the voices in history have been men, but on this one question of gender, men don't talk about it. This has nothing to do with women; it has to do with men.

People have evolved into something selfish, greedy and intolerant. People are unaccepting, because of religion, race, gender, sexual orientation... I've seen it in punk clubs, and I've seen it in the world.

There's no telling from poem to poem where this brilliant 'conversation' about maleness and gender will lead---there are poems about husbands and wives, parents and children, Elvis, Apollo, Walt Whitman, rhythms of its politics. Manthology is a remarkably honest and enormously heartening collection.

There is a tendency under capitalism system to reduce everything to a kind of commodity fetish, and this order tends to promote extremely conventional and uniform expressions of gender and sexuality in order to promote certain products and lifestyle choices that are commercialized. This necessarily entails a capitulation to heteronormativity, or in the case of the new gay movement, a "homonormativity" that doesn't stray far from the heterosexual paradigm. Anyone who questions these normative values and conventions is subject to disapproval, hostility, or even violence.

As a kid, you get to the stage where you realise the gender barriers that exist in society and what you're supposed to do and not supposed to do.

...gender relationships, which are tough for people to deal with, are key to whether a society orients to domination or partnership in all its relations.

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.

claims about what's 'natural' have long been used to reinforce traditional gender roles and values. ... Even the notion that women should have children at all is based on the idea that a woman's inherent and most important role is that of mother. Shockingly, men's 'innate' roles are a lot more fun than the ones bestowed on women.

Always remember, wherever you are, whether near or far, you had a mother who really, really loved you. The original mother. Once you've found your true inner guru you can never again be divided. Perfect union with the divine, through the grace of your real teacher, transcends time, space, death and all worldly limitations. Your real teacher is the original mother - regardless in which manifest or non-manifest form, or gender, she appears. The one who nurtures you and the one who also, out of wisdom and compassion, corrects you if you are misguided.

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.

The more you lecture those running the companies on how they need to give more breaks to women or other minority groups and be more open-minded to their work products and perhaps question themselves on a double standard, the more some of those people shut down to your messaging. I'm not saying it's right; I'm just saying you can very easily get labeled as someone who sees everything through a prism of race or gender or what have you. So we have to walk a fine line. It's sad but it's the truth.

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.

Someone said to me that we have to encourage more young women to want top-level editing jobs. I think that will happen naturally as we have more role models, more examples of boss ladies who aren't sad and cruel and overworked and undersexed like in DevilWearsPrada, but who are straight-up owning it and notable not for their gender but for their editorial savvy.

I don’t want to make an incremental change in some technology in my life. I want to create a whole new technology, and one that is aimed at helping humanity at all levels regardless of geography or ethnicity or age or gender.

My 'awakened dreams' are about shifts. Thought shifts, reality shifts, gender shifts: one person metamorphoses into another in a world where people fly through the air, heal from mortal wounds. I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world's soul, I am the dialogue between my Self, and el espirítu del mundo. I change myself, I change the world.

From what I understand from talking with older friends and feminists, I think that once I enter the workforce and start to think about marriage and having children, my gender will probably eclipse my feminist identity in terms of marginalization. Discrimination in terms of hiring and in the workplace are still real according to statistics. I also think, as a feminist, figuring out what a relationship based on true and complete equality is will be a challenge. But hopefully by the time I'm dealing with those issues feminists will have made great progress in all of those areas.

I do a lot with characters' sense of identity. I also like challenging stereotypes, gender roles, things like that. Give me a stereotype or a genre expectation and the first thing I want to do is stand it on its head. In the Nightrunner books I wanted to see if I could create a believable gay hero, one who wasn't someone's sidekick or a victim.

I would put all the efforts to humanize the "masculine" and "feminine" gender roles that are the beginning of a false human hierarchy and normalize race, class and other systems of domination to come.

Be yourself. Forget about whether you are male or female and just work hard to become a director who truly knows her craft and the direction she wants the film to go. People respect a director for her work regardless of her gender.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences...our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.

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.

My sense is that we may not need the language of innateness or genetics to understand that we are all ethically bound to recognize another person's declared or enacted sense of sex and/or gender. We do not have to agree upon the "origins" of that sense of self to agree that it is ethically obligatory to support and recognize sexed and gendered modes of being that are crucial to a person's well-being.

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.

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.

To take one example, I mean, the whole issue of bathrooms and gender - in this particular election, when the stakes were so high, the fact that Democrats and liberals, more generally, lost a lot of political capital on this issue that frightened people. People were misinformed about certain things, but it was really a question of where young people would be going to the bathroom and where they would be in lockers.

I aspire to be able to appreciate and review a director based on their accomplishments and based on who they are and what they bring to the material, regardless of their gender.