Posted on 03/17/2008 8:50:15 PM PDT by Marc Tumin
It was late on a rainy fall day, and a college freshman named Rey was showing me the new tattoo on his arm. It commemorated his 500-mile hike through Europe the previous summer, which happened also to be, he said, the last time he was happy. We sat together for a while in his room talking, his tattoo of a piece with his spiky brown hair, oversize tribal earrings and very baggy jeans. He showed me a photo of himself and his girlfriend kissing, pointed out his small drum kit, a bass guitar that lay next to his rumpled clothes and towels and empty bottles of green tea, one full of dried flowers, and the ink self-portraits and drawings of nudes that he had tacked to the walls. Thick jasmine incense competed with his cigarette smoke. He changed the music on his laptop with the melancholy, slightly startled air of a college boy on his own for the first time.
Rey’s story, though, had some unusual dimensions. The elite college he began attending last year in New York City, with its academically competitive, fresh-faced students, happened to be a women’s school, Barnard. That’s because when Rey first entered the freshman class, he was a woman.
Rey, who asked that neither his last name nor his given name be used to protect his and his family’s privacy, grew up in Chappaqua, the affluent Westchester suburb that is home to the Clintons, and had a relatively ordinary, middle-class Jewish childhood....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Why are freak-shows news today? I simply don’t get it.
I had a female to male er ... fellow in my abnormal psych class. Utterly miserable and confused. good transformation though I didn’t even notice until it was brought up.
“I didn’t even notice until it was brought up.”
That is just sick!
I do.
It's an apparently successful attempt by the media to normalize deviancy, to "define deviancy down."
They want us to think there are lots of sick fvcks like "Rey," and that we shouldn't think there's anything wrong with them.
They haven't found a way, however, to keep the bile from rising in my throat...
Hey he must have gone through some serious hormone therapy, hairy arms fairly deep voice. It was very disturbing. I think the class was actually discussing that sort of thing when he dropped that bomb shell.
Mayhap if boys were raised by men and girls raised by women, this wouldn’t be a problem.?
It’s too bad that the fathers of these NY Times writers failed to use condoms or the “pullout method”.
Laughing! Hard! Great pic.
If you tell deviant stories long enough and loud enough, eventually people start to accept them.
It must be really depressing after you have your 5 minutes of fame and then wake up the next day and no one cares!
I read two pages, that’s enough. Typical baloney. Abnormal becomes normal, normal becomes fringe.
I knew someone once at work who’d gone through this. I can’t begin to imagine the stress on them wrestling with these decisions. It was a very sad story that finally turned out for the best.
“When girls will be boys”
I suppose that is when women will REALLY destroy each other.
Caption: Not Quite the 3am Call We’d Thought Hillary Would Take.
Someday it would be fun to argue with one of these girls. Point out to them that they’ve only changed the outside. Their skeletons would still invariably be sexed as female by any anthropologist, and a thousand years from now when they’re dug up and put on display, it will say “woman” forever.
I would imagine that Her Thighness will likely be quite busy at 3AM anyhow :-)
The idea that he might actually want to transition from female to male began to take shape for Rey when he was 14 or 15; ... “A transmale speaker guy” gave a talk at a meeting of his high school’s Gay Straight Alliance, and Rey was inspired. ...
At the end of his freshman year in high school, he met Melissa, ... Melissa, who was immersed in campus gender activism, mentioned the concept of being a “transman” and spoke of her transmale friends. Rey confided his questions about his gender identity to her, and she encouraged him to explore them further. For most of high school, Rey spent hours online reading about transgendered people and their lives. “The Internet is the best thing for trans people,” he said. “Living in the suburbs, online groups were an access point.” He also started reading memoirs of transgendered people. He asked Melissa to explain the gender theory she was learning in college.
… In addition, 147 colleges and universities nationwide now include “gender identity and expression” in their nondiscrimination policies, and students will often use gender-neutral pronouns like “ze” and “hir” — especially if they post on campus message boards. At Wesleyan last year, students initiated a survey of bathrooms, checking to see if they were transgender-friendly — open to all sexes. Many colleges now have Transgender Days of Remembrance in memory of victims of gender-identity-related hate crimes.
… As Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California and the author of “Female Masculinity,” put it, feminist theory offers students a way to think about gender as performance, to create a trans self or a genderqueer one — and give that self contours, definition — in a way that was simply unavailable 30 years ago.
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