Gender Norms Quotes

“Long before we had writing or farms or post-digital strike helicopters, we had each other. We lived together and changed each other, and so we needed to say “this is who I am, this is what I do.”

So, in the same way that we attached sounds to meanings to make language, we began to attach clusters of behavior to signal social roles. Those clusters were rich, and quick-changing, and so just like language, we needed networks devoted to processing them. We needed a place in the brain to construct and to analyze gender.”
― Isabel Fall

“Some gender norms are healthy, some are unhealthy - you must wake up from the patriarchal sleep to recognize which is which.”
― Abhijit Naskar, See No Gender

“I understood intersectionality—the way that white supremacy props up patriarchy props up poverty props up environmental destruction props up white supremacy again—on a gut level, even if I didn’t know to call it “intersectionality” yet. I understood that sex workers are often stigmatized, barred from claiming their full humanity, by sexist culture and feminist movements alike. I understood that the idea of “The Closet” applied to so much more than just queer people, that we are all in a closet of one kind or another. And, contrary to all of my actions since, I understood that high heels and back problems were, in fact, related. What stands out to me most is that, at the age of seventeen, I seem to have understood the full stakes of what I was doing. I understood that by challenging gender norms and conventional masculinity, I was challenging, well, everything. Through challenging the idea of manhood, of being “a good man,” of “manning up,” I was burrowing deep into the core of power, privilege, and hierarchy. On a gut level, I understood that my freedom and liberation were wrapped up with those of so many others who were facing oppression.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“To fight against these falsehoods, though, one needed to be able to see past the present-day and very male-oriented distortion lens to the underlying truth. Beyond question, Molly Valle could do this. A woman whose surface appearance, eyeglasses and conservative clothes, fit the schoolmarm stereotype to a T. Yet she had sloughed off that exterior and society’s restrictions as effortlessly as she had her clothes, and during their lovemaking, she had not only kept up with him but often passed ahead of him. With other women, he had seen the embers of passion but never the flame. Tonight, he had witnessed the bonfire.”
― Ray Smith, The Magnolia That Bloomed Unseen

“If there are real men, I haven't met them yet.”
― T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“If you don't challenge things, all you have done is passed it on to the next woman to deal with.”
― Julia Hardy

“i am relieved.
when
i see the feminine presence
in a man’s eyes.
it means
he is a peace
i do not
have
to
bring to him.

–– ease”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

“In traditional Aeluon culture, a mother was not a parent. Parents were men and shon. Parents went to school for it. Parents were the people who actually raised children, not those who had done the easy business of creating them. The gendered expectations of parenting were dissolving, but even though women could be found working in creches now, there was still an enormous difference between the person who produced an egg and the person who took care of the little being that crawled out of it. Parenting was a profession, and it was not Pei’s. She could not imagine living like Ouloo, performing two distinct jobs at once, splitting herself for decades until Tupo reached adulthood. The whole idea was overwhelming.”
― Becky Chambers, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

“Just because she saw that the vagaries of capitalism, patriarchy, gender norms, or consumerism contributed to facial dysphoria didn't mean she had developed immunity to them. In fact, a political consciousness honed on queer sensitivity simply made her feel guilty about not having managed to change her deeply ingrained beauty norms. Call her a fraud, a hypocrite, superficial, but politics and practice parted paths at her own body.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“I'm gitting tired of Harpo, she say. All he think about since us married is how to make me mind. He don't want a wife, he want a dog.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“Absolutely, women just love cleaning because it's in our 'female DNA'—right next to the 'loves pink' gene.”
― Anubha Saxena

“When I was pushed to the brink of loneliness and gender agony as a third grader, when I didn’t know how to communicate with the adults in my life about what was going on, I channeled my anger at my own body, my own existence. When the world made who I was feel impossible, I began to see my own body as an impossibility. For years of my life, I told myself this was normal. That kids just thought about killing themselves sometimes. That every third grader had experienced that. In order to move on with my life, I had to normalize it.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“Estamos más guapas con la boca cerrada. We are prettier with our mouths shut.”
― Ruta Sepetys, The Fountains of Silence

“Many girls think of the 'feelings' of those who are hurting them. This is the catastrophic consequence of likeability. We have a world full of women who are unable to exhale fully because they have for so long been conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

“The moment you become aware of your automatic behaviours, judging and expecting another human being to live and behave within the stereotypical gender boxes, you cannot go back to being unconscious. This is when you know you are changing”
― Runa Magnusdottir, The Story of Boxes, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly: The Secret to Human Liberation, Peace and Happiness

“I will not feel ashamed because I don’t adhere to gender roles I never consented to being part of in the first place.”
― Essie Dennis, Queer Body Power: Finding Your Body Positivity

