Biography
Welcome to my website. I’m Kate Bornstein—author, playwright, performer, and lifelong mischief-maker when it comes to questioning the rules about who we’re supposed to be. I call myself a gender outlaw, and if you’ve landed here, chances are you’re a curious soul, maybe even a bit of an outlaw yourself. Either way, you’re in the right place to find some good trouble.
For over thirty years, I’ve been writing, speaking, and performing about what we now call nonbinary gender—what it means to be neither man nor woman, decades before “nonbinary” was even a word. My books, Gender Outlaw, My New Gender Workbook, and Hello, Cruel World have stirred up conversations in classrooms, community spaces, and anywhere people are questioning the boxes we’ve been handed. I wrote Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives To Suicide For Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws for anyone who’s ever felt backed into a corner, life’s not all that worth living, and desperate for a way out. There’s always another way out. Always. And you can always make your life more worth living. I promise.
I started out in theater, and that sense of playfulness, performance, storytelling, and creative community has shaped everything I do. Whether I’m writing, speaking, or performing, what I want most is to expand the ways we see ourselves and each other. I’m well into my seventies now, old enough to know that life isn’t a straight line—it’s a wibbly, wobbly, twisty, ever-changing story, and we all get to revise ourselves as the lead character as we go.
My own story has had its fair share of plot twists. I grew up in a more or less Conservative Jewish family in New Jersey, studied theater at Brown University, and spent twelve years deeply enmeshed in the Church of Scientology before leaving and starting over. I transitioned from male to female in the 1980s, back when the language around gender was even narrower than it is now. I came to realize that neither “man” nor “woman” told the whole truth about me. So, I’ve spent the rest of my life exploring that space in between and standing up for the right of everyone to define themselves however they see fit. I wrote about my life’s journey in my memoir, A Queer and Pleasant Danger: the true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology and leaves 12 years later to become the lovely lady she is today.