It's pride week! Today in my Human Sexuality class we had Jenny Boylan as a guest speaker, author of required reading She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders. Jenny's book is about the first half of her life physically being a male but feeling like a female, and her transition to a transexual.
I enjoyed reading this book- it's funny and personal, but most of all, it helped me to understand how someone can be one sex but feel like the opposite gender. This book was like reading the mind of a transgender person and it was helpful to me in my understanding of transgender people. I think there should be more literature out there like this- a huge reason people are disciminated against is because others do not understand. Fear of the unkown creates prejudice and transgender can sound like a complicated topic to someone unfamiliar with the issues.
This is also a book about becoming who you are. What surprised me the most while reading was Jennys internal struggle when she was a man (James). James said he would wake up in the morning, thinking he was a woman, but then have to force himself to become a man, when physically, he was male. This is something he struggled with until after marriage. It was his refusal to acknowledge that he knew he was female that surprised me. I have never thought about the internal struggle probably a lot of people, including non transgender people, have. This book did a wonderful job in showing that internal struggle and how it can destroy a person.
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