Kate Bornstein Biography
Kate Bornstein whose real name is Katherine Vandam is an American author, playwright, performance artist, actress, and gender theorist.
Bornstein in 1986, identified as gender non-conforming and has stated “I don’t call myself a woman, and I know I’m not a man.” after having been assigned male at birth and receiving gender affirmation surgery. She now identifies with the pronouns they/them or she/her. She has also written about having anorexia, being a survivor of PTSD and being diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder.
She has chronic lymphocytic leukemia and in September 2012 was diagnosed with lung cancer.
Kate Bornstein Age
Kate was born on March 15, 1948. She is aged 71 years as of 2019.
Kate Bornstein Height
She stands at a fair height and fair body weight.
Kate Bornstein Wife | Kate Bornstein Barbara Carrellas
She is married to Barbara Carrellas who is an author, sex educator, performance artist, and certified sexologist.
Kate Bornstein Daughter
Bornstein has a daughter by the name Jessica Leah Baxter,Kate posted this on facebook
Saw today that a woman found her birth mom by asking FaceBook to help out. OK. I’m in search of Jessica Leah Baxter, my daughter. She’s a member of Scientology’s Sea Organization. If there’s any way you can boost this signal and tell her that her dad (me) wrote a book for her (memoir: A Queer and Pleasant Danger), I’d sure appreciate it. Thank you. K
Kate Bornstein Net Worth
The author has a net worth of 1 million dollars.
Kate Bornstein Health
In August 2012, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Doctors thought that she was cancer-free after surgery, but it emerged in February 2013 that the disease had returned. Laura Vogel, a friend of hers, launched a GoFundMe campaign on March 20 to help fund cancer treatment.
Kate Bornstein Film
- 2017 Saturday Church
- 1998 The Brandon Teena Story
- 2014 Golden Age of Hustler
- Play in the Gray
Kate Bornstein Books
Books
- Bornstein, Kate (1994). Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York City: Routledge. ISBN 978-0679757016.
- Sullivan, Caitlin; Bornstein, Kate (1996). Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure. New York City: High-Risk Books. ISBN 978-1852424183.
- Bornstein, Kate (1998). My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely. Illustrations by Diane DiMassa. New York City: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415916721.
- Bornstein, Kate (2006). Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws. New York: Seven Stories Press. ISBN 9781583227206.
- Bornstein, Kate; Bergman, S. Bear, eds. (2010). Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. Berkeley, California: Seal Press. ISBN 9781580053082.
- Bornstein, Kate (2012). A Queer and Pleasant Danger: A Memoir. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 9780807001653. The portrait-film, Kate Bornstein is a Queer & Pleasant Danger by Sam Feder, will be released in 2014
- Bornstein, Kate (2013). My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415538657.
- Bornstein, Kate (2016). Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (Revised and Updated). New York: Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. ISBN 978-1-101-97461-2.
Performance pieces
- Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger
- The Opposite Sex Is Neither
- Virtually Yours
- Hidden: A Gender
- Strangers in Paradox
- y2kate: gender virus 2000
- Hard Candy
Kate Bornstein Quotes
“Gender is not sane. It’s not sane to call a rainbow black and white.”
“The first question we usually ask new parents is: “Is it a boy or a girl?”.
There is a great answer to that one going around: “We don’t know; it hasn’t told us yet.” Personally, I think no question containing “either/or” deserves a serious answer, and that includes the question of gender.”
“It’s easy to fictionalize an issue when you’re not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.”
“I have this idea that every time we discover that the names we’re being called are somehow keeping us less than free, we need to come up with new names for ourselves, and that the names we give ourselves must no longer reflect a fear of being labeled outsiders, must no longer bind us to a system that would rather see us dead.”
“Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender is that, let’s recognize that the word gender has scores of meaning built into it. It’s an amalgamation of bodies, identities, and life experiences, subconscious urges, sensations, and behaviors, some of which develop organically, and others which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of saying that gender is any one single thing, let’s start describing it as a holistic experience.”
“I see fashion as a proclamation or manifestation of identity, so, as long as identities are important, fashion will continue to be important. The link between fashion and identity begins to get real interesting, however, in the case of people who don’t fall clearly into a culturally-recognized identity.”
“And keep in mind that the you that makes life worthy of living today won’t be the same you that makes life worth living this time next year. Identities aren’t meant to be permanent. They’re like cars: they take us from one place to another. We work, travel, and seek adventure in them until they break down beyond repair. At that point, living well means finding a new model that better suits us for a new moment.”
“Let’s stop “tolerating” or “accepting” difference as if we’re so much better for not being different. Instead, let’s celebrate difference because in this world it takes a lot of guts to be different and to act differently.”
“You can have great autonomy in the things you choose to learn and pursue on your own time. When you’re learning things that interest you, challenge you, and make life worth living, getting an education can be blissful and stimulating.”
“We can’t ignore right-wing demagogues who insist that the word of the doctor who proclaims a child’s sex at birth somehow holds more sway over the reality of the body than the word of the person who inhabits it. – Gwendolyn Ann Smith”
“Let’s stop pretending that we have all the answers because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.”
Kate Bornstein Tattoos
Kate Bornstein Gender Work Book
My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, Or Something Else Entirely. It is a must-read book for people with an interest in gender, nature vs. nurture, queer issues, trans issues, fabulosity, and introspection. If you’ve ever colored outside of the lines, read this book. It deals with difficult issues with a deceptively light touch. You’ll find yourself being introspective when you thought you were just playing with quizzes.
