Home / Quotes / Quote by Judith Butler

Quote by Judith Butler

“Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs - it is also not always what a trans person needs. Either way, one should be free to determine the course of one's gendered life.”

Quote by Judith Butler

Author

Judith Butler is a renowned philosopher, born on February 24, 1956. Her research focuses on issues of gender, identity, and power, having a profound impact on postmodernism and gender theory. more

You May Also Like

“All of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions - or norms - that help to form us.”

Helping Body Form Position Active Construction Norm

Author:Judith Butler

“We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones.”

Sometimes Form Rejects Vocabulary

Author:Judith Butler

“Gender assignment is a "construction" and yet many genderqueer and trans people refuse those assignments in part or in full. That refusal opens the way for a more radical form of self-determination, one that happens in solidarity with others who are undergoing a similar struggle.”

People Way Self Happens Form Struggle Determination Refuse Gender Radical Construction Self Determination Solidarity Refusal Trans Assignments

Author:Judith Butler

“I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.”

Want Persons Wanted Poor Rich Mets Get Rich

Author:Jack Kemp

“Nothing is more important for transgender people than to have access to excellent health care in trans-affirmative environments, to have the legal and institutional freedom to pursue their own lives as they wish, and to have their freedom and desire affirmed by the rest of the world. This will happen only when transphobia is overcome at the level of individual attitudes and prejudices and in larger institutions of education, law, health care, and kinship.”

“I do know that some people believe that I see gender as a "choice" rather than as an essential and firmly fixed sense of self. My view is actually not that. No matter whether one feels one's gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives.”

People Knows Feels Should Believe Persons Self Matter Reality Choices Term Views Essentials Should Have Determine Gender Fixed Sense Of Self

Author:Judith Butler

“Whether one wants to be free to live out a "hard-wired" sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization - and with full institutional and community support. That is most important in my view.”

Want Important Hard Sex Community Views Support Gender Discrimination Injury Fluid Harassment Community Support

Author:Judith Butler

“I know that some subjective experiences of sex are very firm and fundamental, even unchangeable. They can be so firm and unchanging that we call them "innate". But given that we report on such a sense of self within a social world, a world in which we are trying to use language to express what we feel, it is unclear what language does that most effectively. I understand that "innate" is a word that conveys the sense of something hired-wired and constitutive. I suppose I would be inclined to wonder whether other vocabularies might do the job equally well.”

“I never did like the assertion of the "innate" inferiority or women or Blacks, and I understood that when people tried to talk that way, they were trying to "fix" a social reality into a natural necessity. And yet, sometimes we do need a language that refers to a basic, fundamental, enduring, and necessary dimension of who we are, and the sense of sexed embodiment can be precisely that.”

People Way Needs Trying Sometimes Reality Language Social Natural Understood Fundamentals Endure Who We Are Dimensions Innate Assertion Inferiority Embodiment

Author:Judith Butler

“My sense is that we may not need the language of innateness or genetics to understand that we are all ethically bound to recognize another person's declared or enacted sense of sex and/or gender. We do not have to agree upon the "origins" of that sense of self to agree that it is ethically obligatory to support and recognize sexed and gendered modes of being that are crucial to a person's well-being.”

Needs Wells May Persons Self Language Sex Support Agree Bounds Gender Well Being Crucial Genetics Sense Of Self Agree Upon

Author:Judith Butler