More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The gender binary is a cultural belief that there are only two distinct and opposite genders: man and woman. This belief is upheld by a system of power that exists to create conflict and division, not to celebrate creativity and diversity.
Is it really a choice when you don’t get to select the options you are given to begin with?
How do you express pain when you can’t even locate the wound?
Our existence is made into a matter of opinion, as if our genders are debatable and not just who we are.
I do not have the luxury of being. I am only seen as doing. As if my gender is something that is being done to them and not something that belongs to me.
Boys don’t do what exactly? Dance, feel, somersault? I learned about gender through shame. In so many ways, they became inseparable for me. As I grew older, people told me to stop being so feminine and grow up. Gender non-conformity is seen as something immature, something we have to grow out of to become adults.
Most of this advice was offered with genuine concern. I suppose some people wanted to protect me from bullying and didn’t realize that they were bullying me in the process.
It’s not just that you internalize the shame; rather, it becomes you.
The idea here was that if you were a boy who displayed even a hint of femininity, then you were gay. And if you were gay, then you were wrong. And if you were wrong, that meant they had license to beat you up in the name of morality.
I figured that if I was going to be effeminate, then I should at least be smart, to have something redeemable about me.
There’s magic in being seen by people who understand—it gives you permission to keep going. Self-expression sometimes requires other people. Becoming ourselves is a collective journey.
We are both too much and never enough. We are always made out to be the problem. But maybe we aren’t the problem; maybe the whole gender system is. Whose definitions are we prioritizing, anyway?
Repression breeds insecurity breeds violence.
People judge gender non-conformity because they are insecure about their identities.
Seeing other people defy this mandate brings the entire system into question.
People have been so conditioned into believing the status quo that any slight attempt to break free from it brings panic and rage.
Conforming to the gender binary was about wanting to hold on to power.
When the basis of your connection is putting down other people, that connection is going to be weak. There’s always the constant fear that people will turn on you.
Conditional acceptance is not freedom—we shouldn’t have to erase our differences in order to be respected.
Power can be defined as the ability to make a particular perspective seem universal.
What’s never questioned here is, whose standards of authenticity are we being held up to in the first place?
Just because an opinion is widely held does not make it right.
It’s not that these people do not exist, it’s that they have been erased to make the Western gender binary seem like the only option, and not a particular and specific cultural worldview.
Normativity, then, is about value judgment
Pain does not have to be visible to be real, and violence does not have to be physical to be serious.
Gender is not what people look like to other people; it is what we know ourselves to be. No one else should be able to tell you who you are; that’s for you to decide.
Using gender-neutral language isn’t about being politically correct, it’s just about being correct.
Scientific knowledge is not fixed—it shifts as cultural prejudice is revealed and challenged.
Everyday people without adequate training pretend to be scientific experts. This doesn’t reveal much about gender, but it does demonstrate the lengths that people go to in order to distort reality to serve their purposes.
Biology and culture are yet another false binary. Nothing exists in a cultural vacuum. Sex is not only biological, it is also cultural. And just because something is cultural doesn’t make it less real.
These people are not accidents or malfunctions; this is how human diversity works.
People in power make hierarchies and stereotypes seem natural in order to make inequality seem inevitable and permanent.
Medical intervention does not make trans people more “real” than others, and it should be a personal choice, not a societal mandate.
Man and woman don’t lose their meaning when we recognize the diversity and difference within them; rather, they invite us to be more specific.
They say that we are erasing them as they actively erase the long history of cultures outside the Western gender binary.
In our fear, we treat other people’s identities as if they are something that they are doing to us and not something that just exists.
Gender is a story, not just a word.
This complexity is not chaos, it just is. We do not need to be universal to be valid.
We spend so much time trying to make other people comfortable that oftentimes we don’t even know what makes us happy. It’s exhausting.
“What part of yourself did you have to destroy in order to survive in this world?”
