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Quote by Judith Butler

“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.”

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

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“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

“Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so that they no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves.”

People Way Important Sometimes Importance Gender Categories

Author:Judith Butler

“If gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood.”

People Ifs Important Self Would Be Strong Pleasure Bounds Gender Domain Hood Sense Of Self Strong Sense Of Self

Author:Judith Butler

“I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are.”

Thinking Want Accepting Position Gender Wide Variety Crucial

Author:Judith Butler

“I reject totally the characterization of a transwoman as a mutilated man. First, that formulation presumes that men born into that sex assignment are not mutilated. Second, it once again sets up the feminist as the prosecutor of trans people. If there is any mutilation going on in this scene, it is being done by the feminist police force who rejects the lived embodiment of transwomen. That very accusation is a form of "mutilation" as is all transphobic discourse such as these.”

People Ifs Men Firsts Done Form Force Sex Born Scene Police Feminist Rejects Discourse Trans Assignments Embodiment Accusation Being Done Prosecutor Characterization Police Force Mutilation

Author:Judith Butler

“There's no limit to what free men and free women in a free market with free enterprise can accomplish when people are free to follow their dream.”

People Men Dream Limits Accomplish Enterprise Free Market Free Man Free Enterprise Free Market Capitalism

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“There is a rather huge ethical difference between electing surgery and being faced with transphobic condemnation and diagnoses. I would say that the greatest risk of mutilation that trans people have comes directly from transphobia.”

People Differences Risk Huge Ethical Surgery Trans Diagnosis Condemnation Mutilation

Author:Judith Butler