Becoming Max: Confronting gender identity disorder

[Shana A]

Becoming Max: Confronting gender identity disorder

by Karina Bland - May. 5, 2012 06:04 PM
The Republic

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/arizonaliving/articles/2012/05/05/20120505gender-identity-disorder-max.html

Max Janssen stood in the middle of the dimly lit stage in his 8:50 a.m. acting class, hunching his shoulders like 15-year-old boys do. He was supposed to give this three-minute monologue yesterday, but he chickened out.

[...]

"It's such a big part of me. I felt like it needed to be said," he says. "Anything else would have been a lie."

"Are you sure?" Mr. Kosnik asked the next day. Max was sure.

Onstage, he pushed up his glasses, took a deep breath, and began:

"June 20, 1996. Makenzie Ann Janssen."

And then Max simply said that he had been born on that day, a baby girl.

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by Karina Bland
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Max Janssen stood in the middle of the dimly lit stage in his 8:50 a.m. acting class, hunching his shoulders like 15-year-old boys do. He was supposed to give this three-minute monologue yesterday, but he chickened out.

"My teacher called my name, and it sort of hit me what I was going to do," Max said. Heart pounding, he told his teacher, "I can't do this today."

It wasn't that he hadn't memorized it, or that he had stage fright. It was that what he was going to say might rock his world, change what his friends thought about him, possibly even freak them out.