#gender outlaw Kate Bornstein

[bog-dwelling-butch]

Books I've read this year:

Tho I'm not done with Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein because it keeps making me stop and ponder & reflect every so often, which isn't a bad thing 😁

[dyke-husband]

Kate Bornstein calls Leslie Feinberg “daddy” (1996)

Watch the full interview here:

[commiegoth]

Interview with nonbinary trans author Kate Bornstein, promoting her book Gender Outlaw (Mondo 2000 #13, 1995)

Full text under cut

I‘m walking down 16th Street minding my own business. This good looking woman is coming toward me. She's got on baggy unbuttoned overalls and an orange tank top. Her arms look good, her shoulders look good, and what I can see of her stomach looks good. Two guys are standing on the sidewalk. As she passes them, one says to the other, “I'd like to take that one home.” The other guy agrees. The woman keeps walking. Now it's my turn to pass 'em. “I'd like to take that one home and knock A her around a little bit,” the first guy says. I keep walking. The other guy answers. “That's a her?”

But enough about me. This is supposed to be about Kate Bornstein who wants you to read her new book Gender Outlaw. Bornstein used to be a man; now she’s not. Bornstein used to be a heterosexual; now she isn't. Bornstein used to have a dick; now she doesn’t.

She’s a “used-to-be-a-man, three husbands, father, first mate on an ocean-going yacht, minister, high-powered IBM sales type, Pierre Cardin three-piece suitor, bar-mitzvah’d, circumcised yuppie from the East Coast… a used-to-be politically correct, wanna-be butch, dyke phone sex hostess, smooth talking, telemarketing, love slave, art slut, pagan Tarot reader, maybe soon a grandmother, crystal palming, incense burning, not man, not always a woman, fast becoming a Marxist.”

All that’s not what makes her an outlaw. What makes her an outlaw is she sees a time when folks will look at the binary gender system and throw back their heads and laugh— ha ha ha. Males and females and that’s it? Ha ha ha. Get the fuck outta here.

Bornstein’s looking forward to us all living in what author Marjorie Garber (Vested Interests, Routledge) calls the Third Space. “This whole concept of three is so beautiful,” Kate says, “because it includes the first two. I don’t say there’s a third space that exists between men and women. I say there’s a third space outside of the Binary which leaves the Binary as this construct off to the side, very fragile and apt to fall apart.”

If I were a man, everything about me that brings me grief in the world—the way | walk, the way I talk, the way I think, the way | stand, the way I sit, the way I dress, the way | cut my hair, how much I weigh, how much weight I lift—would not only be acceptable, it would be revered. If we lived in the Third Space, it wouldn't even matter.

Bornstein had to learn a lot of rules in order to fit in. Like when a man walks down the street he looks people in the eye; when a woman walks down the street she looks at the ground. And women talk different. They have higher, breathier voices and their speech is more modulated. In mixed conversations, it’s the woman's job to laugh at the bad jokes and fill in the awkward silences. They smile constantly while they’re talking and use tag questions to qualify sentences, like “you know what I mean?”

“All of these customs are forms of self-deprecation,” says Bornstein, “like learning how to keep my knees together and not putting my arm across the back of my seat in the subway train. A lot of that was not so much to be a woman as to pass as a woman, so that I wouldn't call attention to myself.”

If we lived in the Third Space, she wouldn't have had to worry. In fact, if we lived in the Third Space, she might not even have had penile conversion surgery.

“I don’t do well with might-have-beens,” she says. “I resent that I was manipulated into that surgery by every signpost in the culture. I was not aware of other possibilities at the time. I was a total subscriber to the Binary and to the genitals by which it stands.

“I knew I wasn’t BOY, I knew I wasn’t MAN. Neither of those categories fit for me. It didn’t feel right, I have no idea why. I tried for thirty some odd years and it didn’t work. The only other option I saw in the culture was GIRL, or WOMAN. Nowhere did I see that it was okay to be a “real woman”—which I believed in—with a penis! So the next step was get rid of the penis. This insistence on the Binary and the genital imperative that signals the Binary coerced me into that. If I knew everything that I know now, would I do it again? Yes. Absolutely yes, because sex is so much more fun now.”

