Judith Butler Quotes

Gender is between your ears and not between your legs.

If gender is on a spectrum, where one finds oneself is completely unique.

I want to say that the way in which we understand gender actually changes the way we live gender.

Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so that they no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves.

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.

Gender fluidity is not really feeling like you're at one end of the spectrum or the other. For the most part, I definitely don't identify as any gender. I'm not a guy; I don't really feel like a woman, but obviously I was born one. So, I'm somewhere in the middle, which - in my perfect imagination - is like having the best of both sexes.

I don't have the panic I used to have, meeting people who are androgynous, but when you meet someone whose identity is unclear, that throws your own identity into flux because the way we treat each other is very gendered.

I don't think gender is aesthetically defining for me.

Sexuality is who you are personally attracted to... But gender identity is who you are in your soul.

I think of my gender as a part of my complex humanity.

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

Bodies have a sex, but gender is a thing we made up, like your star sign or nationality. It doesn't really say anything about who you are. The destruction of gender binary would free everybody.

What we really need to look at is gender fluidity and the idea that gender can be customised however you want.

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

If someone's OK with being the 'transgender girl,' that's fine, but that's not me.

Any kind of gender expression is performance for me, regardless of where it is on the spectrum.

I think it's really difficult for folks that aren't transgender to really wrap their mind around the feeling of having a gender identity that differs from their sex assigned at birth. But for me, it felt like a constant feeling of homesickness.

the term 'androgyny' ... defines a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned. Androgyny seeks to liberate the individual from the confines of the appropriate.

Everyone has a masculine and feminine side; masculine qualities and feminine qualities. We've all got these sides to ourselves. And clothes can tell that story. People would think this is very unsympathetic, but I would always say to people, you don't actually need to go through with an operation, can't you just be? You are who you are! But then people say to me, "Oh, you're really dreadful, how would you know?".

I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are.

If we think about sexual life for a gender life, it seems to me that we have to allow for certain kinds of changes or certain kinds of ways of reconceptualizing ourselves.

My feminist view - that gender is on a continuum and we are all better off dropping a lot of those binary notions - is one that is shared by the more recent generation of trans activists and theorists.

It seems to me that "Gender trouble" will always be important to try and open up our ideas of what gender is. So, I don't know if it's revolutionary, but maybe it still has something to say to those issues.

I am like a woman. I have a woman inside me.

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