Pride Panel

The Pride Panel on Friday was really cool and helpful. One of my friends just started taking hormones and about a month ago announced to everyone (from her family to all of her friends on Facebook) that she has always felt that and identified as a woman and is officially starting the transformation. The lesson on gender and sex the other week combined with the panel has really helped me understand more about the transformation and what goes on.

My friend is the first person I've met that is going through the transition from male to female, and she has said how it's not only a transformation for her but a transformation for everyone in her life. In her Facebook status she told everyone her new name and that it might be hard for us to get used to, and she understands that. Lydia's response to my question about the transition people go through helped me understand a lot, and will hopefully help out my friend.

In my Adolescent Literature class we're doing a unit on LGBT novels for adolescent readers. I chose to read the book Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger, which is about a teenager that was born male and now identifies as a woman. The professor for this class, Heather McEntarfer, gave us a choice between two novels that deal with young boys and homosexuality or Parrotfish. This novel was one I'm definitely hoping I can teach (I'm being optimistic here! hopefully I'll be able to get a job!) because it does a good job of reading like a typical high school girl novel and being a relatable to teenagers, while teaching the reader what a transgendered person is, the difference between sex and gender, and that not all people fall into one of the two sex categories.

The main character, Grady, has a lot of great things to say throughout the novel, constantly criticizing the concept of gender, thinking “I forgot that changing your gender was not even a question for most people. They just took for granted being a boy or a girl. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be so sure of yourself. To be scornful of anybody who wasn’t just like you” (Parrotfish, p99). My favorite quote in the novel is another one of Grady’s internal thoughts, where he is contemplating her mother, sister and best friend’s reaction to his new identity. “So what did it mean that I felt like a boy? If I couldn’t really but it into words myself, was it fair that I was making Laura and Mom and Eve suffer for it? And yet, hadn’t I been suffering for a long time now?…maybe if people divide everybody up into just two groups- male and female, two lines only- I could have just been a crew-socks-wearing person who played on the boys’ soccer team and it would have been okay. I wouldn’t have had to make a big deal out of being a boy, which seemed to be the part that was making a lot of people crazy” (p105-106). Teaching this novel or even having it on a suggested reading list for a high school English class would be a good start to inform students about transgender issues.