"The point of a gender liberation movement for me is not just to rescue and acclaim those people sometimes referred to as "transgressively gendered," those specimens inevitably corralled in the Binary Zoo: the stone butches and diesel dykes, drag kings and drag queens, leatherdykes and dyke daddies, the radical fairies and fag hags, nelly queens and fruit flies, the transexuals, transgendered crossdressers, and intersexed.
"It is also about the seventeen-year-old Midwestern cheerleader whose health is destroyed by anorexia because "real women" are supposed to be preternaturally thin. It's about the forty-six-year-old Joe Six-Pack who wraps his car around a crowded school bus on the way home from the bar because "real men" are supposed to be heavy drinkers. It's about the unathletic and fat little boy who is physically attacked by his classmates every day after school. It's about the two lesbian lovers stalked and killed on the Appalachian trail in Virginia. It's about the aging body succumbing to an unnecessary hysterectomy because certain kinds of gendered bodies simply don't matter as much. And it's about the sensitive, straight young man who is repeatedly raped his first year in prison because, within that environment, he's perceived as genderqueer, gender-different, or simply gender-vulnerable.
"In short, a gender liberation movement is not just about people like Brandon Teena, Marsha P. Johnson, Christian Paige, Deborah Forte, Tyra Hunter, and Channel Picket, all of whom died simply because of the way they expressed sexuality and gender. It's also about those who felt impelled and even empowered to kill to preserve the regimes of gender. It's about working until every one of us is delivered from this most pernicious, divisive, and destructive of insanities called gender-based oppression."
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