Gender and race got very entwined in the 19th century, as abolition broke out, and then women wanted the right to speak about it.
The more I've been able to learn about gay rights and equal pay and gender equity and racial inequality, the more that it all intersects. You can't really pick it apart. It's all intertwined.
I believe in equal pay for equal work. Gender, race, skin colour, or ethnicity should not be the parameters to hire someone or to decide how much they should be paid.
Equal protection under the law - for race, religion, gender or sexual orientation - should not be subject to the most popular sentiments of the day.
We need love, and to ensure love, we need to have full employment, and we need social justice. We need gender equity. We need freedom from hunger. These are our most fundamental needs as social creatures.
What everyone in the astronaut corps shares in common is not gender or ethnic background, but motivation, perseverance, and desire - the desire to participate in a voyage of discovery.
Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.
What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.
Too often, customary practices and discrimination on the basis of gender, ethnicity, race, religion, social status, or class are the root sources of pervasive inequality in many countries.
For me, if a company is really committed to diversity, that means everything. That means gender diversity, that means sexual orientation for me, that means race, ethnicity.
I'm not telling women to be like men. I'm telling us to evaluate what men and women do in the workforce and at home without the gender bias.
So the tough questions that have been asked of Sarah Palin thus far just have been about the fact that she doesn't know anything and isn't ready to be vice president. That's fair game and it has nothing to do with her gender.
Dismissing socialization and gender roles as piddling compared to this amorphous idea of 'maternal imperative' is part of the reason progress is stalled for family-friendly policies.
I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.
What I do know is that traditional gender roles are very real and flipping the norm is difficult for even the strongest, funniest, smartest men.
My own experience of gender has been about a lot of fluidity. In drag, I like to combine aspects of masculinity and femininity and rewrite the rules for those.
I first wrote about Michael Jackson in the 1980s. His skin was growing paler, his features thinner, and his aura more feminine. Some called him a traitor to his race. Some fussed about his gender fluidity. I saw him as a post-modern shape-shifter. But the shifts grew more extreme and mysterious.
What we really need to look at is gender fluidity and the idea that gender can be customised however you want.
Feminism needs a political program because gender inequality has been fostered by political decisions.
Everyone - regardless of their background, wealth, race, faith, gender, sexual orientation or age - should be able to fulfil their potential and succeed.
