Kate Bornstein - My Gender Workbook

1997, English, Interview, Kate Bornstein, USA,

Full title: "My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely" by Kate Bornstein.

Gender isn't just about "male" or "female" anymore, if you have any doubts, just turn on your television. RuPaul is as familiar as tomato ketchup, and transgender people have become regulars on talk shows and reality TV. But while the mainstreaming of gender variance might reveal the cracks in the binary, it doesn't necessarily help us figure out where to go from here. Cultural theorists have written volumes on the topic, often in inaccessible academic language. What was missing, until Kate Bornstein came along, was a playful, hands-on guide to help us navigate and create our own gender identities. My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely is exactly that.

 

Published in 1998, Bornstein's My Gender Workbook is part workbook, part philosophical challenge, and part joyful rebellion. It starts from a radical, yet increasingly intuitive idea: that there are not just two genders, but countless. What society lumps into "male" and "female" is only a small slice of the wild spectrum of identity and expression available to us. Using a deceptively light tone filled with quizzes, diagrams, pop culture references, and humor, Bornstein invites readers into a kind of gender laboratory where they can test, discard, and reinvent pieces of identity at will. She uses the USDA food pyramid to explain gender roles, pokes fun at Mars and Venus books by blasting them to Uranus, and weaves in testimonies from real “gender outlaws.” 

 

In doing so, Bornstein makes theory not only accessible, but deeply personal. Bornstein brings lived experience into every page. Assigned male at birth, she had gender-affirming surgery in 1986 and settled into lesbian life in San Francisco, writing for queer newspapers and performing in underground theater. But as she tells it in a 2017 interview with The Heroines blog, she never really felt at home in either gender box. “I never believed I was a woman trapped in a man's body,” she said. “That just wasn't true for me.” Her work stems from a refusal to choose between two oversimplified options. Instead, she carved out space for "neither," "both," or "something else entirely." This refusal to conform became the foundation of her groundbreaking performance pieces, including Hidden: A Gender, and later, her books.

My Gender Workbook isn’t about settling into a new identity, it's about learning to enjoy the process of becoming. Bornstein urges readers to embrace fluidity and contradiction, to resist certainty when it limits growth, and to recognize how systems of power (like sexism, transphobia, and capitalism) rely on rigid gender categories to maintain control. Rather than provide neat answers, the workbook is filled with open-ended questions. What makes you feel like a man? What makes you feel like a woman? What if you didn't have to be either? If this sounds playful, it is. But it’s also survival work. Bornstein is painfully aware of the stakes, especially for trans and nonbinary youth. In her later book Hello, Cruel World, she offered 101 alternatives to suicide for “teens, freaks, and other outlaws,” born from her own experience living with PTSD, an eating disorder, and suicidal ideation. Her motto: “Do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living. Just don’t be mean.” That combination of fierce compassion and punk irreverence infuses My Gender Workbook too, creating a sense of safety and permission that’s rare in books about identity. In the same Heroines interview, Bornstein speaks about aging, letting go of the performative parts of gender, and laughing about her sagging boobs with characteristic honesty. “Gender became inconsequential to me while I was in quarantine and grappling with old age,” she admits. But that doesn’t mean her work has lost relevance, on the contrary, it has only gained urgency.

 

In a world increasingly hostile to gender nonconformity, Bornstein’s unapologetic weirdness, warmth, and wisdom feel like a lifeline. Bornstein’s legacy doesn’t stop with My Gender Workbook. She has written and edited multiple books, including the Lambda Award-winning Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (co-edited with S. Bear Bergman), and her memoir A Queer and Pleasant Danger. She also starred in the Broadway play Straight White Men, and appeared in the docuseries I Am Cait. Her refusal to fit neatly into any category, whether gender, genre, or generation, has made her an enduring icon of queer resilience. My Gender Workbook remains a singular achievement. It refuses to tell readers who they are, opting instead to give them the tools to discover, create, and affirm their own truths. It meets people where they are, but never leaves them there. And it insists, above all, that we deserve to live as the real us, whatever that may look like. In an era that’s hungry for authenticity but confused about how to get there, Kate Bornstein’s workbook still asks the most radical question of all: What if you made your own gender, and had fun doing it?

Available via Amazon

and The Heroines of My Life

Wikipedia

Photo via Heroines of My Life