Judith Butler Quotes

Nothing is either all masculine or all feminine except having sex.

I've definitely met some people that cultivated a masculinity that they taught themselves. I don't know how they figured out how to do it, but I couldn't.

Most gay men are as sexist in their thinking as are heterosexuals. Their patriarchal thinking leads them to construct paradigms of desirable sexual behaviour that is similar to that of patriarchal straight men.

I'm not looking for a boyish girl. I'm looking for a boy. And I'm not looking for a girlish boy either.

The terms 'male' and 'female' must be understood as representing no mere primitive opposition of sex to sex; but as defining two worlds of differing quality, in either of which men and women may jointly move and live.

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

If I talk to a girl, it's assumed that I'm having a scene with her. If I don't, then it's assumed that I'm gay.

I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.

Our main reasons for fearing males having sex with males is that you really had to construct a more powerful social role to keep men in their place than you did to keep women in their place.

Gender is between your ears and not between your legs.

There is no conscious choice of heterosexual identity any more than there is a homosexual one. The last person in the world who wants to be homosexual, for the most part, are homosexuals.

In Turkey, Egypt and the Maghreb, men who are ‘active’ in sexual relations with other men are not considered homosexual; the sexual domination of other men even confers a status of hyper-masculinity.

I was really raised in a gender-neutral household. I always knew I was a girl, but it never occurred to me that there was a limitation.

Let's call a spade a spade: when people look at me, they say, 'Oh, she's the androgynous one.' I'll tell you what type of character I would never be offered out there: The femme fatale. Or the white-trash, heterosexual hillbilly.

Homophobia, transphobia, and sexism, they're all rooted in the same prejudice: the belief that one perception at birth - the sex we are assigned - should dictate who we are, who we love, how we act, and what we do.

Gay men are still men.

Gay people are made and not born.

It would be easier for people to grasp that gender, sex, and sexual orientation are different things if we had as much imagination in real life as we do when we are making our movies.

Really, I think the extra layer of raising a son as a gay black man comes from trying to raise a son who doesn't subscribe to masculine stereotypes.

Let us stop pathologizing masculinity. Instead, let us appreciate the endless ways by which men and women are similar to one another, as well as the important ways in which the two sexes differ.

I feel that most gay men are so much more in touch with a certain kind of sensitivity that heterosexual men aren't allowed to be in touch with, their feminine side. To me they're whole human beings, more so than most of the straight men that I know.

The gender prism is just descending upon us. For instance, when we're girls of nine or 10 we may be climbing trees and saying, "I know what I want. I know what I think." And then suddenly at 11 or 12, the gender role takes hold, and adults tell us, "How clever of you to know what time it is." It happens to boys, too and even sooner - between five and eight. Before that, boys cry and express uncertainty.

The time has come, I think, when we must recognize bisexuality as a normal form of human behavior... we shall not really succeed in discarding the straitjacket of our cultural beliefs about sexual choice if we fail to come to terms with the well-documented, normal human capacity to love members of both sexes.

We need to stop raising boys to think that they need to prove their masculinity by being controlling or by not showing emotion or by not being little girls.

Those that think my clothes are androgynous also still believe that women should look like Barbie dolls. That's precisely the problem, the deep-rooted assumptions about what is feminine.