I donât have the book anymore because I slipped it into the locker of my depressed mormon lesbian coworker on the last day of my retail job but it was that kate bornstein book about 101 reasons not to kill yourself and she had a whole section on how every gay and lesbian in history was betraying their assigned gender so utterly that they automatically became trans people and itâs one of those brilliant batshit things trans women say so often that drives the right people bugfuck nuts and I wish I had the full quote
"The next chapter of gender activism was written by the early gay rights activists. They tackled the law of gender that says loud and clear, 'Real men love women, real women love men.' 'No we don't!' cried the homosexuals.
And these pioneers transgressed a deeply rooted rule of gender. Lesbians and gays transgressed gender. Lesbians and gays are transgender. And they needed to band themselves together under some flag.
But it's a terrifying thing to say, 'Hey, I'm a man who loves men, so maybe I'm not a real man!'
And it's a terrifying thing to say, "I'm a woman who loves women, and so what if I'm not a real woman?"
People were even meaner about that kind of talk back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than they are today. It was difficult enough to say the lesbian and gay stuff, and in most areas of the world, it still is. No one was ready to hear not-man, not-woman, So they called themselves lesbian women and gay men, and they said things like, 'We're just like you."
They named themselves after the system that had oppressed them for such a long time. By the simple act of naming themselves women and men, it seems, in Minnie Bruce Pratt's words, that their imaginations were in thrall to the institutions that oppressed them."
Kate Bornstein, Hello Cruel World.
