# Gender bender

A gender bender is a person who actively rebels against, or "bends," expected gender roles. Gender bending in actions or in fictions, is sometimes a form of social activism undertaken in response to assumptions or over-generalizations about genders. In fiction, the term gender bender may refer not only to characters modeled after real-life gender benders, but also to characters who undergo changes in their physical sex – magically or otherwise – throughout the story. A work of art which challenges gender roles or features gender bending may itself be referred to as a "gender bender".

## Quotes

* All I know is this: he went out for his walk a man and came home female.
** Carol Ann Duffy, "Mrs Tiresias"
* The eyes were the same. But in the shocking V of the shirt were breasts. When he uttered my name in a woman’s voice I passed out.
** Carol Ann Duffy, "Mrs Tiresias"
* There are also third-sex citizens, sometimes greatly attached to one another and with complete faith in one another, who get married together.
** Kama Sutra, Book II Chapter 9, verse 36
* A male child is produced by a greater quantity of male seed, a female child by the prevalence of the female; if both are equal, a third-sex child [napumsaka] or boy and girl twins are produced; if either are weak or deficient in quantity, a failure of conception results.
** Manusmriti, chapter 3 verse 49
* Here we show that sexual fate is also surprisingly labile in the testis: loss of the DMRT1 transcription factor 3 in mouse Sertoli cells, even in adults, activates Foxl2 and reprograms Sertoli cells into granulosa cells. In this environment, theca cells form, oestrogen is produced and germ cells appear feminized.
** Clinton K. Matson, et al, in "DMRT1 prevents female reprogramming in the postnatal mammalian testis" in Nature 476.7358 (2011), p. 101-104
* A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.
** Dan Savage, in Dan Savage Explores College Relationships on his New MTV Show
* There is a widespread belief in India that hijras are born hermaphrodites [intersex] and are taken away by the hijra community at birth or in childhood, but I found no evidence to support this belief among the hijras I met, all of whom joined the community voluntarily, often in their teens.
** Nanda, Serena. Neither Man Nor Woman: The hijras of India, p. xx. Canada: Wadworth Publishing Company, 1999
* Last night I was seriously considering whether I was a bisexual or not but I don’t think so though I’m not sure if I’d like to be and argh I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, if you like a person, you like the person, not their genitals.
** Jess C. Scott, Tongue-Tied
* Weirder and more contemplative than many of its time-traveling brethren, Predestination is a stylish head trip. It also marks Australian actor Snook as one to watch, as she demonstrates some serious gender-bending range.
** Sara Stewart in "Predestination is a sci-fi head trip" in The New York Post (7 January 2015)
* We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman — there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory — but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his,’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’— her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.
** Virginia Woolf, in Orlando: A Biography (1928)

## See also

* Gender