Back to this idea of the Third Space, how do we get there?

“Cyberspace would be a doorway into the Third Space,” according to Bornstein. “Cyberspace frees us up from the restrictions placed on identity by our bodies. It allows us to explore more kinds of relationships.

“I can go online as anything. I go online as various kinds of women. I've gone online as a guy a couple of times; I’m playing a stable boy in a vampire scenario now. I’ve gone online as different monsters. I’ve gone online as Mr. Spock in a ‘Star Trek’ scenario.

“Cross-gender identity surfing online is so telling: Men slum and women step into the trappings of power as men. You talk to a man after he’s been a woman online and he'll usually laugh and describe some kind of sex he had, usually lesbian sex. But you talk to a woman who's been surfing as a man, there’s this spark there. There’s this wonder. There's this—'They really do have this power!’ As soon as men cop to the idea that women are learning this, they’re gonna be more frightened.”

Bingo.

In Gender Outlaw, Bornstein asks: “If wealth and power are important, and if in this world wealth and power belong to men, then why did I cease being a man and give up that wealth and power?"

Some male-to-female transsexuals argue—often in response to being excluded from women-born-women only clubs—that they didn’t have a real male experience because they were never real males. Bornstein’s not buying it. “I had a bona fide male experience—of course I did. I’ve been bar-mitzvah’d. I hated it. Being male and hating it sets up a fugue experience. It’s definitely a form of madness. | think one way of dealing with the madness is to say it never really happened. That’s a legitimate way of dealing with it, but the fact of the matter is, I spent over thirty years of my life as a man or boy. I did not like it. I hated it. I drank a lot. I did a lot of drugs. I played a lot of arcade games.”

Once you've altered your gender, it’s gotta seem like anything’s possible. The whole world must open up. Does that mean that transgender stuff is the final frontier? Bornstein doesn’t think so.

She believes that once people get a grip on the idea of the Third Space, and transgender stuff becomes passé, we're probably gonna have to look at other binary divisions. “What are the differences between animals and humans? What are the differences between plants and animals? What about artificial intelligence, androids like Data from “Star Trek?” They're gonna be around. | think the gender binary is the one most firmly entrenched in our culture simply because it’s the one that capitalism trades on the most, other than class. We haven't confronted class. A minor communist uprising in Eastern Europe is not dealing with class. Certainly, the United States has never dealt with class. I think the fact that my book actually got published by a respectable publisher is an indicator that the culture is ready to chew on gender, whereas I don’t think the American culture is as ready to chew on class.

“I'd say gender is the last apparent frontier. It’s the frontier that’s just become illuminated. It’s titillating. In public relations terms it’s sexy. In sex terms it’s sexy. It’s a movement, a real live movement—ready or not, here we come!”

Meanwhile, back on 16th Street.

I take a few more steps, then my brain turns over and I say to myself, “Fuck this shit.”

I stop, turn around, walk back, and stand in front of the first guy. “You say something to me?”

He’s shocked. He starts stuttering and shaking his head.

“Uh…uh…no…I was just…I mean…he was just…I mean…he wanted to know—"

I interrupt him.

“Something about knocking somebody around?”

He starts stuttering again.

“Uh…no…uh, I was just… I mean, he just… I mean, I was just saying—"

I interrupt him again.

“You know what it sounded like you said? It sounded like you said you wanted to suck my dick.”

“Uh…uh… your dick?” He looks at my crotch to see if I have one.

(I do, but it’s back at my apartment.)

��Yeah,” I say, “that’s what it sounded like you said. I think you want to suck my dick, don't you?”

He looks at my crotch again, then he looks back at my face. He grins, still stuttering.

Uh...well...I, I, I... I wouldn't mind.”

“That's what I thought,” I say, and walk away.

For an almost complete collection of Bornsteiniana, start with Gender Outlaw (Routledge), go directly to The Last Sex, Arthur and Mary-Louise Kroker (St. Martins Press), and keep an eye out for performances of Hidden: A Gender and Virtually Yours. The unsatisfied can obsessively watch for guest appearances on Geraldo.

