page_title: Kate Bornstein
section_title: Transition and post-op
hierarchical_section_title: Kate Bornstein / Biography / Transition and post-op
caption_attribution_description: English: see caption
context_page_description: Katherine Vandam "Kate" Bornstein is an American author, playwright, performance artist, actress, and gender theorist. In 1986, Bornstein identified 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 receiving sex reassignment surgery.
  She now identifies with the pronouns they/them or she/her. Bornstein has also written about having anorexia, being a survivor of PTSD and being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Bornstein has chronic lymphocytic leukemia and in September 2012 was diagnosed with lung cancer.
context_section_description: Bornstein never felt comfortable with the belief of the day that all trans women are "women trapped in men's bodies." She 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. She had sex reassignment surgery in 1986.
  Bornstein settled into the lesbian community in San Francisco, and wrote art reviews for the gay and lesbian paper The Bay Area Reporter. Over the next few years, she began to identify as neither a man nor a woman. This catapulted Bornstein back to performing, creating several performance pieces, some of them one-person shows. It was the only way that she knew how to communicate life's paradoxes.
  Bornstein also teaches workshops and has published several gender theory books and a novel. Hello Cruel World was written to keep "teens, freaks, and other outlaws" from dying by suicide. "Do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living," Bornstein writes, "just don't be mean."
  Bornstein's partner is Barbara Carrellas. They live in New York City with three cats, two dogs, and a turtle.
caption: Kate Bornstein at SUNY New Paltz in October, 2018. Photo by Morgan Gwenwald.
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