Gender Assumptions Quotes

Don't we see that men's rightful task is to go out to work and wear themselves out trying to accumulate wealth, as though they were our factors or stewards, so that we can remain at home like the lady of the house directing their work and enjoying the profit of their labors? That, if you like, is the reason why men are naturally stronger and more robust than us - they need to be, so they can put up with the hard labor they must endure in our service. ~ Moderata Fonte

Aspiring female leaders risk being liked but not respected, or respected but not liked, in settings that may require individuals to be both in order to succeed. ~ Barbara Kellerman

It's my choice to be beautiful. It's my choice to be ugly. And it's my choice to decided what those words actually mean. ~ Virginia Petrucci

But Tik Tok believes everything's circular, including men and women. He says nature seems to go around and around, and that we all have bits of everything. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

I do believe our culture is doing a bad job raising boys. The evidence is in the shocking violence of Paducah, Jonesboro, Cheyenne, and Edinboro. It's in our overcrowded prisons and domestic violence shelters. It's in our Ritalin-controlled elementary schools and alcohol-soaked college campuses. ~ Mary Pipher

It was never reasonable or fair that women should shoulder the burden of household management, but it is possible that in an effort to move toward gender parity, some of the art and science of household management and gracious living have been lost. ~ Julianne Malveaux

The majority of dysfunctions that arise and entrench themselves in our lives are caused because of preconditioned expectations and assumptions. ~ Ly De Angeles

Do not ghettoize society by putting people into legal categories of gender, race, ethnicity, language, or other such characteristics. ~ Preston Manning

Utopianism also attempts to shape and dominate the individual by doing two things at once: it strips the individual of his uniqueness, making him indistinguishable from the multitudes that form what is commonly referred to as 'the masses,' but it simultaneously assigns him a group identity based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, income, etc., to highlight differences within the masses. ~ Mark R. Levin

Cruz nodded. "In case you're wondering, I have a dick."
That earned a sudden, single bark of laughter from Shade, which in turn raised a disturbing red-and-white smile from Cruz.
"Is that a permanent condition?" Shade asked.
Cruz shrugged. "I don't have a short answer."
"Give me the long one. I'll tell you if I get bored." She flopped onto her bed.
"Okay. Well . . . you know it's all on a spectrum, right? I mean, there are people - most people - who are born either M or F and are perfectly fine with that. And some people are born with one body but a completely different mind, you know? They know from, like, toddler age that they are in the wrong body. Me, I'm . . . more kind of neither. Or both. Or something."
"You're e), all of the above. You're multiple choice, but on a true-false test."
That earned another blood-smeared grin from Cruz. "Can I use that line?"
"I understand spectra, and I even get that sexuality and gender are different things," Shade said, sitting up. ~ Michael Grant

It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, and so on) precisely one, the gender of the object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as THE dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of 'sexual orientation. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

...While many who have debated the image of female sexuality have put "explicit" and "self-objectifying" on one side and "respectable" and "covered-up" on the other, I find this a flawed means of categorization. [...] There is a creative possibility for liberatory explicitness because it may expand the confines of what women are allowed to say and do. We just need to refer to the history of blues music - one full of raunchy, irreverent, and transgressive women artists - for examples. Yet the overwhelming prevalence of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in American culture means that any woman who uses explicit language or images in her creative expression is in danger of being symbolically cast into the role of whore regardless of what liberatory intentions she may have. ~ Imani Perry

she used to wear pearls, not bones. ~ Roxanna

The vast majority of funding in support of women appears to have been directed toward the training of women as participants in political, civil, and economic processes. This approach to women's empowerment is based on two assumptions. The first is that Iraqi women need training to bring them into the public sphere ... The second is that women, if equipped with appropriate skills, merely need encouragement to participate and flourish in public life. Such an approach does not consider the social and political context in which women operate and that undoubtedly affects their ability to participate. ~ Nadje Al-Ali

I don't think this is a good idea. We all live on one planet so we cannot segregate the genders. If the Holy Mosque in Makkah, which is the holiest place on earth, does not segregate women, then why would the Ministry of Health want to segregate them?"
She also went on to object to the selection of a physician based only on gender and not competence, expressing her disdain as follows: "I prefer doctors who are professional in studying my situation and solving my problem, regardless of whether they are male or female. I cannot imagine a men's hospital without female nurses and doctors, and I also cannot imagine women's hospitals without men playing a role in them. ~ Qanta A. Ahmed

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original. ~ Judith Butler

My theory of everything is that we are training kids to have gender bias against girls, therefore when you are an adult, you don't see it. We think it's normal. ~ Geena Davis

Besides, what's in a name? Actually, a lot. Whether taken from a parent or grandparent, some saint, or even the late great Elvis, your name insists another person's dream of what you should have been. The portrait of some ancestral ideal lingers through heirloom names. Gender specific names imply all sorts of expectations. More than just a signifier used to summon, instruct, address, accuse, sometimes praise us, our names define and thereby limit us. They put us in a cage. ~ Brien Piechos

