Gender Quotes

Man will never understand woman and vice versa. We are oil and water. An equal level can never be maintained, as one will always excel where the other doesn't, and that breeds resentment.

~ Dionne Warwick

So please, for the love of gender- go bloom. Or water someone else while they do.

~ S. Bear Bergman

The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.

~ Judith Butler

Eventually you can't help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.

~ Imogen Binnie

I don't know why people persist in believing women are inferior, when it is quite clear that men are the more feeble-minded of the two.

~ Julia Quinn

I followed the trail out of the room, invigorated by the possibility of reinventing my own body. The meaning was mine, as long as I was with those who had the vision and vocabulary to understand my creation.

~ Nick Krieger

When I was a girlthe books I read were by men.

~ Sharon Doubiago

Gender and the complications it gives rise to simply aren't relevant to the lives appliances lead.

~ Thomas M. Disch

If a woman tells a man the god favor him, everybody says she's far-minded.' The broom halted mid-sweep and the slave turned to Hild. 'But let a woman do what the gods tell her, without asking a man's permission first? Then she's possessed.' Unwen punctuated her words with her broom, jabbing it into the corner.

~ Rebecca Barnhouse

I was used to being perceived as having a good attitude. Self-control, self-effacement, self-denial. People like this, especially in girls.

~ Stephanie Grant

Some women have become far too proscriptive of other women's pleasures and private arrangements, and the definition of feminism has become ideologically overloaded.

~ Naomi Wolf

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple, one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. ... Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.

~ Virginia Woolf

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

The fundamental condition of man is his verticality.

~ Laura Fraser

Young men list music as their focus and means of identity -- before sport, before TV, before cinema -- while women cite fashion as most important, with music an ambivalent second.

~ Lucy O'brien

In a 1999 paper, Reiner indicates that his data show that with time and age, children may well know what their gender is, regardless of any and all information and child-rearing to the contrary. They seem to be quite capable of telling us who they are, and we can observe how they act and function even before they tell us.

~ Deborah Rudacille

Are you bisexualLabels were invented for people like you who can't grasp a reality outside of a defined gender role. I like what i like.

~ Colleen Hoover

The gender thing is a giveaway, though. Only a Radchaai would misgender people the way you do.I'd guessed wrong. I can't see under your clothes. And even if I could, that's not always a reliable indicator.

~ Ann Leckie

There are many worlds in the 'Realm of Worlds' where the ascendant beings are not male or female.

~ Anne Rice

Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not, Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there.

~ Naomi Alderman

Even when we are confused about someone’s gender, and don’t have a greater awareness of what it means to be trans, we have a choice to respond with kindness rather than cruelty.

~ C. N. Lester

And that makes us (black women) feel like we have spokespeople, because everybody we encounter feels they have a piece of you and can tell you how to live your life

~ Malebo Sephodi

The first thing you're going to want to know about me is: Am I a boy, or am I a girl?

~ Jeff Garvin

That’s the vicious truth doctor. For me and persons like me, we are experiencing a divorce from our own individual self by sensing our sensations, emotions, behaviors as not belonging to the same person or identity. That’s how you psychiatrists could explain it. That’s how society would like to codify its population. Such a ludicrous model we’ve been creating calling it civilization

~ Neda Aria

I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies—though shifting the balance matters—but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Like me wanting to get nailed made me less of a man than him? That was bullshit. He seemed kind of sexist. I bet he was a fucking Republican.

~ Megan Erickson

He feels excited. He feels ashamed. He wants to talk to her, but he is afraid. Maybe he imagined it all. Maybe she will call him a bad name if he asks her what happened.

~ Naomi Alderman

She follows her nose and stands once more before the doors of a quintessential dilemma. Male or Female. Here is her paradox. A staccato voice seems to challenge her, berate her. Hombre or Mujer. Mann or Frau. Homme or Femme. Gentleman or Lady. Com on, decide. She knows them all. She is them all. Not fluid or all-encompassing, gathering the harvest of the reaping fields, but fractured and split and bleeding. Her inner core weeping out of itself. There is nothing for hermaphrodites. It's too confusing. The words rattle around in her earbones, androgynous and humming. How can she choose? She cannot choose. To choose is to sunder.

~ Mark O'flynn

When did you know you were a girl? When did I know I was a boy? he said. I knew my whole life. I can't tell you exactly when, but it wasn't like I was ten and realized, 'Oh gee, I must be a boy!' What people fail to realize is they made that decision way earlier than that. It just happened that their gender identity and their anatomy matched.

~ Jaime A. Seba

The idea of a character dichotomy between women and men has been overwhelmingly, decisively, refuted. The broad psychological similarity of men and women as groups can be regarded, on the volume of evidence supporting it, as one of the best-established generalizations in all the human sciences.

~ Raewyn W. Connell

Get it? Gender is a country, a field of signifying roses you can walk through, or wear tucked behind your ear.Eventually the flower wilts & you can pick another, or burn the field, or turn & run back across the tracks.(from Essay on the Theory of Motion)

~ Cameron Awkward-Rich

Binary thinking is human nature: Light/Dark, Beautiful/Ugly, Full/Empty, Male/Female.But NONE of those are binary—they’re all gradients.

~ Jimbeaux Dean

It's a man's world and show business is a man's meal, with women generously sprinkled through it like overqualified spice.

~ Carrie Fisher

When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father.

~ Jeanette Winterson

When we stand, we do so not only for ourselves, but also for countless others who have similar stories but may never have an opportunity to be witnessed.

~ William Keepin

No one escapes gender conditioning. Most of us unwittingly carry the cultural gender shadow into our important relationships, and we end up in struggles with our partners, family members, friends, and colleagues that aren’t really about us as individual. When women and men do gender reconciliation work in community, they begin to see the power of this cultural baggage in a new light. They realise the prevalence of overarching social patterns and conditioning in much of their experience – and comprehend that, in this larger context, they are not alone in what happened to them.

~ William Keepin

We stand not as victims, but rather to bear witness to the gender injustices present in our lives and in our world as a whole.

~ William Keepin

No doubt the female self and the male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But flexible, context-sensitive, and useful is not the same as “hardwired”.

~ Cordelia Fine

When women and men listen with the heart a liberating or cleansing process comes about in the collective, and something transformative moves through both parties and into the dialogue.

~ William Keepin

Bailey, a former prosecutor, attacked her credibility scattershot, an approach he would use throughout the trial, particularly with female witnesses. ...He accused her, that is--without coming out and saying it--of being a certain kind of woman: conceited, disingenuous, and dissatisfied. The universal misogynist caricature.I'd never gone in for academic gender theories, but Bailey's cross-examination strategy--with Farrar and other women to come--convinced me that the culture of criminal justice has a fundamentally masculine tilt. Repeatedly, in a manner that I suspected was typical in modern courtrooms, he portrayed the female mind as intrinsically unreliable, ruled by emotion, immune to logic, prone to pettiness, swayed by lust, and corrupted by vanity. It rarely spoke plainly. It was seldom candid. It was composed of layers of hidden agendas. It put up a front, behind which was another front. It either aimed to please or to conceal, which were often the same thing. The only way to get the truth from it was to push and prod until it snapped. Make it angry. Make it cry.

~ Walter Kirn