Finally a "Times" reporter gets it right! When Girls Will Be Boys by Alissa Quart delves much deeper than just the dilemma faced by women’s colleges when students transition from female to male. Unlike the Stonewall generation, the Genderqueer Revolution is not about fitting easy definitions – “gay or straight” does not translate neatly into “male or female.” We’re transmen/women as well as gender nonconformists who’ve never desired hormones, and we run the gamut from post-op transsexuals to those that “pass” as the biological sex we were born into (“trans” being the operative word – we transcend gender in a way that the gay and lesbian community does not transcend sexuality). That society reduces us to a group “born into the wrong body” is offensive, for it implies that there is a “right” body to be born into. This revolution is not about making it easy for society to categorize us. (As Eddie Izzard eloquently put it in his recent “Times” interview, “I have fought for the right to be able to wear a dress, not that I have to wear a dress. I didn’t jump out of a not-wearing-dress box into a have-to-wear-dress box.”) It’s about making it easier for us to live comfortably inside our contradictory selves.
(An edited version appears in “The New York Times Magazine” Letters to the Editor section.)
No comments:
Post a Comment