Kate Bornstein

Kate Bornstein, born Katherine Vandam Bornstein, is an American author, playwright, performance artist, actor, and gender theorist. Raised in a Conservative Jewish family of Russian and Dutch descent in a suburb just outside Asbury Park, New Jersey, Bornstein studied Theater Arts under John Emigh and Jim Barnhill at Brown University, graduating with the class of 1969. She subsequently enrolled in a graduate acting program at Brandeis University before departing to join the Church of Scientology in 1970. During her years in the organization, she served aboard a ship with L. Ron Hubbard and rose to a high-ranking position within the Sea Org. She formally left Scientology in 1982, an exit that resulted in her being designated a suppressive person, which severed her contact with her daughter. A transgender pioneer since the 1980s, Bornstein has stated that she does not identify as a woman and knows she is not a man; she now identifies as non-binary. Her public writing and advocacy have also addressed personal experiences with anorexia, PTSD, and a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.

Following her departure from Scientology, Bornstein settled in San Francisco's lesbian community and contributed art reviews to the gay and lesbian newspaper The Bay Area Reporter. Her theatrical career had begun earlier, while she was living in Philadelphia in the early 1980s, when she co-founded Order Before Midnight, then described as a women's theater company. After relocating to San Francisco, she worked with Theatre Rhinoceros and Outlaw Productions. At a 1988 conference on women and theater, she performed a trio of monologues examining gender through roles she had played across her career. The following year she appeared in Theatre Rhinoceros's production of The Balcony, playing the Judge.

Also in 1989, Bornstein developed Hidden: A Gender in collaboration with director Noreen Barnes, drawing on parallels between her own life and that of the intersex figure Herculine Barbin, whose memoirs were edited by Michel Foucault. Originally conceived as a solo performance, the piece expanded to three roles: Bornstein as Doc Grinder, Justin Vivian Bond as Barbin, and Sydney Erskine as Herman/Kate Amberstone. The production premiered in San Francisco before traveling to a festival in Seattle and embarking on tour. Throughout the 1990s, Bornstein wrote and performed solo works centered on gender and trans identity, including The Opposite Sex Is Neither and Virtually Yours. Her 1998 piece Strangers in Paradox examined the medicalization of trans people in Western medicine. She and her partner Barbara Carrellas also developed Too Tall Blondes in Love, which toured nationally during the 2000s. Additional solo works she created include Hard Candy and y2kate: gender virus 2000, which incorporated monologues, slam poetry, and lecture.

Bornstein made her Broadway debut in July 2018, appearing in the play Straight White Men. Her writing career has run parallel to her performance work and has been equally influential in queer and transgender culture. In 1994 she published Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, a book combining theory, autobiography, performance excerpts, personal photographs, interviews, and reader exercises to argue that gender is a cultural construct rather than an inherent binary. Kirkus Reviews praised its tone and questioning of prevailing gender ideology, and The Lesbian Review of Books called it a must-read for anyone puzzling over the sex and gender system. The book has since entered the queer studies canon and is credited, alongside works such as Leslie Feinberg's Transgender Warriors, with building visibility and inclusion for trans and non-binary people in the United States. It has also been critiqued for not examining how race and class intersect with gender in forming oppressive hierarchies.

In 1997, Bornstein published My Gender Workbook, a volume of gender-bending exercises also containing comics, autobiographical material, the play Post Hard: An Online Play in One Act, and writing from more than 300 contributors. Publishers Weekly described it as a classic of modern transgender theory and literature. An updated edition, My New Gender Workbook, appeared in 2013 with expanded sections on sexuality and intersectionality and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. In 1996, Bornstein and co-author Caitlin Sullivan published the cyberpunk novel Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure, which addressed themes including surveillance, online identity, the gender binary, and trans exclusion. The novel is among the earliest publications to use the neopronouns ze and hir, a usage that contributed to the broader adoption of gender-neutral pronouns. The two authors had met at a queer writers' conference and composed the book by exchanging individual chapters, a process that mirrored the epistolary form of the novel itself, which is structured as emails and chat logs.