Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman
goodreads
In the 15 years since the release of Gender Outlaw, Kate Bornstein's groundbreaking challenge to gender ideology, transgender narratives have made their way from the margins to the mainstream and back again. Today's transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being. In Gender Outlaws, Bornstein, together with writer, raconteur, and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, collects and contextualizes the work of this generation's trans and genderqueer forward thinkers — new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world's most respected mainstream news sources. Gender Outlaws includes essays, commentary, comic art, and conversations from a diverse group of trans-spectrum people who live and believe in barrier-breaking lives.
I made this zine at the end of last year/beginning of this year. You can get a digital PDF version (which includes a greyscale edition) on my itch.io and print versions are available in my shop. Printed with orange riso on pink paper.
Greyscale also available to read for free here (scroll down).
Thinking thinking thinking about Leslie Feinberg in Outlaw talking about gender and zie described hirself as a “transgendered woman.” Leslie had ID’ed as “trans” but I had not heard til that interview zie saying “transgender(ed) woman.”
I know zie considered hirself still a lesbian, and something under a trans umbrella, and while many were quick to assign “trans man” or “transmasc” onto hir, I knew that somewhere in a sense of womanhood, zie identified with a woman-adjacent label still.
I had not considered zie would combine hir sense of womanhood with the label of trans but it makes complete sense, and gives a whole new layer to hir sense of sisterhood with (amab) trans women!
Zie was a woman in a transgressive, transitional, transgender(ed) way. A trans woman.
What a concept of gender and transness that would make so many spaces spit blood. But it makes total sense!
Oh, to have more people recognize the trans umbrella (and frankly entire queer umbrella) as a spectrum of transgressive gender and not as mirrors for cisheteropatriarchy.
The more I see lesbians who are anywhere under the trans umbrella the happier I am.
Since reading Stone Butch Blues at the start of this year,
Since following a bunch of they/them, he/him, she/they/he, nonbinary, trans, butch lesbians on here,
And watching a few interviews by Lynn Breedlove of Tribe 8,
I just feel like home, people like me exist, and people like me have existed for a while! I don't have to debate my identity with anyone, I just *am* some queer, gender-weird butch dyke 🌈
And if you don't like it: goodbye, don't bother me.
first @yeehawgust prompt was 'gather the posse' and since I'm using this challenge as a way to explore new characters I just took that to mean "design the fuckers"
anyways, Whiskey and Tago. Tbh this pose was meant to be more a metaphor thing than literal, but it's making me strongly consider changing Whiskey to being a they/them(plural) instead of a they/them(singular).
“I know I’m not a man … and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably not a woman, either…. The trouble is, we’re living in a world that insists we be one or the other.”
With these words, Kate Bornstein ushers readers on a funny, fearless, and wonderfully scenic journey across the terrains of gender and identity.
On one level, Gender Outlaw details Bornstein’s transformation from heterosexual male to lesbian woman, from a one-time IBM salesperson to a playwright and performance artist. But this particular coming-of-age story is also a provocative investigation into our notions of male and female, from a self-described nonbinary transfeminine diesel femme dyke who never stops questioning our cultural assumptions.
Gender Outlaw was decades ahead of its time when it was first published in 1994. Now, some twenty-odd years later, this book stands as both a classic and a still-revolutionary work—one that continues to push us gently but profoundly to the furthest borders of the gender frontier.