Kate Bornstein

Kate Bornstein
File:Kate Bornstein 1120364.jpg Bornstein at the 2025 Baltimore Book Festival
Born	(1948-03-15) March 15, 1948 Neptune City, New Jersey, U.S.
Education	Brown University (BA)
Occupations	Performance artist author
Partner	Barbara Carrellas
Website	katebornstein.com

Katherine Vandam Bornstein is an American author, playwright, performance artist, actor, and gender theorist. As a transgender pioneer since the 1980s, Bornstein's reflections on sex and gender nonconformity have influenced various spheres of queer culture. She has stated "I don't call myself a woman, and I know I'm not a man". Bornstein now identifies as non-binary, and has also written personal accounts of having anorexia, surviving PTSD, and being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Early life and education

Bornstein grew up just outside of Asbury Park, New Jersey, in an upper middle-class Conservative Jewish family of Russian and Dutch descent. Bornstein studied Theater Arts with John Emigh and Jim Barnhill at Brown University (Class of '69).

Scientology

Bornstein joined the Church of Scientology in 1970. She found herself drawn to Scientology because thetans are genderless beings. Bornstein eventually would serve on a ship with L. Ron Hubbard and eventually become a high-ranking lieutenant in the Sea Org. While serving in this position, she secretly bought porn magazines from Lee Brewster. She would also purchase women's clothes to wear while staying in hotels and later discard them. Bornstein later became disillusioned and formally left the movement in 1982. By doing so, she was deemed a suppressive person, which prevented her from contacting her daughter.

Career

File:KateBornstein.jpg

Kate Bornstein at SUNY New Paltz in October, 2018

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.

In 2009, Bornstein's Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for LGBT Nonfiction and Honorbook for the Stonewall Children's and Young Adult Literature. Bornstein edited Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation in collaboration with S. Bear Bergman. The anthology won Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards in 2011.

Bornstein is a major cultural icon, influencing the social and political representation of transgender identity. Aperture referred to her as a "gender outlaw." Bornstein was featured in the reality television series I Am Cait.

Books

• — winner of a 1999 Firecracker Alternative Book Award
• Bornstein, Kate (2016). Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (Revised and Updated). New York: Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. .
• Bornstein, Kate; Sullivan, Caitlin (2025). Nearly Roadkill: Queer Love on the Run. New York: Generous Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. .

Theatre

Bornstein made her Broadway debut in July 2018 in the play Straight White Men. She has since created several performance pieces, some of them one-person shows. In 1989, Bornstein created a theatre production in collaboration with Noreen Barnes, Hidden: A Gender, based on parallels between their own life and that of the intersex person Herculine Barbin, starring Bornstein and Justin Vivian Bond.

Bornstein has featured in The Opposite Sex Is Neither, Virtually Yours, Hidden: A Gender, Strangers in Paradox, y2kate: gender virus 2000, and Hard Candy.

Personal life

See also: Transgender culture of New York City

Bornstein lives with her partner Barbara Carrellas in New York City, with three cats, two dogs, and a turtle.

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. She had sex reassignment surgery in 1986.

In August 2012, Bornstein was diagnosed with lung cancer. She had surgery which initially seemed successful, but in February 2013 it was found that the disease had returned. Laura Vogel, a friend of Bornstein's, launched a GoFundMe campaign on March 20 to help fund subsequent treatment. In December 2015, Bornstein announced that they had been cancer-free for two years.

Speaking to the LGBTQ&A podcast in July 2021, Bornstein talked about how her view of gender evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic, "Gender became inconsequential to me while I was in quarantine and grappling with old age...This is where you really need to be letting go of shit. I'm letting go of the ability to be cute, in certain ways. I'm too old for that. My face is sagging, my boobs are sagging. Boy, oh boy. They're down to my waist and you let go of that as being necessary to your gender."

Further reading

• Gentleman, Rye (2022). "Kate Bornstein" in Noriega and Schildcrout (eds.) 50 Key Figures in Queer US Theatre, Routledge, pp. 26–29. ISBN 978-1032067964.
• An Interview with Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman.

External links

• katebornstein.com
• Interview:
• Interview:
• Lecture by Kate Bornstein