Kate Bornstein’s My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity is far more than a workbook. It’s a manifesto, a guidebook, a game, a mirror, and a kiss on the cheek for anyone who has ever found themselves bewildered by the rigidity of the gender binary, or battered by it. An updated version of Bornstein’s groundbreaking 1997 classic My Gender Workbook, the new edition expands the original’s brilliance with sharper political urgency, deeper intersectional insight, and a wider embrace of identities that refuse to conform. As always, Bornstein’s voice is warm, subversive, mischievous, and healing, a trickster mentor with a deeply serious mission.
The structure of the book is deceptively playful. Through quizzes, games, fill-in-the-blank exercises, thought experiments, and wild hypotheticals, readers are invited not only to reconsider what they think they know about gender but to excavate how it shapes their identities, relationships, and dreams. Bornstein does not scold or lecture. Instead, she coaxes, teases, and entices her readers to look under the surface of words like “woman,” “man,” “real,” or “normal.” What happens when you break the rules, not to shock or offend, but to liberate yourself and others from systems that reduce complex lives to categories on a form?
In the 2017 interview published on The Heroines, Bornstein reflected on her lifelong project of untangling gender from oppression. She said, “The purpose of the workbook has always been to help people come up with their own definitions of gender, rather than being limited to what culture throws at them.”
That commitment, to personal exploration as political resistance, runs through every chapter of My New Gender Workbook. It's a gender theory book, yes, but unlike the academic texts that often alienate readers through inaccessible jargon or abstract detachment, Bornstein’s work invites readers into a conversation. You’re not just reading about gender; you’re engaging with it, interrogating it, laughing at it, crying with it, and eventually, maybe, breaking it open.
This is not a book that tries to funnel readers into new boxes labeled “progressive” or “woke.” On the contrary, Bornstein dismantles boxes entirely. She invites you to imagine what it would mean to live outside of imposed scripts, not just gender scripts, but all social expectations that limit the full expression of our humanity. As Bornstein emphasizes, gender doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It intersects with class, race, disability, sexuality, age, and language. This new edition includes more content about those intersections, asking how they shape power dynamics and self-perception. If the original workbook opened the door to a new world, this edition throws the door off its hinges and builds a stage where everyone can show up as themselves, whoever that turns out to be.
In My New Gender Workbook, she doesn’t shy away from pain or pretend that identity exploration is a purely intellectual game. She knows the stakes are high. Gender norms kill. Shame kills. Erasure kills. But she also believes in the capacity of creativity and love to save lives. This is especially clear in her work with young queer and trans readers, whom she addresses not as broken people in need of fixing, but as brilliant outlaws worthy of celebration.
That ethos radiates through her partnership with Barbara Carrellas, their shared home of human and nonhuman companions, and the chosen family they’ve created in New York City. Bornstein doesn’t just theorize gender anarchy, she lives it. Even in her later years, she continues to perform, teach, and speak, including a Broadway debut in Straight White Men and appearances in I Am Cait. As she said in her 2021 LGBTQ&A interview, quarantine and aging taught her to let go of old ideas about gender presentation: “I’m too old for that. My face is sagging, my boobs are sagging… and you let go of that as being necessary to your gender.” It's a hilarious and moving declaration of freedom: the kind that only comes after a lifetime of swimming against the current.
My New Gender Workbook is a culmination of decades of activism, performance, introspection, and survival. It’s for the newly questioning teen. It’s for the exhausted trans woman trying to survive corporate life. It’s for the queer elder confronting internalized norms. It’s for cis people who want to stop causing harm and start understanding. It’s for anyone who has felt unseen, unheard, or misfit, and anyone who’s ready to turn those feelings into something revolutionary.
Reading this book is not a passive act. It’s an invitation to unlearn and imagine. It is, as the subtitle promises, a step-by-step guide to world peace, but only if we’re brave enough to embrace gender anarchy and sex positivity as tools for liberation rather than threats to order. Bornstein shows us that joy can be subversive, that identity is performance, that love is possible outside control, and that yes, world peace might just begin with a workbook and a pencil.
In the end, My New Gender Workbook is less a map than a compass. Bornstein doesn’t claim to have the answers, she’s far too punk rock for that. What she offers is more dangerous and more tender: the tools to find your own path, and the affirmation that your weird, beautiful journey is worth taking.
Available via barnesandnoble.com
Photo via Heroines of My Life
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