[transbookoftheday]

Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein

“I know I’m not a man … and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably not a woman, either…. The trouble is, we’re living in a world that insists we be one or the other.”

With these words, Kate Bornstein ushers readers on a funny, fearless, and wonderfully scenic journey across the terrains of gender and identity.

On one level, Gender Outlaw details Bornstein’s transformation from heterosexual male to lesbian woman, from a one-time IBM salesperson to a playwright and performance artist. But this particular coming-of-age story is also a provocative investigation into our notions of male and female, from a self-described nonbinary transfeminine diesel femme dyke who never stops questioning our cultural assumptions.

Gender Outlaw was decades ahead of its time when it was first published in 1994. Now, some twenty-odd years later, this book stands as both a classic and a still-revolutionary work—one that continues to push us gently but profoundly to the furthest borders of the gender frontier.

[on-the-pansy-path]

Gender quiz from 1998

found this in an old trans magazine, thought some might enjoy. 

https://archive.org/details/transgendertapes8219unse/page/n19/mode/1up?view=theater- a very interesting read 100 recommend

[lupuslikethewolf]

i think everyone would benefit from reading (at minimum) the 101 Gender Outlaw's section of Kate Bornstein's Gender Workbook.

[infernalcrypt]

i got an e reader for my birthday and i immediately loaded like 6 transgender books into it. good times

[fuchsiamenace]

purchased this book today at a half priced books and feeling like I stumbled across a beautiful secret

[scarletemeraldpurple]

As a transmasc butch I cannot even put into words how frustrating and disgusting this person and their line of thinking is. There is so much beautiful trans (transmasc and transfem mind you) dyke history that doesn’t have shit to do with “biological sex” (which is A. not immutable because it is B. a false binary that is violently reinforced)

Hell Leslie Feinberg in the fucking 90s identified transphobia and biological essentialism as something that was killing the feminist movement of the time. God I’m so pissed off sorry

One of the most popular agathario authors being a terf is so disgusting, actually!

[bog-dwelling-butch]

When I started to read Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw I did a little bit of looking up about her

And after reading books by and about so many trans activists that when I looked them up they turned out to be dead by the time I started reading their books I am so absolutely thrilled to discover Kate Bornstein is alive 😭😭😭❤️🏳️‍⚧️

[gatheringbones]

kate bornstein, from gender outlaw: men, women, and the rest of us, 1995

[ftmtftm]

Hi I've seen you use the tag transfeminism a lot but I've never seen anyone else talk about it? Would you mind explaining it, or if not maybe pointing me in the direction of what to read to understand it? Thanks a lot in advance! <3

Yeah absolutely!

The most broad and basic premise of transfeminism is: it is feminist practice that works to incorporate the experiences of trans individuals into a feminist framework.

Depending on what theorists you engage with transfeminism is either a framework for the liberation of all trans individuals from the Patriarchy - or it solely focuses on the experiences of trans women and fems. I personally ascribe to the theories of the former, not the latter.

The best, and easiest, place to start with transfeminist theory in my opinion is with Emi Koyama's "Transfeminist Manifesto" - [ here ]. The first 10 pages are the Manifesto as originally written. The last 5 are a postscript to the manifesto and a bonus piece about racist feminism. I highly recommend reading the postscript, I find it fundamental to my own understanding of transfeminist praxis.

You can read more of Koyama's work on her website - [ here ] - and I highly recommend it! She's a profound trans and intersex advocate.

I also recommend trans theorists that pre-date Koyama such as Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, and Judith Butler. They're all nonbinary trans theorists across a multitude of identities and experiences. I love this interview with Feinberg and Bornstein a lot - [ here ].

Feinberg was prolific and the first author to truly advance the concept of transgender liberation - hir website [ here ] has a free PDF download of hir book Stone Butch Blues and several other resources on hir work and life.

Bornstein's books Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us and Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation are go-to's of mine regarding a relatively modern history and understanding of trans identity. Her My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, a Real You, or Something Else Entirely really helped shape my own relationship to my gender identity really positively and profoundly!

