Kate Bornstein - A Queer and Pleasant Danger

2012, English, Interview, Kate Bornstein, USA,

Full title: "A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She is Today" by Kate Bornstein. 

"In the early 1970s, a boy from a Conservative Jewish family joined the Church of Scientology. In 1981, that boy officially left the movement and ultimately transitioned into a woman. A few years later, she stopped calling herself a woman—and became a famous gender outlaw.

Gender theorist, performance artist, and author Kate Bornstein is set to change lives with her stunningly original memoir. Wickedly funny and disarmingly honest, this is Bornstein's most intimate book yet, encompassing her early childhood and adolescence, college at Brown, a life in the theater, three marriages and fatherhood, the Scientology hierarchy, transsexual life, LGBTQ politics, and life on the road as a sought-after speaker."

In 2017, Kate agreed to have an interview with me, and this is what she shared with me: "I was trying to live my life as a boy and as a man. I was always conscious of the fact that doing “boy” and “man” never felt natural to me. I had to watch boys and men to see how they did it. I practiced. Sometimes in the mirror. And gradually, I could perform “boy” and “man” easily and without much thought. But inside, there were always doubts.

Fast forward to six months after my SRS, I was conscious, every day, of the fact that doing “girl” and “woman” does not feel natural. I was watching girls and women to see how they did it. I practiced. Sometimes in the mirror. I wasn’t expressing myself. I was expressing myself - mind, body, and soul - as the boy, man, girl, woman that the culture expected me to be. I finally threw up my hands in despair and went into a deep depression. I guess I wasn’t a woman after all."

According to Wikipedia, Katherine Vandam Bornstein (born in 1948) is an American author, playwright, performance artist, actor, and gender theorist. In the 1980s, Bornstein started identifying herself 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 undergoing mtf bottom surgery in 1986. 

Bornstein never felt comfortable with the belief of the day that all trans women are "women trapped in men's bodies." They did not identify as a man, but the only other option was to be a woman, a reflection of the gender binary, which required people to identify according to only two available genders. Another obstacle was the fact that Bornstein was attracted to women. Bornstein now identifies as non-binary and uses the pronouns they/them and she/her.

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Photo via Heroines of My Life