Alice Dreger Quotes

I never get to forget who I am, my gender identity.

I was a tomboy as a kid - I was skinny and had cropped hair and was often mistaken for a boy - and up until I was about six, I had my own very fluid ideas of gender in that I believed that, somehow, an individual could choose whether or not s/he wanted to be a boy or a girl.

I grew up believing I sounded like a boy.

When I was five, long before I understood what the word 'gender' meant, I would always tell my mother that I wished I were a girl.

I felt alien my whole life, but I didn't feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.

To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

Gender is between your ears and not between your legs.

As you get older it's more confusing. Suddenly, there's more pressure to fit in to your assigned gender.

I think that people are most comfortable when the world is orderly. I think there's the sense that when you begin questioning basic distinctions, such as the distinction between being male and being female, it represents a threat to the social order.

I don't think gender even exists.

I don't understand when you say I'm a man or I have a deep voice. I know I'm a female, so there's no question for me.

I don't know what I am if I'm not a woman.

I'm totally fine with myself. It's the other people I run into out there who are so hung up on gender. The way it trips them up is their problem, not mine.

Gender doesn't exist in my book.

We need to overcome the stereotype that genders aren't fluid.

The thought of being a boy makes me cringe. I just couldn't do it.

I feel like there's no such thing as gender.

We've been socialised and told that there is a way to describe people, and that way is by their gender or their sex.

We all have a cross-gender character: Every woman has a man that they can play, and every man has a woman that they can play.

I wanted to show a normal young girl whose only difference was that she behaved in the way a boy might, without any sense of guilt on a moral or sexual level.

I was always just so feminine. I don't think anyone who ever met me would describe me as a man.

It's my view that gender is culturally formed, but it's also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation.

As a little kid, I was convinced that I was a guy.

I always felt like the male from the time I was a child. There wasn't much feminine about me.

When I was born, there was a very isolated idea of what it meant to be a man or a woman, and you belonged to one gender or the other.