What does it mean to be trans?
What does it mean to be a transgender? Is it possible that one can be born that way or is it a life choice? There’s a chance that we’ll never know the true answer due to it dealing with just an individual’s feelings. As humans we all process and learn things differently so therefore one person’s reasoning might differentiate from another’s. Some believe that they were born in the wrong body and others choose to no longer identify with the sex they were given at birth for personal reasons but regardless of the reasoning’s behind becoming a different sex, the topic has always been taboo in America.
The first time a majority of Americans became familiar with sex reassignment surgery was when Christine Jorgensen (born as George William Jorgensen Jr.), a former soldier of World War II, underwent operations to begin his transformation to become a female. She was a trail blazer in transgender community and became an advocate for those who felt that they were assigned the wrong sex at birth. Fast forward to today, the transgender community now have multiple advocates such as Lavern Cox, Chaz Bono, Caitlyn Jenner and Kate Bornstein, an author, performer and gender theorist who’s dedicated her life to educating and helping society in understanding gender fluidity.
Kate was born as Albert Bornstein but quickly understood that she wasn’t like other little boys. She didn’t share anything but an anatomy and an attraction to females with them and therefor felt as if her only other option was to be female. As an adult she lived her life as the sex that she was assigned at birth up until 1986. By then she’d already been married and divorced with a daughter who’d become estrange after her decision to become a woman.
Kate’s decision wasn’t based on the need to become a woman but her desire to push the limit of sex assignment being just male and female. As a result, she dedicated her post surgery life to writing gender theory books, play writing and traveling around the world for workshops. She became an advocate for minority groups in America despite dealing with her own demons. In 1989 she created a theater production: Hidden: A Gender about her own life. Following that she edited an anthology: Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation and The anthology won Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards in 2011.
Kate has gone on to do many things to help her community and just recently did a workshop at our own Miami Dade college Book fair for Transgender awareness month. Unfortunately I missed her and couldn’t interact with her face to face but thanks to social media, I was able to get ahold of her on twitter and she gladly answered some questions that I had for her:
