Judith Butler Quotes

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.

When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that we've taken on a role or we're acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.

Being perceived as a guy is nothing new or complicated to me. It is what it is.

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

We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it's a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.

When I was a kid, I was always mistaken for a girl.

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

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 grew up believing I sounded like a boy.

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

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'm not trying to be a girl by putting on a dress - gender is separated by fabric.

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

I have a lot of characteristics that would normally be present in a guy and then less that would be present in a woman.

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.

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender... identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results.

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 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 think once I was in high school - I had boyfriends and stuff like that, but I think when I was younger, I went through a period where I looked like a boy, and people thought I was a boy.

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.

My secret world had been invaded, and the attractive figure of Tiptree - he did strike several people as attractive - was revealed as nothing but an old lady in Virginia.