Welcome to The New Gender
K.Sosin on 02.23.10 at 2:59 PM
http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/new-gender/2010/02/welcome-to-the-new-gender.htmlOn the first day of my first college class, the professor issued a seemingly simple assignment: write about the moment you realized your gender, the moment you understood you were a boy or a girl. For me, the answer was not the moment I realized I was a girl, but the moment I realized I couldn't be a boy. No, I had been informed. I could not just rip off my shirt during living room basketball. That was for boys only.
Nearly the entire class wrote that they came to understand gender by breaking its many rules. Women especially, mourned the loss of not just boyhood, but of the respect and encouragement their male peers would recieve. To me, it was an old story: girls were always being told they couldn't do something. That was just the way of things.
But today, a lot of those students are transgender.
