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.
Theatre While living in Philadelphia in the early 1980s, Bornstein co-founded Order Before Midnight, then labeled a women's theater company. After moving to San Francisco, she worked with
Theatre Rhinoceros and Outlaw Productions. At a conference on women and theater in 1988, she performed a trio of monologues exploring gender via roles she had performed throughout her career. In 1989, she joined her first San Francisco show, playing the Judge in
The Balcony, produced by Theatre Rhinoceros. Other single-person performances Bornstein created include
Hard Candy and
y2kate: gender virus 2000, which involved monologues, slam poetry, and lecture. 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.
Writing Gender Outlaw Bornstein published
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us in 1994. With a range of evidence and writing modes, they argue that
gender is a
cultural construct, not an inherent and rigid
binary. The book contains theory and autobiography, as well as performance excerpts, personal photos, interviews, and exercises for the reader.
Kirkus Reviews gave the book a positive review for its charismatic tone and incisive questioning of the predominant gender ideology of the time.
Gender Outlaw has become part of the
queer studies canon. It was an influential work in building visibility and inclusivity for
trans and
non-binary people in the U.S., along with other 1990s works like
Ann Fausto-Sterling's
Myths of Gender,
Leslie Feinberg's
Transgender Warriors, and Bornstein's later
My Gender Workbook. Bornstein gave talks at college campuses for two decades following the publication of
Gender Outlaw, speaking on the same topics under that name. The book is focused on
gender-bending exercises, but also contains comics, the play
Post Hard: An Online Play in One Act, autobiographical elements from Bornstein, and writing from over 300 people. On the book's inside cover, the book begins with a fill-in the blank: "My Name is ____ and this is MY Gender Workbook".
Nearly Roadkill is also notable for being one of the earliest publications to use the
neopronouns "
ze/
hir" to describe one of its characters, which helped popularize the use of
gender-neutral pronouns. Bornstein and Sullivan had met at a
queer writer's conference and began exchanging letters, eventually switching to email and chat rooms. Bornstein recounted later that the freedom of expressing themself over text online enabled them to "be as outrageously queer" as they wanted and not disabled or filtered. Both authors' experiences online inspired the book, which they wrote by sending individual chapters to each other. Bornstein had begun writing the book after she had fallen into depression after witnessing the
September 11 attacks and being unsatisfied with the, in her opinion, unhelpful and harmful advice in the available
suicide prevention books. The book was partially inspired by
1001 Ways to Live Without Working by
Tuli Kupferberg (1961).
Hello, Cruel World was a
Lambda Literary Award Finalist for
LGBT Nonfiction and Honor book for Stonewall Children's and Young Adult Literature. In April 2025, the book was republished with 20 additional alternatives as
Hello, Cruel World: 101+ Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws: Second Edition. The re-release was motivated by rising
hostility towards the
trans community and disagreements in the
LGBTQ community. The book builds on
Gender Outlaw, with five parts exploring
transgender themes. It incorporates essays, comics, and poems, on tragic and funny subjects, and explores the advantages and disadvantages of
gender nonconformity and transgender identity.
Gender Outlaws received a positive review from
The Gay & Lesbian Review. It also won a Special Nonfiction
Publishing Triangle Award in 2011.
A Queer and Pleasant Danger In 2012 Bornstein published their memoir,
A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today. This would be her first public account of some of these experiences, especially in discussing Scientology. Bornstein stated that they were too scared to talk about Scientology, which had a reputation for legal retaliation against people who speak critically of the church, until seeing enough people talk publicly following
South Park's
episode on Scientology. They described their eventual motivation in speaking up within the memoir as an attempt to reconnect with their daughter, who was still a Scientologist. Bornstein was featured in the reality television series
I Am Cait. == Reception ==