Judith Butler's most recent book Who's Afraid of Gender is also incredibly good, however it is incredibly dense in an academic sense. It personally takes me weeks to get through Butler's writing because it is so jammed with information - and that's not to their discredit, it's just the way they write. I highly recommend looking up some of their talks and interviews on YouTube as they're an easier introduction to their work.

Personally, I don't like Julia Serano as an author all that much, but she is still an influential transfeminist voice to be aware of because she coined and popularized the term transmisogyny. I personally have a lot of criticism of her work - particularly her seminal work Whipping Girl - because it explicitly, in her own words, is intended to be distinctly different from the work of Feinberg, Bornstein, and Riki Wilchins (another nonbinary intersex activist) and is more interested in societal perception and binary trans womanhood over politics and liberation. It also stands in opposition to a lot of the liberationist ideals of the Feminists she claims to be inspired by. I've read the whole book twice over now and in my opinion it reeks of White Feminism. I don't recommend it outside of reading it for context to the wider transfeminist discourse.

Transfeminism as a whole is also deeply entangled with the politics of Black and Intersectional Feminist politics, as many of those previously mentioned authors worked with, worked around, or were inspired by authors like Audre Lorde and bell hooks. As such I highly recommend both of them as authors as well!! I think their work really helps set the framework transfeminist theory is also built around.

I hope this helps!!

[astridellejo]

Anastasia Transarovna

Wait... more autobiographical comics during Pride Month 2024?

Comic text transcript below the cut!

1. In 1984, I saw a character on television who would live in my brain for the rest of my life. She had long black hair, glasses, and black form-fitting body armor.

2. The Baroness

3. Little Elle: I need to be her! … is a totally normal thing for a nine year old boy to think.

4. That Guy: But she's a girl! You are a boy! Little Elle: Oh.

5. So I got older and just pushed The Thoughts out of my mind. Little Elle: I wish I'd wake up as a girl.

6. That Guy: It would be really nice if this "wanting to be the opposite sex" part of puberty would hurry up and finish! … is a totally normal thing for a seventeen year old guy to say.

7. I didn't know being transgender was a thing. I thought everybody went through feelings of wanting to be a different gender.

8. Eventually I figured out what my deal was. But it was a very arduous process full of angst. And it took many years to get where I am now.

[The books are "Gender Outlaw" by Kate Bornstein and "Transgender Warriors" by Leslie Feinberg.]

9. Elle: Black form-fitting body armor. I wonder if I could even pull off that look? … is a totally normal thing for a 49 year old trans woman to think.

[eternal-echoes]

“Those who promote the notion that "gender-affirmative" therapy is the only ethical pathway for treatment often make this claim based on the premise that gender is innate and unchanging. Yet at the same time, they strive to defend the narrative that gender is fluid. In the words of Kate Bornstein, "Gender fluidity is the ability to freely and knowingly become one or many of a limitless number of genders, for any length of time or rate of change."(39) Or, as Julia Serano explained, "[The majority of the transgender people I know understand that our experiential gender is potentially fluid and often changes over time as we accumulate new experiences."(40) Therefore, if one's internal sense of gender identity isn't always fixed, why would it not be possible for therapists to assist clients to realign their identity with their sex?

Many psychologists have found counseling effective in this regard. This is not about dismissing the intensity and reality of one's dysphoric feelings. Rather, it involves taking a deeper look at the challenges being faced by the individual who is experiencing such feelings. Psychiatrist Susan Bradley noted that many who transition and reflect with regret upon their decision often say, "I wish somebody had understood me from a psychological point of view and didn't just take at face value that I thought this was the answer to how I was feeling."(41) Or, as Dr. Deborah Soh asks, "If a gender dysphoric person is not experiencing a mental health disorder, why do they need to transition to feel better?"(42)

Counseling has been proven to help individuals who experience gender dysphoria, in some cases to experience greater alignment to their biological sex.(43) It can involve therapy for coexisting psychological issues, parental counseling, talk therapy, and other forms of counseling. In a follow-up study by Dr. Kenneth Zucker and colleagues, of the twenty-five young women who had been treated by psychological interventions, gender dysphoria persisted in only three of the patients.(44)”

-Jason Evert, Male, Female, or Other: A Catholic Guide to Understanding Gender

—

Work cited:

39) Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Routledge, 1994), 52.

