Quotes About Gender

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.

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.

I know there is gender imbalance in the spec fic field, and it concerns me very much. We live in a gender-biased world. There have been some fascinating discussions and studies on this on the internet in recent years. There seem to be a lot of women writing spec fic and not as many getting published, or otherwise taken seriously. While it seems there is less overt bias against women writers compared to a few decades ago, there are still institutionalized biases, subtler biases that are harder to discern. I think these are serious issues that deserve examination by the community.

MMI brothers were very resistant to women such as Lynn Shiflet and others who emerged as leaders within the OAAU, so one of the tensions that occurred was around gender equality and gender leadership inside of Malcolm's X entourage.

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.

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

The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.

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.

Iranian women are very consciously aware of gender-explicit oppression. Therefore: with so much more at stake, Iranian women have each other's back: on the street, in stores, at celebrations, everywhere.

Human beings make mistakes, so we all make mistakes and wrong decisions. Being able to make a decision and act upon it is not gender specific.

Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.

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.

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.

So why, after prior successes, did Obama's race/class/gender attack finally sputter out like the French at Waterloo?

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

That it is not same-gender relationships that are destroying marriage. What is actually destroying marriage is high unemployment, incarceration, a lack of education and ministers living in contradiction where they speak about holiness on one side but yet are living in adultery on the other.

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

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.

With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me that, as you get older, your younger self becomes a stranger to you. A split occurs within yourself. But maybe we're all always strangers to ourselves.

I never go anywhere and encourage people to get married to someone of the same gender or to have abortions - the issue never comes up.

I have always been interested in gender politics, so I'm not that keen on doing things that don't represent a truth about women.

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

I've been a staunch advocate of women's empowerment, and I've worked hard throughout my career to advance the cause. It is heartening to see that gender equality is really becoming more of a reality. There is still much more to be done, and I'm confident that, by working together, we can empower women worldwide.

Woman cannot be free until man's mind is liberated from the megalomania! His self-exaltation is the mother of the gender inequalities. Till we eliminate his exacerbated narcissism, woman will remain unfree!

Individual heterosexual women came to the movement from relationships where men were cruel, unkind, violent, unfaithful. Many of these men were radical thinkers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice. However when it came to the issue of gender they were as sexist as their conservative cohorts.

No country in the world can yet say they have achieved gender equality.

I don't agree with a core statement by most feminists, the statement by Simone de Beauvoir: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one." Even as a schoolgirl I wasn't convinced by the claim that gender has nothing to do with biology and is only shaped by one's environment.

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.

We need to finally be proactive in enlightening people from Islamic cultural groups. And this applies to immigrants already here as well as to current refugees. The German constitution stands above the Sharia. Schools need to offer classes on gender equality. You also have to offer an alternative to young men with a penchant for violence.

I recently realized that I'm gender-fluid - I didn't even know that was a term until recently - but I have a strong effeminate side and identify with women in that way. Because women would make jokes and they were all really funny, but the straight male comics always said "faggot," or they had some really awful gay joke. And so it's like, I'm just going to watch the ladies because they don't - I'm sure there are, but I couldn't even tell you one woman comic that I've ever heard say the word "faggot."

The fact that you couldn't see Alfred Hitchcock's first film The Mountain Eagle, or that you couldn't see so many of F.W. Murnau's masterpieces, or that you couldn't see so many of Oscar Micheaux's really intriguing race melodramas, made with fierce independent spirit against all odds in '20s and '30s America. That stuff haunted me. They really did bring to life a sense of 20th Century history: cultural history, pop history, gender politics and race politics, socio economic history, all that stuff. It was bracing and instructive.

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.

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.

I think it's a feminine energy, not necessarily men versus women, but a nurturing, mothering, loving energy. I think definitely. But I think you need a balance of both. I think right now we're just so in the extremes and people are just conditioned and given these gender assignments very early on.

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.

I hope what I do when I draw from other people's lives is pay tribute. To try to understand what it means in our society to be silenced. To try to understand how class and gender intersect with that. To try to understand how being named and classified within the context of psychiatry can intersect with all that, as well.

Gender equality and women's empowerment have been a top priority for me from day one as Secretary-General. And I am committed to making sure that the U.N. leads by example.

What we need is a political and joyous alternative to the behaviorist discourse, the Christian discourse on evil or sin, and the convergence of the two in forms of gender policing that [is] tyrannical and destructive.

Google is reeling right now. This is the kind of thing, this is the kind of charge that just sends leftists up the tree, that they're unfair, that they're discriminating on the basis of gender. Ladies, tell Google to prove it to you that the guy who wrote the memo is wrong. What you say to Google is, "Show me the money." Go for the money. Tell 'em you want money. Tell 'em you want raises. Tell Google to prove it. Don't join the protest march and start throwing underwear and bras. Just demand the money. They're reeling right now. Hit 'em!

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

I have simply taken some of the same questions and reposed them in new ways. But, you see, I must live. Right? I mean I can't stay the same for everyone to be consumed as the author of "Gender trouble". I have to continue to live and that means I have to "reposer les questions".

Historically, religion has given people another world to live in, a world more adaptive to the human spirit. As a student of world religions, I see religion as the winnower of the wisdom of the human race. Of course, not everything about these religions is wise. Their social patterns, for example - master-slave, caste, and gender relations - have been adopted from the mores of their time. But in their view of the nature of reality, there is nothing in either modernity or postmodernity that rivals them.

I love to be individual, to step beyond gender.

The lack of racial diversity and gender diversity and the lack of female directors - those are not fashionable issues. And they're not issues that reside solely within the film industry.

Valentine's Day is a sham created by card companies to reinforce gender stereotypes. [..] I'll buy some cookies, but NOT for Valentine's Day. These cookies celebrate the February 14th birthday of Anna Howard Shaw, famed American suffragette.

It is of course, entirely possible that men (or anyone who is relatively privileged) are most defensive, most obstinate and unseeing when they are worried about losing privileges.... In the reactions of husbands, I detect a haunting worry about what they will lose when true gender equality arrives.

Looking at health through a gender lens is the first step to a more helpful and personalized approach to healing.