Top 35 Kate Bornstein Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Let’s stop ‘tolerating’ or ‘accepting’ difference, as if we’re so much better for not being different in the first place. Instead, let’s celebrate difference, because in this world it takes a lot of guts to be different.”

— Kate Bornstein

2. “Your life’s work begins when your great joy meets the world’s great hunger.”

— Kate Bornstein

3. “We are entitled to our anger in response to this oppression: our anger is a message to ourselves that we need to get active and change something in order to survive.”

— Kate Bornstein

4. “Male privilege” is assuming one has the right to occupy any space or person by whatever means, with or without permission. It’s a sense of entitlement that’s unique to those who have been raised male in most cultures – it’s notably absent in most girls and women.”

— Kate Bornstein

5. “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

6. “There’s no such thing as hurting someone for their own good. There’s only hurting someone for your own good.”

— Kate Bornstein

7. “There’s a simple way to look at gender: Once upon a time, someone drew a line in the sans of culture and proclaimed with great self-importance, ‘On this site, you are a man; on the other side, you are a woman.’ It’s time for the winds of change to blow that line away. Simple.”

— Kate Bornstein

8. “I was obsessed, and like most obsessed people, I was the last one to know it.”

— Kate Bornstein

9. “No matter how your world falls apart-and honey, that’s what happens: we all build ourselves a world, and then it falls apart-but no matter how that happens, you still have the kind heart you’ve had since you were a child, and that’s all that really counts.”

— Kate Bornstein

10. “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

11. “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.”

— Kate Bornstein

12. “Gender is used as a control mechanism that’s just wrong. Gender is never anything to struggle with; gender is something to play with. Once you’re free of the rules that all these hierarchical, oppressive systems place on gender, that’s the tricky part.”

— Kate Bornstein

13. “Given any binary, it’s fun to look for some hidden third, and the reason why the third was hidden says a lot about culture. 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. Once we choose one or the other, we’ve bought into the system that perpetuates the binary.”

— Kate Bornstein

14. “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

15. “Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I’d learned to rise to it.”

— Kate Bornstein

16. “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

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

— Kate Bornstein

18. “Definitions have their uses in much the same way that road signs make it easy to travel: they point out the directions. But you don’t get where you’re going when you just stand underneath some sign, waiting for it to tell you what to do.”

— Kate Bornstein

19. “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

20. “And keep in mind that the you that makes life worthy of living today won’t be the same you that makes life worth living this time next year. Identities aren’t meant to be permanent. They’re like cars: they take us from one place to another. We work, travel, and seek adventure in them until they break down beyond repair. At that point, living well means finding a new model that better suits us for a new moment.”

— Kate Bornstein

21. “You are worthy and capable of finding a way to live your life just the way you really are. And there are plenty of good people in the world who believe that a life like yours needs to be lived.”

— Kate Bornstein

22. “One answer to the question “Who is a transsexual?” might well be “Anyone who admits it.” A more political answer might, “Anyone whose performance of gender calls into question the construct of gender itself.”

— Kate Bornstein

23. “When God says no to your harmless desires, it’s time to get another God.”

— Kate Bornstein

24. “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

25. “Our spirits are full of possibilities, yet we tie ourselves down to socially-prescribed names and categories so we’re acceptable to more people. We take on identities that no one has to think about, and that’s probably how we become and why we remain men and women.”

— Kate Bornstein

26. “If we buy into categories of sexual orientation based solely on gender – heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual – we’re cheating ourselves of a searching examination of our real sexual preferences.”

— Kate Bornstein

27. “Male privilege is, in a word, violence.”

— Kate Bornstein

28. “As an exercise, can you recall the last time you saw someone whose gender was ambiguous? Was this person attractive to you? And if you knew they called themselves neither a man nor a woman, what would it make you if you’re attracted to that person? And if you were to kiss? Make love? What would you be?”

— Kate Bornstein

29. “The whole transgender movement idea is happening in waves around the world. Some areas of the world are further along politically than others. The economy has a lot to do with that, as does moral or religious climate.”

— Kate Bornstein

30. “In this struggle for our freedom of expression, there comes a point when this gender system reveals itself to be not only repressive but silly. When we begin to see how ridiculous it is, we can try begin to dismantle it.”

— Kate Bornstein

31. “The current transgender movement is composed of a great number of factions, divided by those old favorites of class, race, age, language, region, and nationality.”

— Kate Bornstein

32. “The Gender Defender is someone who actively, or by knowing inaction, defends the status quo of the existing gender system, and thus perpetuates the violence of male privilege and all its social extensions. The gender defender, or gender terrorist, is someone for whom gender forms a cornerstone of their view of the world. Shake gender up for one of these folks, and you’re in trouble.”

— Kate Bornstein

33. “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.”

— Kate Bornstein

34. “The differences in the way men and women are treated are real. And the fact is this difference in treatment has no basis in the differences between men and women. I was the same person, and I was treated entirely differently. I got real interested in feminist theory – real fast.”

— Kate Bornstein

35. “It’s healthier for your soul to live outside and above a degraded moral code than within and beneath one.”

— Kate Bornstein

36. “Moral codes are useful only when we have descended to needing them.”

— Kate Bornstein

37. “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