The Gender Games Quotes

“I dare to dream of a world where people can dress, speak and behave how they want, free from mockery, derision, judgement, harassment and danger. This is what I want. Who’s with me?”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both

“Remember this, whoever you are, however you are, you are equally valid, equally justified and equally beautiful.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both

“Where we’re from, both the location and the environment we’ve stewed in, has a massive impact on the adults we become.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both

“I sometimes wonder if people are so wary of transgender progress because we highlight how something we often consider carved in stone can be so easily manipulated.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both

“Fame is Diet Love. It tastes like love and looks like love, but there’s zero per cent real love in it.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both

“No panel, no scientist, no politician, not the WHO, no one can tell me – or you – how it feels to be male or female.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both

“Trans people are a living reminder that something we steadfastly believe to be carved in stone (gender) is actually a very moveable feast.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“When is it Straight Pride?’ ‘What day is International Men’s Day?’ ‘Where are our rights?’ cried people who have all the rights already.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“There are no reported cases of trans women assaulting women or children in public bathrooms.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“it implicitly suggests that women are at risk of harassment, rape and violence from trans women. This, quite clearly, is prejudice. Making sweeping, awful assumptions or accusations towards any minority group is prejudice.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“A generation of young men who’ve always had access to high-quality streaming pornography and never had access to decent sex education at school.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“Last year, Crystal Cash, a trans woman from the USA, was shot in the face by Christian extremists. She survived but is now unable to talk.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“men are very much at risk of mental health issues and suicide,fn5 but I don’t think that’s the same thing as living in abject, constant fear.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“They need to realise that by not actively acknowledging all women, they have themselves become oppressors.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“Gender is learned behaviour”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“It’s different when a woman compliments you to a man. She doesn’t want anything back from you.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“none of us know how it ‘feels to be a man’ or how it ‘feels to be a woman’. We have only a unique, personalised experience of how it FEELS TO BE US.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“mothers are still doing the lion’s share of parenting. There’s not a lot of good in trying to explicitly parent in a gender-neutral way when there’s nothing implicitly gender-neutral about the parenting.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“study indicates that parents have different expectations for sons and daughters as early as twenty-four hours after birth.fn4”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“It takes a phenomenally brave child to continually defy Gender’s wishes. It also takes brave parents.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“How often, when we tell children they are ‘being good’, do we mean they are blindly conforming?”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“Women may appear to have been ‘liberated’ from the kitchen sink fifty years ago, but we are yet to achieve anything even vaguely resembling equality.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“In a world without socially defined gender rules, maybe no one would need to transition,”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“the World Health Organization (WHO) defines gender as ‘the result of socially constructed ideas about the behaviour, actions, and roles a particular sex performs.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“Gender is not sex. Gender is something else.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“people are so wary of transgender progress because we highlight how something we often consider carved in stone can be so easily manipulated”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“Any creative writing teacher worth their salt will tell you that a great story never starts at the beginning, it starts when something changes.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem with Men and Women, from Someone Who Has Been Both

“Even family favourite Lego has succumbed to Gender. In the non-pink section you can buy a Lego airport for £69. In the pink section you can buy a Lego Friends airport for £79. The only difference, you’ve guessed it, is that the Lego Friends airport is pink. IT IS AN AIRPORT.fn2 It was at that point, regrettably, I burned the store to the ground.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both

“I think – as women – we can all agree on one thing: sometimes biology fucks us over. Those of us who can’t get pregnant – does that make a woman less of a woman? Women who choose IVF or surrogacy? Those of us who need mastectomies – less of a woman? Those of us (including me) on HRT – less womanly? I think I’m just one more woman who was royally fucked over by biology and now I’m in the process of putting that right.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both

“So yeah, I personified Gender and made him some scary presence that lurks under every child’s bed, but actually, if you think about it, gender is no more corporeal than a bogeyman. It’s an abstract concept. If gender isn’t a real, solid thing we can reach out and touch, then why shouldn’t we be able to change it? All of us.”
― Juno Dawson, The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both