Nobody Passes Quotes

“If we eliminate the pressure to pass, what delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation might we create?”
― Matt Bernstein Sycamore, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

“I realize that I will always find respite amongst the migrants, the refugees, the expatriates, the homeless, the pirates. I will always be the fence-sitter. I will pass as I see fit and fail to pass when I was really hoping I would and refuse to pass when it serves my purposes.”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

“For people who might struggle to survive at basic levels, it may be more fulfilling to claim an identity like butch, which does not necessarily require engagement with institutions like medicine or academia, which have historically sought to kill, pathologize, or ignore people of color and poor people (and queers). Most transgender scholarship leaves little room for groups of people or ways of being that do not fit a narrow definition of what is scholarly enough or trans-gressive enough.”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

“U.S. society, after all, continues to be starkly segregated along class and race lines, never allowing people to have the sort of interactions necessary to undo prejudices, stereotypes, and oppressions.”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

“After all, isn’t anyone who would actively seek to inhabit femininity frivolous, foolish, and therefore responsible for her own oppression? This stereotype in itself is pretty damn misogynistic; it also points out the misogyny inherent in many who would call themselves feminists, who, rather than reimagining femininity, buy into the dominant discourses that devalue it and do all they can to divorce themselves from that which they fear will make them weak and powerless.”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity