The Changing Room: Stories of Gender Transitions

Luke’s family and friends welcomed his decision to change genders and weren’t very surprised. When he was a child and identified as a girl, he didn’t act very feminine.

 

“I ripped the heads off of Barbie’s,” Luke said. “Maybe that’s why [I want to be a doctor].”

 

Luke’s girlfriend Margaret, who also asked for her last name to not be used, said her parents seem to understand Luke’s gender, although other members of her family might not.

 

“I think my mom is still slightly confused about what trans is, but she doesn’t actually really care who or what I date,” Margaret said. “My dad’s so liberal that he probably knows more about any of this than I do. On the other hand, I’m not telling any of my extended family because I’m Filipino, and they’re all Catholic, so they’re all a little more hardline conservative.”

 

Margaret's boyfriend felt more confidence once he began identifying socially as a man.

 

“I felt more like myself,” Luke said. “I could go to the guys’ bathroom, and there would be a lot [fewer] people walking out and checking the sign.”

 

Luke said most people don’t question his male identity, although he encounters some exceptions.

 

“One time I got carded, and then they just kept staring at my ID, and they were like, ‘Is this you?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah that’s me.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yeah, I’m f***ing sure,’” Luke said with a laugh. “A lot of double takes when people look at my ID.”

 

Luke said he hasn’t faced overwhelming obstacles from the general public for being transgender and doesn’t actually think about his gender very often. However, for now, he still doesn’t feel comfortable expressing his gender identity in every situation.

 

Luke’s story touches on the larger topic of being transgender in the U.S., a country in which 700,000 people identify as transgender, according to a report by The Williams Institute.

 

Educational psychology assistant professor Nancy Daley, who teaches a human sexuality course at UT, said many people change genders simply because they don’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

 

“I’m sure there are lots of American people who just don’t feel American, like I’m Italian at heart,” Daley said. “It’s not intense enough to make me want to do anything about it, but I think we can all understand at least a little piece of feeling like, ‘I don’t really belong in this category that you think I belong to.’”

 

Daley said historically, women have had more flexibility in their gender roles than men have.

 

“Culturally, women’s gender roles were very much caregivers… and yet at the same time, we are a species of war, and men go off to war,” Daley said. “What happens to men’s roles when they go off to war? Women do them… I really feel like that fear of not being manly is so enormous here. Stupid, but enormous.”

 

Daley said she thinks the fear of not being manly makes transitioning from male to female more difficult than the opposite transition.

 

“We have not yet achieved perfection… [but] it’s much easier for a girl to be a tomboy,” Daley said. “If I want to wear a tuxedo to school, nobody’s going to say anything. We want our boys to be boys… and we want them boyish, and we don’t want them in dresses, and we don’t want them taking on feminine gender roles.”

 

Americans feel comfortable with a binary view of gender because they can easily understand it, Daley said, but she thinks people will become more accepting of transgender people as they meet more of them.

 

“Like our ideas about gay and lesbian people, more and more families will confront that they have somebody differently gendered in their family,” Daley said. “When it’s your Aunt Louise or your Uncle Charlie, it’s no big deal anymore. It’s not this strange, foreign, weird thing that somebody’s going to hell for. It’s a real person that you really know.”