Saturday, March 15, 2008

When Girls Will Be Boys

"Jordan Akerley (left), a senior at Wellesley College, eschews pronouns," according to a really good indepth article in today's New York Times about transmen who are in college.

The focus of the piece, in part, is women's colleges. What happens when a woman transitions to a man at a single-sex institution? Goes to show how institutions change so glacially that they never quite catch up to social changes.

The transmen quoted in the article are all so articulate and thoughtful about their queernesses. I love the way that Rey, for example, says: “Some transmen want to be seen as men — they want to be accepted as born men. I want to be accepted as a transman — my brain is not gendered. There’s this crazy gender binary that’s built into all of life, that there are just two genders that are acceptable. I don’t want to have to fit into that.”

No comments: