Gender Quotes

Men only treat women like princesses when they want to use them like prostitutes.

~ Bauvard

By God, if women had written stories,As clerks had within here oratories,They would have written of men more wickednessThan all the mark of Adam may redress.

~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men, this is the essential truth of pornography.

~ Andrea Dworkin

Never look down on someone because God himself does not do so. No matter what defines the status, nationality or gender of a person, once God's spirit is in him/her, he or she becomes a complete creature with complete potentials!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

The invisible fuel for this healing process is our heartfelt compassion and loving presence and the sincerity of the collective intention that we bring to it.

~ William Keepin

The time has come for women and men to band together to jointly create gender harmony. We must gather in mixed group to plumb new depths of relational awareness, courageous truth-telling, compassionate listening, empathic sensitivity, and mutual healing.

~ William Keepin

We hate each other by race, color, tribe, wealth, gender etc because everyone wants to feel special and different than the other. I do not however have a solution on how people can stop having an ego that makes them specially superior than the other.

~ Robert Kodingo

I'm never going to be happy, but I could get close now, I think. I could be almost normal. I could have a friend.

~ Alyssa Brugman

The ultimate reality from which the path of this becoming could start off again will no longer rest on a ground of 'causa sui.' in any case the sense of a God who would alone be capable of giving an account of self. It is rather from the human and from what the human most irreducibly is that it is a question of starting off again. From the human as it objectively is before it starts to construct a language and a thinking which help to distance it from its beginning, from its prematureness without thinking it in the totality of its being.

~ Luce Irigaray

How do you know if someone loves herself? No hairstyle, religion, or ethnicity has ownership of self-love or a greater propensity toward self-hatred. The best way to tell if a woman loves herself is by how she treats herself and others. She makes self-loving choices.

~ Abiola Abrams

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

~ Nelson Mandel

Sexual expression is so powerful a way of bonding with others and so devastating a way of hurting others that it can never be reduced to a mere matter of personal preferences. Sexual desires have immense capacities to order or disorder the social world. Because of this, the social meanings and expressions of sexual desire, connections, and taboos are an organizing component of human societies: Who wants whom? Who belongs with whom? Who is forbidden to whom? What do infractions mean, and what are their consequences?

~ Rachel Adler

In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love for a gender. I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don’t understand why it’s so hard, when it’s so obvious.

~ David Levithan

I'm perfectly natural the way I am. Why can't you humans ever understand that I might not want to be afflicted with gender?

~ Carolyn Ives Gilman

The power of the work comes through this alchemical process in which the darkness is transmuted into light, and the energy that was trapped in maintaining rigid social structures and unhealthy cultural conditioning becomes freed up and released.

~ William Keepin

Moving beyond past wounds and hurts and building a culture of respect, dignity, and flowering love

~ William Keepin

Delving deeply in this [gender healing] work inevitably takes people on an inner journey, and, if they follow it far enough, they are ultimately let into an awakening of an expansive, all-encompassing love.

~ William Keepin

We became acutely aware of the profound healing that is needed in our species. We knew with conviction that what we were doing, as women and men together, was confronting the cultural dynamics that are killing us all- killing women and men, killing our children, killing the planet.

~ William Keepin

As the community stays with the uncomfortable tension of contradiction, individuals begin to perceive the truth of “the other” as their own experience, and the polarities of conflicting positions often dissolve into an unexpected emergence of a deeper underlying unity: a profound recognition that, ultimately, there is no “other”. We are all one.

~ William Keepin

When we convene a group for gender healing and reconciliation, we are collectively taking similar action. We stretch ourselves to a larger consciousness and grace that is beyond our capacity, but within our reach.

~ William Keepin

In gender reconciliation groups, we collectively reach for an unknown power or grace that has a healing potential far beyond our own capabilities or understanding. We invite this power and presence, knowing from experience that something transcendent and universal can and does work through us and it dwarfs our own mechanisms for healing, thinking, fixing, and/or reconstructing what needs to be healed.

~ William Keepin

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean--in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

~ Audre Lorde

Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. The answer isn't just to introduce new words (boi, cis-gendered, andro-fag) and then set out to reify their meanings (though obviously there is power and pragmatism here). One must also become alert to the multitude of possible uses, possible contexts, the wings with which each word can fly. Like when you whisper, You're just a hold, letting me fill you up. Like when I say husband.

~ Maggie Nelson

Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation

~ Iain M. Banks

A choice of pains. That's what living was all about.

~ Audre Lorde

Are boys encouraged to express sadness, fear, or anxiety? In general, our society gives boys permission for one emotion: anger. If a boy is hurt or upset, he may be comforted briefly, but then he is told to stop crying and be a man. This message usually implies he should hide his feelings. Boys and men are supposed to be solid unemotional rocks. Demonstrations of emotions are seen as silly. Anger is seen as a sign of strength. Males are considered to be standing up for their rights if they react to a frustrating or undesirable event with anger. Outrage is often the only reaction to an injustice that is allowed from boys.

~ Meg Kennedy Dugan

Accepted social gender roles and expectations are so entrenched in our culture that most people cannot imagine any other way. As a result, individuals fitting neatly into these expectations rarely if ever question what gender really means. They have never had to, because the system has worked for them.

~ Nicki Petrikowski

For every 100 women who earn a bachelors degree, 75 men do so. For every 100 American women who earn a Masters degree, 66 American men do so. For every 100 females, ages 20 to 24, who commit suicide, 624 males do so. For every 100 women, ages 18 to 21, in correctional facilities, 1430 men are so confined.

~ Mitch Pearlstein

Literalness, however, is not the substance from which human culture is made.

~ Begoña Aretxaga

The ways of men and women are such a puzzle. And I could barely decipher my own feelings, let along anyone else's.

~ Megan Shepherd

And do stop trying to determine if I am a man or a woman. The fact is I'm a good part both and therefore neither one. I was just explaining to your Aunt Queen. I was born endowed with the finest traits of both sexes and I drift this way and that as I choose.

~ Anne Rice

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won't accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.

~ D.h. Lawrence

There are three stupids:A woman who thinks she does not deserve more, a man who believes he is superior, and a God who considers himself always right.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

In 2015, the writer Alex Blank Millard engaged in her own gender-swap experiment to highlight the misogynist nature of online abuse. Sick of constantly receiving rape threats from ‘faceless eggs’ online, she changed her Twitter profile photo to that of a white man – but kept the content she posted the same. When Millard tweeted about rape culture, fat shaming, and systemic oppression as Lady Alex, the standard response was a deluge of rape and death threats, and a bunch of guys calling her fat. When she commented on the same things as Straight- and Cis-Looking White Dude Alex, she was retweeted, favourited, and even cited by Buzzfeed (Millard, 2015).

~ Emma A. Jane

Nature has made a mistake in the choice of my sexuality and I must do a life-long penance for it, for the moral power to suffer the unavoidable with dignity is lost.

~ Richard Von Krafft-Ebing

It's time to undo Rahim.

~ Nadia Hashimi

No matter your race, level of education, gender, age, religion, cultural beliefs, physical appearance, social status, financial status and more, always remember that you are as important as everyone else.

~ Hafiz

Identity is one of those absurd synthetic terms that if you ask someone about it, they can’t give you a proper definition of it without recapping what they’ve learned in school. Identity supposedly is a state or a condition of being oneself or itself, and not another. At least, this is what dictionary.com explains to us. They always say that you need to define who you are and this definition is always labeled by gender role and preference, political views, religious beliefs, nationality, family bonds, age, jobs and education titles.” Lucera looked at the doctor and shrugged her shoulders. “This might be only MY perception.

~ Neda Aria

What matters most is not 'what' you are, but 'who' you are.

~ Dashanne Stokes

I can't blame you for trying to categorize me. It's a human instinct. It's why scientists are, to this day, completely flabbergasted by the duck-billed platypus: it's furry like a mammal, but lays eggs like a bird. It defies conventional classification. I AM THE PLATYPUS (Coo coo ka-choo)

~ Jeff Garvin