Gender Categories Quotes & Sayings

I read my email aloud to hear how it sounded, then I read it again in a British accent to make sure it didn't come across as pretentious. — Jerry Mahoney

Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special Sunday quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater proprietyand stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothes. — Rose Wilder Lane

The arbitrary character of patriarchal ascriptions of temperament and role has little effect upon their power over us. Nor do the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and polar qualities of the categories "masculine" and "feminine" imposed upon human personality give rise to sufficiently serious question among us. Under their aegis each personality becomes little more, and often less than half, of its human potential. Politically, the fact that each group exhibits a circumscribed but complementary personality and range of activity is of secondary importance to the fact that each represents a status or power division. In the matter of conformity patriarchy is a governing ideology without peer; it is probably that no other system has ever exercised such a complete control over its subjects. — Kate Millett

I waited. After what seemed an hour, but which was only fifty-nine minutes, — Robert Leslie Bellem

I am somewhat allergic to explanations that divide men and women into frozen categories and attribute to each sex its characteristic virtues and shortcomings. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

What I said to them at half time would be unprintable on the radio. — Gerry Francis

With pornography, if you don't get hard or wet, depending on your gender, it didn't work. With humour, if you don't laugh it didn't work. And with horror, if you don't get scared or haunted, depending on what it's trying to do, it didn't work. I'm fascinated by those three categories. — Neil Gaiman

As far as art's concerned, I probably like modern art more than traditional art. — Paul McCartney

Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so. It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone, as a passion must be undergone. It may also be that life itself becomes foreclosed when the right way is decided in advance, or when we impose what is right for everyone, without finding a way to enter into community and discover the "right" in the midst of cultural translation. It may be that what is "right" and what is "good" consist in staying open to the tensions that beset the most fundamental categories we require, to know unknowingness at the core of what we know. — Judith Butler

The ski club was a frugal and intergenerational group. It gave dime-store trophies for speed and agility within categories of gender, age, and experience, and so eventually everyone got a trophy. — Meredith Marple

Men can be relentless," she agrees, "when they think a woman belongs to them. — Rae Carson

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside. — Dorothy Allison

I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. — Judith Butler

Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love,
for I have put my trust in you.
Show me the way I should go,
for to you I lift up my soul.
Rescue me from my enemies, O LORD,
for I hide myself in you.
Teach me to do your will,
for you are my God;
may your good Spirit
lead me on level ground. -Psalm 143:8-10, NIV — Anonymous

No, I want big ol' titties in my face! — Chris Rock

Do not ghettoize society by putting people into legal categories of gender, race, ethnicity, language, or other such characteristics. — Preston Manning

I have heard an argument that transgender people oppress transsexual people because we are trying to tear down the categories of male and female. But isn't this the same reactionary argument used against transmen and transwomen by those who argue that any challenges to assigned birth sex threaten the categories of man and woman? Transgender people are not dismantling the categories of man and woman. We are opening up a world of possibilities in addition. Each of us has a right to our identities. To claim one group of downtrodden people is oppressing another by their self-identification is to swing your guns away from those who really do oppress us, and to aim them at those who are already under siege. — Leslie Feinberg

One of the concepts I was having trouble illustrating was the concept that administrative systems create narrow categories of gender and force people into them in order to get their basic needs met - what I call "administrative violence." I had images of forms with gender boxes and ID cards with gender markers, but I also wanted an image that would capture how basic services like shelters are gender segregated. — Dean Spade