She brings theory down to Earth and provides a practical approach to living with or without a gender. She gently but firmly guides you to discover your own unique gender identity. Whether she’s using the USFDA’s food group triangle to explain gender, or quoting one-liners from real “gender transgressors”, Bornstein’s first and foremost concern is making information on gender bending truly accessible.
With quizzes and exercises that determine how much of a man or woman you are, My Gender Workbook gives you the tools to reach whatever point you desire on the gender continuum.
Kate Bornstein Caitlyn Jenner
Caitlyn Jenner’s got the company: meet Kate Bornstein, the one-woman whirlwind who’s lived many lives
She’s been a ship’s mate, a sex worker, and a Scientologist. As her one-woman show hits Britain, we talk peace and pronouns with Kate Bornstein, the new co-star of I Am Cait
Kate Bornstein has crammed a lot of lives into her 67 years. In no particular order, she has been: a man, a woman, a father, a husband, a performance artist, a novelist, a playwright, a gender theorist, a ship’s first mate, a sex worker, and a recovering Scientologist. She may be the closest person real life has to Virginia Woolf’s gender-shifting, multiple-existence character Orlando, only with cute round glasses and a Tardis necklace.
Bornstein’s next incarnation will be as a reality TV star when the second series of Caitlyn Jenner’s show I Am Cait arrives next month. She has already been the subject of a 2014 documentary, Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, which did well at festivals, but entering the Kardashian world will be something else entirely. Although Bornstein did appear in the first series, which documented Jenner’s transition, she will now feature much more prominently.
Until very recently, transgender people were very much on the margins, invisible at best, mocked or attacked at worst. But transgender lives have suddenly become visible and celebrated – from Orange Is the New Black’s Laverne Cox to Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl. It is wonderful, says Bornstein, over tea and biscuits in a London hotel, but it is still early days.
“It is an amazing media moment for transgender people,” she says. “But that’s only one way of messing with gender. There’s non-binary, genderqueer, agender, gender non-conforming. And no, that hasn’t reached the mainstream.” It could take another 20 years before the rest of the trans community is recognized, she thinks.
Bornstein is currently in the UK touring her show, On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, which starts with her attending the funeral of her mother, and having to introduce herself to her mother’s friends, who hadn’t been told about her transition. It covers Bornstein getting to grips with existing somewhere between two genders: only someone as funny and charismatic as Bornstein could make a grammar lesson about pronouns so hilariously joyful (despite identifying as non-binary, she favors she, her, they and there).
Later, at Brown University, she discovered a love of the performing arts and became an actor. A good one, she says, and although she reveled in her ability to make people cry or laugh, she wondered what the point of it was. “I was looking for spiritual answers. It was the summer of 1969 and I was driving across the US, stopping at different religious communities.” She visited Amish, Baha’i and Kabbalah groups, then finally found the Scientologists.
All her life she had been puzzled about her gender – she knew she wasn’t a man, which meant, she thought, that she must be a woman. But she didn’t feel like a woman either and Scientology offered an explanation. “They said you’re not your body, not your brain, you don’t have a soul. You are your own immortal soul. And as an immortal soul, you have no mass, no energy, you don’t exist in time or space. Because of all of that, I thought, ‘Oh, then I wouldn’t have a gender.’” Scientology made sense to her. Unfortunately, she says, with a raised eyebrow and a sideways smile, “it’s a totalitarian cult.”
She was a Scientologist for 12 years. Three of them were spent as a lieutenant on founder L Ron Hubbard’s ship in his Sea Org fleet. “He was a physically unattractive man,” she says. “He had a deathly fear of dentists, so his teeth were a mess and so was his breath. Despite all of that, he made you feel like he was your daddy and you just wanted to please him. He would come out on the deck at night, under the stars, and spin wonderful stories. He would tell us about who we were millions of years ago, the battles we fought back then, saying that now is our chance to move back in and free Earth from the slavery of the psychiatrists.”
She left after they subjected her to six hours on a lie detector machine, refusing a place on its punishing Rehabilitation Project Force. Instead, she chose excommunication, which meant leaving behind her then nine-year-old daughter, who is still a member of the Church of Scientology along with her mother, who hasn’t spoken to Bornstein since.
Following her exit, Bornstein suffered post-traumatic stress disorder. She was also coming to terms with transitioning, and finding that – after surgery – she wasn’t comfortable as a woman either. It wasn’t until she moved to San Francisco and found a transgender community that she became happier with who she was.
“I realized, ‘Wow, I have a family.’ That made a big difference. Back in those days, anybody who was messing with gender was family with everyone else. We all hung out. Given a family, I felt strong enough to enjoy who I was. I think that’s still true to this day: I’d be a lot less sure of myself, a lot less active if I didn’t have the extended family.”
Bornstein is writing her sixth book, this one about the infighting in the LGBT community – “and how to bring about some peace, as an elder”. But she is not universally loved within such groups: she has been criticized for referring to transgender people as “trannies” (affectionately, she says); and she has said sex work is “far from a bad thing”. Does she think the often vitriolic gulf between the group known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists and transgender people will ever be fixed?
She is quiet for a while. “I think the only people who listen to trans exclusive radical feminists are transgender women. They call themselves feminists but it’s not the kind of feminist I ever knew. Who is paying attention to them? Seriously. So some people don’t think you’re a woman. So? It’s much more important to know you’re a woman than to depend on someone’s approval.” You only care, she adds, “if they are in positions of power”.
The last few years have been tough for Bornstein – she has undergone treatment for lung cancer – but her passion remains undimmed. A self-described “leftwing wing-nut and anarchist”, she is excited about the tantalizing prospect of a Bernie Sanders presidency and, just before we leave, jokes about a no less tantalizing prospect: how being a Kardashian cast member could lead to her own TV show. Please – someone commission this.