40) Serano, Whipping Girl, 226.

41) Soh, The End of Gender, 169.

42) Soh, The End of Gender, 152.

43) Cf. K. Zucker et al., "A Developmental, Biopsychosocial Model for the Treatment of Children with Gender Identity Disorder," Journal of Homosexuality 59 (2012), 369-397; L. Lothstein et al., "Expressive Psychotherapy with Gender Dysphoric Patients," Archives of General Psychiatry 38:8 (August 1981), 924-929; J. Kronberg et al., "Treatment of Transsexualism in Adolescence," Journal of Adolescence 4.2 (1981), 177-185.

44) Cf. Kelley D. Drummond et al., "A Follow-Up Study of Girls with Gender Identity Disorder," Developmental Psychology 44, no. 1 (2008): 34-45.

—

For more recommended resources on gender dysphoria, click here.

[grubloved]

Last summer, in the front yard: "I'd feel a lot better if I weren't so fat," I said, slapping my big thighs where they flattened out against the warm concrete step. His back was to me; he was planting something. "Yeah...maybe if you got more exercise," he said. "And we should really be eating more fruits and vegetables." When he turned around to get another bulb out of the bag, I had my head in my hands and the sniffles were audible. "Oh, honey," he said, and sat down beside me on the step and put his arm around me. "What's wrong?" "You weren't supposed to agree with me." My voice quivered. "Ohhhhh..." he said, pondering. We sat together in the sun while I tried to get myself under control. He hugged me. "I'm so sorry, honey," he said, sincerely. "I keep thinking of you as a big dyke, and to a big dyke that wouldn't matter. But I forgot: you're a big fag, and of course it matters." How could I not love a man like that?

from the old folks at home, by joan hardy, for gender outlaws: the next generation, edited by s bear bergman & kate bornstein

[riotdyke]

hey could i ask, what does being butch mean to you? all my friends tell me I've got butch vibes, or I'm butch-adjacent, or whatever, and it feels good, it feels right. i feel so much euphoria when people see me that way. but I'm not really even sure what it means. I'm sporty, I'm handy, i don't dress very feminine, sure, but that feels....kind of surface level? i guess I'm wondering, surely there's something deeper to it than that? i feel like i want it to be something more meaningful about who i am at my core i guess

Okay so this is a question I've answered a couple different ways over the years, and it always ends with me rambling a bit so stay with me: For me, being butch has a lot to do with how I interact with the world around me. In Gender Outlaw, Kate Bornstein has an interesting idea of relating gender to a language we speak to others to tell them how to perceive us - it can signify our class, our ideals, our relation to patriarchy, and what defines us most. I think that speaks a lot to my conception of what being butch means: I want people to know my values just through my looks, my deeds, and the way I hold myself. I want them to know that I value forms of masculinity and femininity not defined by an oppressive patriarchal cishet culture, that solidarity and understanding for those who are shunned by society is a priority for me, and that I won't be forced to accept what that same society thinks a person has to be. In that way I find my butch identity to be very closely tied to my politics. The forces that systemically keep these forms of oppression alive can only really be halted by a movement built on loyalty to one another and love for community, and I think many of us hold compassion and fidelity very near to our hearts because of that.

But to get back to the point - I think the fact that it gave you such euphoria is already a good sign you might be exploring in the right direction. Sporty and handy can definitely be a part of it for you, it is for a lot of folks, but you're right that it is so much deeper than aesthetic and interest and I'm hoping that delving those depths is something that might be in your future. Even if you don't end up feeling like calling yourself butch is quite right, I think we always get value out of that sort of introspection. What do you want people to see when they look at you, to know about you? What do you want to tell the world? Like words and languages, the possibilities are endless.