Because there is no way to know the gender of an intersex baby, experts recommend that intersex children be allowed to manifest their natural, innate gender, which may be witnessed as early as two years of age, usually by age three, and almost universally by age six. Not identifying a gender in an intersex baby may be socially difficult for parents, causing them uneasiness or even hostility on the part of others, but it can save the intersex person from a life of frustration, and mental and emotional anguish. ~ Kathy Baldock

It's hard to tell these days what gender people are. You don't know if they're gay, if they're straight, or Bruce Jenner. ~ Chelsea Handler

Vigilance of the wisest kind is to incessantly remain open to the reality that what I 'see' is but a single thread and solitary shard of what 'is', for to assume otherwise is to surrender the wisdom of vigilance to the decay of ignorance. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught. ~ Leslie Feinberg

More conservative advocacy work often encourages portrayals of trans people as people who deserve rights. Deservingness, of course, corresponds to national racial, gender and ability norms. ~ Dean Spade

Mathematics is not arithmetic. Though mathematics may have arisen from the practices of counting and measuring it really deals with logical reasoning in which theorems - general and specific statements - can be deduced from the starting assumptions. It is, perhaps, the purest and most rigorous of intellectual activities, and is often thought of as queen of the sciences. ~ Christopher Zeeman

In other studies, the philosophy is made explicit by a special section in the study - typically in the description of the characteristics of qualitative inquiry often found in the methods section. Here the inquirer talks about ontology, epistemology, and other assumptions explicitly and details how they are exemplified in the study. The ~ John W. Creswell

It's a secret code," said Calvin. "Girls are not not like boys. If a boy wants to kill you, he says 'I'm going to kill you.' If a girl wants to kill you, she says, 'We need to talk.' That's the code."
I gasped. "Has a girl ever wanted to talk to you?" I asked.
"Yup," said Calvin.
"How come you're still alive?" I asked.
"I vomited," said Calvin. ~ Lenore Look

Yes, our social and economic circumstances shape decisions we make about all sorts of things in life, including sex. Sometimes they rob us of the power to make any decisions at all. But of all human activity, sex is among the least likely to fit neatly into the blueprint of rational decision making favoured by economists. To quote my friend Claire in Istanbul, sex is about 'conquest, fantasy, projection, infatuation, mood, anger, vanity, love, pissing off your parents, the risk of getting caught, the pleasure of cuddling afterwards, the thrill of having a secret, feeling desirable, feeling like a man, feeling like a woman, bragging to your mates the next day, getting to see what someone looks like naked and a million-and-one-other-things.' When sex isn't fun, it is often lucrative, or part of a bargain which gives you access to something you want or need.

If HIV is spread by 'poverty and gender equality', how come countries that have plenty of both, such as Bangladesh, have virtually no HIV? How come South Africa and Botswana, which have the highest female literacy and per capita incomes in Africa, are awash with HIV, while countries that score low on both - such as Guinea, Somalia, Mali, and Sierra Leone - have epidemics that are negligible by comparison? How come in country after country across Africa itself, from Cameroon to Uganda to Zimbabwe and in a dozen other countries as well, HIV is lowest in the poorest households, and highest in the richest households? ~ Elizabeth Pisani

You 'ain't found out yet we're women-folks, Nanny Penn," said she. "You 'ain't seen enough of men-folks yet to. One of these days you'll find it out, an' then you'll know that we know only what men-folks think we do, so far as any use of it goes, an' how we'd ought to reckon men-folks in with Providence an' not complain of what they do any more than we do of the weather. ~ Mary Wilkins Freeman

Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren't. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. ~ Ryan Tate

It is not loving to impose our own grid onto others. We need to understand their situation and their needs accurately, and this comes from listening to them, not coming in with our own assumptions. ~ Matt Perman

I'm not suggesting that all men are beautiful, vulnerable boys, but we all started out that way. What happened to us? How did we become monsters of feminist nightmares? The answer, of course, is that we underwent a careful and deliberate process of gender training, sometimes brutal, always dehumanizing, cutting away large chunks of ourselves. Little girls went through something similarly crippling. If the gender training was successful, we each ended up being half a person. ~ Frank Pittman

[T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is
at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

women had to be controlled and kept from going wild because of their inherent susceptibility to lust; thus men had to exercise aidos, "shame," and sophrosyne, "soundness of mind," to keep women from transgressing the bounds of propriety. ~ Thomas Van Nortwick

If dominating and destructive relations to the earth are interrelated with gender, class, and racial domination, then a healed relation to the earth cannot come about simply through technological 'fixes'. It demands a social reordering to bring about just and loving interrelationship between men and women, between races and nations, between groups presently stratified into social classes, manifest in great disparities of access to the means of life. In short, it demands that we must speak of eco-justice, and not simply of domination of the earth as though that happened unrelated to social domination. ~ Rosemary Radford Ruether