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What is a man? What is a woman? And why do we have to be one or the other?

Kate Bornstein

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Kate Bornstein
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 1
Actor
Author
Choreographer
Novelist
Writer
Neptune
New Jersey
Katherine Vandam Bornstein
Woman
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More quotes by Kate Bornstein

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To see cartoon-me positioned (alphabetically) amongst so many of my women heroes and role models ... well, I just broke down and cried. Happy tears. I surely hope that this one-of-a-kind collection of radical American women reaches the hands of all children who want to grow up and become amazing women.
Kate Bornstein
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This Western culture of ours tends to sacrifice the full range of experience to a lower common denominator that's acceptable to more people we end up with McDonald's instead of real food, Holiday Inns instead of homes, and USA Today instead of news and cultural analysis. And we do that with the rest of our lives.
Kate Bornstein
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Both bisexuality and transgender are fluid notions of identity, while lesbian and gay are fixed identities. Some people believe that means there should be two movements: LG and BT. But then what're ya gonna do about SM players? And intersexed folks who want their own I in the alphabet soup of sex and gender related politics?
Kate Bornstein
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I honor anybody who wants to be a man and do the work of becoming a man. I honor anyone who mindfully becomes a woman. That's cool. But, I really don't get how there's only two choices. There's no two of anything else in the entire universe why should there only be two genders? I don't get it.
Kate Bornstein
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Sex is f-king, everything else is gender.
Kate Bornstein
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I know and know of more than a few MTF's (male-to-female trannies) who've developed strange cancers. Myself, I've got a nice little case of Chronic Lymphocitic Leukemia (CLL).
Kate Bornstein
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The real problem devolves around class lines once again: it's the street hormones that folks without insurance, or folks who are too young for prescriptions without parental okay, use. Sometimes those hormones can be pretty rough.
Kate Bornstein
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When you're a Scientologist it's like the movie Goodfellas, where the gangsters hang out with only other gangsters. We only hung out with each other, so we knew we were saving the world.
Kate Bornstein
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I see fashion as a proclamation or manifestation of identity, so, as long as identities are important, fashion will continue to be important. The link between fashion and identity begins to get real interesting, however, in the case of people who don't fall clearly into a culturally-recognized identity.
Kate Bornstein
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I know I'm not a man-about that much I'm very clear, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably not a woman either, at least not according to a lot of people's rules on this sort of thing. The trouble is, we're living in a world that insists we be one or the other-a world that doesn't bother to tell us exactly what one or the other is.
Kate Bornstein
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It's easy to fictionalize an issue when you're not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.
Kate Bornstein
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I have this idea that every time we discover that the names we're being called are somehow keeping us less than free, we need to come up with new names for ourselves, and that the names we give ourselves must no longer reflect a fear of being labeled outsiders, must no longer bind us to a system that would rather see us dead.
Kate Bornstein
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Your life's work begins when your great joy meets the world's great hunger.
Kate Bornstein
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There are Easter eggs in every book I've ever written. I think in the first one I called Scientology Diabology, but I was scared, so I didn't tell many people what it really meant.
Kate Bornstein
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The choice between two of something is not a choice at all, but rather the opportunity to subscribe to the value system which holds the two presented choices as mutually exclusive alternatives.
Kate Bornstein
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I was obsessed, and like most obsessed people, I was the last one to know it.
Kate Bornstein
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I love the idea of being without an identity, it gives me a lot of room to play around but it makes me dizzy, having nowhere to hang my hat.
Kate Bornstein
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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.
Kate Bornstein
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Disney will never make a movie about my life story, and that's a shame--I'd make a really cute animated creature.
Kate Bornstein
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Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I'd learned to rise to it.
Kate Bornstein