Youth Gender Identity, Race and Class in the New York Times and In the New Year
Filed by: Dr. Jillian T. Weiss
December 31, 2009 12:00 AM
http://www.bilerico.com/2009/12/youth_gender_identity_race_and_class_in_the_new_yo.php#moreThe New York Times published an interview on Monday with Vidari DeGuzman, a youth worker at the Hetrick-Martin Institute, a service organization for LGBT youth in New York City.
Although relatively short, I found the interview revealing about issues of race and class that often get obscured in discussions of gender identity. Is "gender identity" a singular experience that every person has, or is it a series of individual experiences differentiated by race and class and other factors? Is there such a thing as "men's experiences" and "women's experiences" that transcend time and space that we can generalize about? Or is that just a convenient story that we invent?
