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.

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.

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.

It seems to me to be kind of inescapable that one has to be interested in the issue of gender and gender equality. I don’t really expect any credit for going in that direction. It’s the only natural direction to go in. Why is it that some people don’t see that as so patently obvious as it should be?

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.

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

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.

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.

Many writers write across difference of one kind or another. Sometimes the difference is large and recognizable: gender, or race, or religion, or sexuality. And sometimes the differences are smaller. ... Where authors get into trouble is in trying to make those different characters stand in for whole groups of people, or for creating characters only to fetishize or explore their supposed otherness. Your character can be wildly different from you, as long as he's written with respect and, moreover, specificity.

There's no denial that one's gender orientation is certainly a core characteristic of any person, but it's not the only one.

President Obama's version of America is a divided one - pitting us against each other based on our income level, gender, and social status. His policies have failed! We are not better off than we were 4 years ago, and no rhetoric, bumper sticker, or campaign ad can change that.

I'm not sure how to put this, but I didn't want things like gender transition to be, like, the money shot in talking about bodily change. The truth is that we are all changing all the time to each other. Anybody who's been in a relationship for more than a year, more than five years, knows this.

I guess professionally I've left my gender open to artistic interpretation.

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.

But the issue of sexual harassment is not the end of it. There are other issues - political issues, gender issues - that people need to be educated about.

We put a gender lens on our whole value chain.

We still have gaps that are rooted in gender inequality. Certainly we have discrimination against the LGBT community.

If you are in the closet and fall in love with someone of the same gender, it doesn't automatically remove the shame and fear that's kept you locked away. The love you are experiencing encourages you to face the reality that this is who you really are and also has the power to set you free. The richness, beauty and depths of love can only be fully experienced in a climate of complete openness, honesty and vulnerability. Love, the most powerful of human emotions, is calling you to freedom and wholeness.

I was assigned male at birth, is the way I like to put it, because I think... we're born who we are... and the gender thing is something someone imposes on you. And so, I was assigned male at birth, but I always felt like I was a girl.

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 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.

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.

We don't often talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes but I can see that that they are and that when they are free, things will change for women as a natural consequence.

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.

I don't believe in categorising a gender, as it makes for discord. People always say, 'That's what men are like' or, 'That's what women do'; I don't really feel that at all. I think that's because I have two fathers, three brothers, a husband and two sons. I'm surrounded by maleness, and I couldn't possibly summarise them into a type.

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.

People who don't have gender dysphoria aren't going to catch it by watching me dance on television.

If one is of the masculine gender, a poodle is the insignia of one's deviation.

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.

Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master.

Sexuality and gender don't change anyone's performance on the court.

We want to end gender inequality, and to do this, we need everyone involved...We want to try to galvanize as many men and boys as possible to be advocates for change and we don't just want to talk about it. We want to try and make sure that it's tangible.

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.

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.

I'm ambivalent about the Orange Prize. I was really proud to be shortlisted alongside the other writers, whom I admire. That said, I don't know if it's best way of addressing gender inequality problems.

I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.

I actually tried to think of the story [Room] in gender-neutral terms at first and said to myself, "OK, would this work if it were a man?" Well no, you can't make a man pregnant, so it's got to be a woman.

Part of the reason images of women in positions of authority are marked by their gender is that the very notion of authority is associated with maleness.

Something happens in the middle when women are in their 30s, and we can start with an array of things that happen, whether it is - you hope this doesn't exist any longer - but overt discrimination; whether it's subtle gender discrimination, which absolutely does exist among men and women; whether it's the fact that it gets hard to juggle at that point children, housework, etc. But people still have to go home and cook the dinner and clean the dishes and get the beds made and so on. And so, for a whole bunch of reasons, women tend to fall out in their 30s still today.

Bones tell me the story of a person's life - how old they were, what their gender was, their ancestral background.

This is going to sound cliché perhaps, but I would say to not second-guess yourself. It's difficult to talk about because gender does play into directing, of course, but it's very hard to talk about. Maybe the worst part is what you internalize.

I'm feminist in that I believe that there should be equality between men and women. I get deeply frustrated on a daily basis by the enormous gender divide in the U.S. literary world. But I don't know how to deal with it, so I don't tend to say much about it.

When it comes to dividing Americans on the basis of their gender, I know a little something about the subject.

I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates - even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process.

We urge persons with same-gender attractions to control those and to refrain from acting upon them, which is a sin, just as we urge persons with heterosexual attractions to refrain from acting upon them until they have the opportunity for a marriage recognized by God as well as by the law of the land. That is the way to happiness and eternal life.

What everyone in the astronaut corps shares in common is not gender or ethnic background, but motivation, perseverance, and desire - the desire to participate in a voyage of discovery.

As a partner in a firm full of women who work outside of the home as well as stay at home mothers, all with plenty of children, gender equality is not a talking point for me. It is an issue I live every day.