Kate Bornstein - Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

2010, English, Interview, Kate Bornstein, USA,

Full title: "Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation" by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman.

In 1994, Kate Bornstein turned gender theory on its head with Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, a genre-breaking book that blended memoir, manifesto, and performance into a celebration of gender variance. Sixteen years later, in 2010, Bornstein, by then a seasoned author, performer, cancer survivor, and self-declared “gender outlaw”, returned to the conversation with a new project: Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. 

 

Co-edited with writer and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, the anthology became an instant classic in queer and trans literature, one that looked to the future by spotlighting the diverse voices shaping gender theory, and life, on their own terms. Where Bornstein’s original Gender Outlaw was a personal, subversive response to binary gender, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation is a chorus. It collects essays, poems, comics, dialogues, and declarations from a global lineup of contributors who refuse to conform to established gender norms, or even established narratives of transness. These are not tales of linear transition or assimilation. These are dispatches from sex/gender radicals who live, love, write, protest, perform, and dream on their own frequencies. As the editors explain in their introduction, the goal was to create a book “by people who are breaking the rules, making their own rules, and being fierce in the face of serious resistance.”

Transgender stories have come a long way, from whispered rumors to cable TV dramas, from talk shows to TED Talks. But as Bornstein observed in her 2017 interview with The Heroines, visibility can be a double-edged sword. “We’re in a time where trans people are out there, and more accepted than ever,” she said. “And at the same time, we’re being murdered, bullied, and legislated out of existence.” 

 

The anthology, then, isn’t just a celebration. It’s a survival guide, a provocation, and a reclamation of storytelling as a political act. Many of the contributors challenge not only cisgender norms, but also mainstream trans narratives that center assimilation and medical transition. Micha Cárdenas, one of the anthology’s most influential voices, writes from the intersections of race, disability, technology, and gender, questioning who gets access to visibility and care, and who gets left behind. Others explore sex work, kink, asexuality, polyamory, aging, disability, incarceration, and parenthood. The scope is intentionally wide, the styles intentionally varied. A reader is just as likely to encounter poetic fragments as academic deconstruction, Twitter-length musings as complex critiques of capitalism and colonialism.

This multiplicity is the point. As Bornstein says in The Heroines, she’s never felt at home in the binaries offered to her, not as a man, not quite as a woman, not even as a conventional trans figure. “I never believed I was a woman trapped in a man's body,” she recalled. “That just wasn’t true for me.” That refusal to collapse into a simplified trans narrative has become a cornerstone of her work. She transitioned medically in 1986, settled into San Francisco’s lesbian scene, and for a while wrote art reviews for The Bay Area Reporter. But gradually, she embraced an identity beyond man or woman, becoming one of the first public figures to claim a nonbinary identity before it had a widely recognized name.

 

Bornstein's co-editor, S. Bear Bergman, brings a similarly boundary-pushing energy. A longtime activist, storyteller, and founder of the children’s book press Flamingo Rampant, Bergman has always worked at the intersection of queerness, Jewish identity, and cultural transformation. His presence in the anthology’s curation ensures that the volume doesn’t fall into tokenism or shallow representation. Instead, Gender Outlaws pulses with authenticity and contradiction, a book that understands gender not as a destination, but as an ongoing, unruly process.

 

What makes the anthology especially vital is its attention to joy, humor, and community. This isn’t a book that wallows in trans trauma, though it acknowledges pain and violence. It’s a book that insists on possibility. From comics that hilariously critique gender expectations to essays that celebrate trans bodies in all their glory, the collection offers not only resistance, but radiance. The authors are not asking for permission to exist, they are building a world where they already do. In the second part of her Heroines interview, Bornstein opens up about aging, disability, and letting go of what society expects a woman, or anyone, really, to be. “Gender became inconsequential to me while I was in quarantine and grappling with old age,” she confides. “I’m letting go of the ability to be cute, in certain ways. My face is sagging, my boobs are sagging. Boy, oh boy. They're down to my waist and you let go of that as being necessary to your gender.” That honesty, raw, irreverent, and deeply human, echoes throughout the book. Gender isn’t just about identity, Bornstein and Bergman suggest. It’s about power, survival, liberation, and play.

 

Since its release, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation has won both the Lambda Literary Award and the Publishing Triangle Award, cementing its place in the queer literary canon. But more than accolades, its power lies in its timing and tone. Published at a moment when trans visibility was growing but backlash was intensifying, it served as a counterbalance to media narratives that only made room for certain types of trans people, typically white, thin, able-bodied, binary-identified, and post-transition. By contrast, Gender Outlaws amplifies the messy, the magical, and the misfit. It centers Indigenous two-spirit voices, non-Western frameworks, Black trans resistance, and disabled queer wisdom. It honors not only trans women and trans men, but agender folks, genderqueers, genderfluid people, intersex individuals, and those who refuse any label at all. It understands that gender liberation must be intersectional, or it isn’t liberation at all. In many ways, the anthology is a love letter to the trans future. It doesn’t ask for inclusion in the existing order. It dreams of new worlds entirely. It refuses assimilation in favor of transformation. And in doing so, it continues Bornstein’s lifelong project: to unshackle gender from its binary cage and return it to the wild.

Available via Amazon

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Photo via Heroines of My Life