Famous Quotes & Sayings

S. Bear Bergman Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 21 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by S. Bear Bergman.

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Famous Quotes By S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1561311

One bright pansy popping through a sidewalk crack will get weeded or stepped on; it's not until twenty fabulous flowers bust through and the pavement is ruined anyway that someone decides maybe it isn't a sidewalk at all, but a flower garden. So please, for the love of gender
go bloom. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 785251

I have a whole set of problem-solving behaviors and I am anxious to use them, in much the same way that I would stand up on the train to give my seat to someone who seems to need it more than I do: here is something I can address, and I do, and all is well. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1099979

Passing is one of the few words in the transgender lexicon that's not a medical-legacy word. We did ever so much better with this one: it's a racist-legacy word, a legacy of the time when Africans were kidnapped from their homeland to be enslaved in the Americas. If you're not familiar with this, a hierarchy of race developed in which the lighter your skin was, the more attractive and intelligent you were considered, and someone quite light-skinned could sometimes pass for white and live in white society. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1010032

Look for it in the wintertime, if you want to find The Light Of The Season - the real light, not the Hallmark one. Look for the location of resistance. Look for the darkness in which you can be a spark. Look for the opportunity to be bright, to light someone else's way, to warm their hands, to shuttle them safely through the dark. Look for the crack you can fill or the shadow you can dispel by bringing a little bit of the light of resistance, carefully and precisely, to just the place where it is needed. Look for the place of being bright - of being bright and present outside your own house, or in the window, on the opposite side to the mezuzah, letting anyone who passes know. We are here. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1478756

You do not see deviantly gendered people walking around with Nalgene bottles, getting our sixty-four recommended ounces as we go through our days. I am sure that somewhere there is an argument to be made that the trans community as a whole is a little cranky because we could all use a nice big glass of water. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1187269

A real friend, he'd say, is the one who, when you say you need for them to kill someone for you, asks only, "And where did you want me to dump the body?" I understood that it was hyperbole, but I saw him do barely less more than once, to exhaust himself in research and effort to him his people. Which is how he divided the whole world: his people and everyone else. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1432604

My conversations with people who are just beginning to understand and include transsexual and transgender people in their plans or programs lean heavily on this. For them, the very fact of a transsexual who is a real student at their school or client of their agency can be new and surprising. But for queers and transfolk, who have institutionalized an additional set of queerly normative genders, it can sometimes be difficult to hear that we, too, must expand. If butch daddies want to crochet, if twinkly ladyboys are sometimes tops in bed, if burly bears can do BDSM play as little girls, if femme fatales build bookcases in their spare time, these things, too, are not just good but great. They bring us, I believe, wonderful news: news that gendered options can continue to explode, that the chefs in the kitchen of gender are creating new and imaginative specials every day. That we, all of us, are the chefs. Hi. Have a whisk. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1238412

I live in a constellation of intimates, and the shape of us is a family. We touch base and check in, with each other and also - I am so gratified to report - they sometimes check in with one another. Correspondences have sprung up and friendships have started to form beyond my influence. Family has begun to take on a transitive property as well. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 2091172

I don't switch much, don't really want many people to fuck me, because there's a whole code, unwritten but no less rigid than if it were chiseled in stone, about how Tops Must be, how Butches Must Be, and it does not include taking off one's pants. It does not include admitting to one's own desires, only quietly serving the desires of others. It certainly does not include taking a break once in a while to inhabit some other gender, role, or sensibility, even for half a delightful, sweaty hour, in the company of someone who feels like a mirror of me rather than a complementary piece I can fit myself against. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1933297

As she began to speak she stood and started to wrap herself, expertly, creating a binding in minutes that held without a wrinkle until the show ended. Peggy made a connection between binding her breasts and wrapping her hands in boxing wraps; this was what one did before battle, to protect one's self (and it is the Self, absolutely, that binding protects for many butches). — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1833526

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

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1638817

And at the risk of answering the same question the same way over and over: it's not a fucking binary. It would be easier for a lot of people if it were, but it just bloody well ain't, and nothing any of us does can make it that way. Please take a deep breath. Or, — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1458852

There are more locations than girl and boy, man and woman. Decamping from one does not have to mean climbing into another. There's plenty of space in between, or beyond the bounds, or all along and across the plane or sphere or whatever of gender, and it is entirely okay to say, "I do not like being a girl, and so I shall be a boy." But it must also be okay to say, "I do not like being a girl, so I shall set about changing what it means to be a girl," and, yes, okay to say, "I do not like being a girl, and so I shan't. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1418034

Remember - the fault is in the garment, certainly not the girl. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with the shape of her. Some designers cut their clothes for certain body types and others for others. Occasionally the pattern will make her ass look strangely square or the fabric will cling in an unflattering way, but Not Cut Well is always the answer, and it has the extremely delightful quality of saving your ass and being completely true at the same time. Use it wisely. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 1288904

I am doing the best I can. I am hoping I am good enough. I am holding you close, as close as I can, hand cradling your head and breath on your hair, my whole body curved around yours, sheltering you as best I can, trying to remember that I cannot keep you safe, but I can keep you loved. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 79616

I had great femme mentors, I had good role models of gentle men, I found ways to be a butch that did not require being an ass in public, ways of masculinity that were not misogyny - which is what I see more often than I used to these days, this way of butches distancing themselves from any and all things feminine by embodying the worst excesses of men, from relatively harmless ones like spitting on the street and wearing too much cheap cologne to behaving as though women were an entirely separate species of second-class citizen, the objects of jokes and derision. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 901035

Glitter family is my long-time favourite term for this: the people who those of us pushed to society's margins (and beyond) make our cohort. Glitter is known to be shiny and unruly, easy to get and hard to be rid of. I love the drag connotations and the femme visibility of it, as well as its unmistakably queer sensibility - look only as far as glitter-bombing for proof that nothing is as thoroughly and satisfyingly queer as glitter. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 655765

Instead of wishing for the Field Guide, be glad to live in the beautiful chaos of each of us finding our way into our own gendered menu, our own identity, and our own name for it, which - if you will just love us while we do this complex and fragile part - we will kiss into your mouth with such gratitude when we're through. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 214370

You should move toward whatever changes, whatever surgeries, whatever renovations or alterations or restorations will create you in the glory you deserve, oh yes you should. And you should do it with your usual style, and you should do it without shame, and when you're healed up and ready we can go shopping for something fabulous to showcase the many wonders of you. But — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 131769

I'm just saying: I have never really felt like a girl is not the same as I have always felt like a boy. I mention this because when I have these tortuous inner conversations about how I may yet need to change my body and whether (and in what way) I am prepared to invest myself in the destination model of transition, I have to keep reminding myself of this important thing. — S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman Quotes 108864

When people speak admiringly of a butch, what I see is someone who has taken on the best gendered characteristics of both woman and man, left a lot of the stuff born of misogyny and heterosexism behind, and walked forward into the world without apology. — S. Bear Bergman