“I'm gitting tired of Harpo, she say. All he think about since us married is how to make me mind. He don't want a wifw, he want a dog.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“Society believes that every man comes out of the womb with a PhD in 'Fixing Stuff 101”
― Anubha Saxena

“Iris Marion Young discusses how some girls learn to “throw like girls”; they learn not to get themselves behind an action, exhibiting what she calls “inhibited intentionality.” She describes how girls often “lack confidence in their capacity to do what needs to be done.” She notes, “We decide beforehand—usually mistakenly—that the task is beyond us and thus give it less than our full effort.”Decisions we make about our capacities are not always our own. We receive messages all the time that tell us who can do what (and who cannot). If you are told you can’t do it, that girls can’t do it, you might doubt whether you can do it; you might not put all of yourself into it. And then when you don’t manage it, you don’t pull it off, the judgment that you are not capable is confirmed. Gender norms sometimes work through a reversal of sequence: we assume we do it because we can, or don’t because we can’t, but often we can do it because we do it, or we can’t because we don’t. Over time, girls learn to inhabit their bodies with less confidence, assuming what they cannot do as a restriction of a horizon of possibility.”
― Sara Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way

“She’d make Nuryevet a strong country, unified again under one ruler, a country where the men were beautiful and the women were powerful and the children were healthy and bright-eyed
(comment: I love how the author switches gender norms and normalizes it off-handedly throughout the book)”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“But as for the rest of you, sisters, when anyone says to you, this, that or the other is natural, then fight. Nature does not know best; for the birds, for the bees, for the cows; for men, perhaps. But your interests and Nature’s do not coincide. Nature our Friend is an argument used, quite understandably, by men.”
― Fay Weldon, Praxis

“did ya ever cry
Black man, did ya ever cry
til you knocked all over?

- Haiku”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“But when they desire to clothe themselves the Valar take upon them forms some as of male and some as of female; for that difference of temper they had even from their beginning, and it is but bodied forth in the choice of each, not made by the choice, even as with us male and female may be shown by the raiment but is not made thereby.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“Now, women are also 'mad' if we want boys to treat us properly and with respect. We're called 'high maintenance' or 'psycho exes'.”
― Holly Bourne, Am I Normal Yet?

“There is so much more we need to learn and understand. Therefore to be open to learning, understanding, and questioning our social constructed gender box is, in my view, the absolute first step.”
― Runa Magnusdottir, The Story of Boxes, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: The Secret to Human Liberation, Peace and Happiness

“…This lack of morality is not limited to rank. In Alaba, for example, even the simplest social structures are ignored. Alabans claim that concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ do not apply, and insist they have either five or six genders, depending on how they are counted, between which these heathens will move depending on their whims. As a tonal language, the same sound with different inflections carries different meanings, so a Naridan must be very careful to avoid misrepresenting himself: for example, ‘mè’ is ‘high masculine’, used by those in whom the fire of manhood burns strongly, while ‘mê’ is ‘low masculine’, for in Alaban society it is no great shame for a man to admit to womanly character. The largely uninflected ‘me’ is the gender-neutral formal, but ‘mé’ is ‘low feminine’, favoured by women who lack the qualities appropriate for their gender, and ‘mē’ is ‘high feminine’, the only appropriate usage for any Naridan lady of decency. Even stranger is ‘më’, used only by those who insist they have no gender, even in the most informal settings. Such immorality is hardly unsurprising in a land that has provided succour to exiled pretenders since the Splintering.
Needless to say, Naridans should resist these pernicious local customs and only use the ‘high’ forms for themselves when visiting this land, lest they cause themselves considerable embarrassment.”
― Mike Brooks, The Black Coast

“Transness is taking control to bring your body more in line with your soul and spirit so the two aren’t fighting against each other and struggling to survive. … It means you’re not a mother or a father — you’re an individual who’s looking at the world and feeling the world.”
― Sophie Xeon

“A woman’s honour is usually tied with curbing her sexuality; similarly a man’s masculinity is about flaunting it. While a woman must protect her honour by keeping her legs closed, quite literally, a man must demonstrate his manhood by putting on a show of his sexuality. How can the one physical act that bridges the gap between men and women be so disparate in its meaning for the two sexes?”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“Oh sure, because my chromosomes totally dictate my ability to park a car.”
― Anubha Saxena

“Sarah Nan takes me by the wrist and pulls me away. 'Lizzie, you were talking to a boy!'

'It's no big deal,' I tell her. Maybe it was--because it didn't feel like talking to a boy. It felt like talking to a person.”
― Karen Wilfrid, Just Lizzie