Living a Life of Risk, and Why:
Encouraging Innovation in Individuals and Communities

Paul Grobstein
24 October 2007

From prior discussions

Critical Feminist Studies

Web Paper #2

10/19/07

Can We "Have A Happy Period"?

As a transgender student, and perhaps the only out trans-identified student living on campus to date, it has been a struggle finding and creating a niche on campus for myself. My friends are for the most part allies, and though some have questioned gender and some have even come to identify as “non-conforming” or “gender queer”, I am the only student, to my knowledge, that has committed to a gender identity and the mental and physical transformations that coincide with my interpretation of this gender identity.  

Dearest Sisterhood,

As I have already mentioned in an earlier conversation…

“I am a freshwoman from South Portland, Maine, and to be quite frank I have never even considered myself a feminist, nor have I even given the issue much thought. I consider myself to be a rather naïve and non-political person. Yet, here I am at a women’s college, in a course titled Introduction to Critical Feminist Studies. Hmm. If you are half as confused as I am, you’d maybe understand just how out of place I might feel here. Most days, I find myself wondering why I am here…and why I am in this class. But, as my Zen calendar said the very first day I arrived here at Bryn Mawr, ‘In your heart, you already know.’”

First of all, this is like my link of the YEAR:

http://www.kreativekorp.com/miscpages/gender/gender.pl. You know those forms where you have to check off either male or female? I hate those two little ticky boxes. That’s all I get, two choices!? Well, this website has 904 ticky boxes. 904!!! Beautiful. Playing with it has made me tremendously more comfortable with having a gender identity as thrillingly unstable and indefinable-and-unmappable-with-traditional-terms as my sexual orientation.