To demand that people find their assigned narrow corridors of culture or ethnicity or gender, expecting people to forevermore stay in that lane, is to limit our human potential. It's oppressive.
You see people in the left lane, and as long as they are on the speed limit, they stay there. Get in the right lane and let people pass you - let the police worry about somebody who wants to speed. Don't force them pass in the right lane and zig zag, which can create an accident, just because you think you're correct.
Women are allowed to exist in this very narrow lane, but as soon as you step out of that lane, people want to stone you.
I don't think the people run to the polls and vote simply on the basis of identity. Yes, it is a factor, of course we all know that. It's also ethnicity, gender, and gender identity. People do take those factors into account.
Culture does not make people - people make culture. So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, we must make it our culture. [...] A feminist is a man or a woman who says, 'yes there is a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it. We must do better.'
People come to this country because they view our culture as the best. It is a culture free of persecution, a culture free of oppressive government, and above all... a culture of really, really cool stuff.
Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person's felt sense of gender was therefore "unreal." That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be. But I think I needed to pay more attention to what people feel, how the primary experience of the body is registered, and the quite urgent and legitimate demand to have those aspects of sex recognized and supported.
I suppose in our culture - in our lifetime - we've always enjoyed people who tell it straight. We like our presidents, our comedians, and our actors to do that . . . It's funny. You say that people prefer a tasteful formalism - as opposed to an oppressive formalism - but I do feel very strongly that form follows function.
Gender is used as a control mechanism that's just wrong. Gender is never anything to struggle with; gender is something to play with. Once you're free of the rules that all these hierarchical, oppressive systems place on gender, that's the tricky part.
Regardless of your religious belief, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity, there is no place in our communities for hate.
One reason I'm grateful to call Hawai'i home is that the people of these islands embrace diversity and celebrate the colorful fabric of race, ethnicity, and religion that make up our people, place, and culture.
Stay in your car in your lane on your road in your world. Stay in your own lane. Don't be minding other people's spiritual business. Stay in your car. In your lane. On your road. In your world.
I want to make sure that that future that we're creating is one that is the best it can be for people around the world, and also one that includes the full range of our talent and our skills - and, you know, gender and ethnicity, geography - to solving the world's problems.
What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.
There is no limit to our ability and potential when we, as a nation and as a people, work together.
One of the concepts I was having trouble illustrating was the concept that administrative systems create narrow categories of gender and force people into them in order to get their basic needs met - what I call "administrative violence." I had images of forms with gender boxes and ID cards with gender markers, but I also wanted an image that would capture how basic services like shelters are gender segregated.
The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don't want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.