Transgender artist to speak at UF for pride awareness

April 2, 2007

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Pride Student Union, ACCENT and LGBT Affairs at the Dean of Students Office will bring speaker Kate Bornstein to the University of Florida in celebration of Pride Awareness Month 2007.

Bornstein is a transgender author, playwright, performance artist, and gender theorist. She will perform “On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us” at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Rion Ballroom in the Reitz Student Union. For more information visit www.ufpam.org or lgbt.ufl.edu.

“I’m what’s called a transsexual person. That means I was assigned one gender at birth, and I now live my life as something else. I was born male and raised as a boy. I went through both boyhood and adult manhood, went through a gender change, and ‘became a woman,’” Bornstein wrote.

As a lesbian feminist writer, Bornstein educates others about what she feels is the inherently oppressive nature of a binary gender system that demands society conform to one of two gender options. Through her work, she challenges and deconstructs all ideas on gender, including ideas most people have not even considered.

Her latest book, “Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws,” sold out in less than a year and is currently in the process of its second edition. Bornstein’s other published works include the books “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us,” “My Gender Workbook,” and the cyber-romance-action novel “Nearly Roadkill” with co-author Caitlin Sullivan.

Plays and performance pieces include “Strangers in Paradox, Hidden: A Gender, The Opposite Sex Is Neither, Virtually Yours,” and “y2kate: gender virus 2000.”

Her books are taught in more than 120 colleges and universities around the world, and she has performed her work live on college campuses, in theaters and in performance spaces across the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria.