Gender Outlaw

Gender outlaw describes a person who rejects conventional gender rules and lives outside the fixed categories of man and woman. The phrase was popularized by the writer, performer, and activist Kate Bornstein, whose 1994 book Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us was one of the first mainstream books by a transgender author to examine gender as performance and to question the binary itself. Bornstein later co-edited the 2010 anthology Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation with S. Bear Bergman, gathering essays, comics, and conversations from a wide range of trans and non-binary contributors. The term is used with pride to name people who deliberately break gender norms and expand what is possible.