You can have your gender

Perhaps we should pause here for a moment and clarify something that I'm often asked about and that seems to be a point of grave misunderstanding. I don't want to take away your gender. I don't want to abolish gender roles, or even gender rules. I do want to abolish gender assumptions, and therein lies the most exciting part of my identity: I am a metaphor. I am not a metaphor for how "you too can be genderfluid." If you aren't inherently fluid, I would never suggest that you try to be or you pretend to be. I'm a metaphor for being free, for a grander ideal. I am a walking, breathing representation of the fruits of self-acceptance.

Jeffrey Marsh, "Life Threats," in Micah Rajunov & Scott Duane eds., Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), p. 76

Double standard about dog love

Why is a woman's love for lapdogs considered embarrassingly sentimental when men bond so proudly with their well-built hounds? Married women admit they sleep with their dogs, and married men deny it; someone's not telling the truth, but who's lying, and why?

Mikita Brottman, The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Exceptional Dogs (New York: HarperCollins), Introduction.

Lapdogs . . . are associated with unfulfilled maternal instincts. While most people accept dogs as part of the family unit, they often feel uncomfortable in the presence of a childless woman and a dog, as if only when a dog's not really "needed" can it be loved appropriately. . . .

It's an unfair stereotype, of course—all kinds of people, inclding men, dote on their dogs—but rather than debunking it, my first impulse is to distance myself from it. I feel compelled to make it very clear that, although I love my dog to distraction, I'm not one of those women, and Grisby is't one of those dogs He's not a Chihuahua or a shih tzu; he's a tough little bulldog, too heavy to ride in a carrier or snuggle on my lap. I want to deny and disavow, to insist how different my situation is, instead of thinking about why it's so hard for a woman who buys sweter for her dog to be taken seriously.

In some ways, after all, I am one of those women.

Id., ch. 10.

Humor in two genders or two languages

"Do you think you’d have your same sense of humor, if you’d been a woman from the start?"

I shrugged. "I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe the humor is what I needed to survive."

"I didn’t think she was all that funny before," said Tori a little self-consciously. "Actually. When you were a boy? Your jokes always seemed so panicked, or something."

"Maybe," said Sarah, "this is your original sense of humor? And what you had before was the replica?"

I knew what she was getting at, but it made my head hurt. It reminded me of something James Thurber once said at a party, in Paris, when a woman told him how much funnier his work was in French. "I know," said Thurber. "It does tend to lose something in the original."

Jennifer Finney Boylan, I’m Looking Through You (New York: Broadway Books, 2008), pp. 244-45. (Page break between “was in” and “French.”)