Talking to classes

I've spoken to a number of college classes and groups around the Bay Area concerning transgender topics, and while I'm not an expert, I've been complemented a few times on my style and communication skills. I've usually been on a panel of several transgender people or been paired up with an FTM. Just last week, I was at San Jose State talking to a Human Sexuality class. Dang...I wish I had that when I was in college, but alas, my college didn't, nor do they now, offer such a class.

Typically, I see a lot of panelists just start out with their story. Unfortunately, most people have no idea concerning the base information most of us take for granted. They don't know what SRS, FTM, MTF, GID, T, GQ, TS, CD, TV, or pre/post/non all stand for. They don't know that sexuality and gender identity are not the same, and they assume that one influences the other. They do affect one another, but they are separate entities.

So, usually when I talk, someone has already told their life story about how they started dressing at a young age, how they hid clothes or never told anyone, and that they always felt a desire to be a man/woman. You hear a few of these, though, and people start to get bored. I usually like to start off by being interactive for a short time. I ask how many people have met or know a transgender person. This past time, in a class of about 50 people, I saw only 3 people raise their hands. Typically, in the bay area, I see about 10% raise their hands...with the number being higher the closer one is to San Francisco and Berkeley, and of course, lower as one moves away from them.

I also like to ask if people know what transgender means...or transsexual, cross-dresser, genderqueer, intersex, etc...and see what people know. I try to give them an overall view in a very short time. I also like to point out that, although we may share similar stories, we're all very different, and that our sexuality is not determined by what our gender/physical sex is.

At that point, I like to give my brief story. I tell them I was a military brat, felt different as a child but had no words for it, and started dressing in my sister's clothes around 7-8. I knew I was a boy on the outside, but felt like a girl on the inside. Puberty was hard as my body rebeled against me. Facial hair, bigger muscles, lower voice, hairy body...all traitorous exploits my body initiated against me. I talk about playing sports in order to live up to societies expectations of me as a man (with other transsexuals seeking similar environments to hide such as the military, computer games, the gay community, etc.), and that I went on trying to be a man as best as possible before finally seeing another transsexual around age 30. Then I began searching for ways of dealing with the GID and determining if I was a cross-dresser or a transsexual. I sum it up with a quick run down of having facial surgery and Sex Reassignment Surgery.

I leave a few topics out in order to stimulate the discussion during the Q and A portion. This usually involves how my family reacted, to my sexuality, to my facial or sex reassignment surgery, or to how my voice sounds like a woman's. (I've 'freaked' out a few classes by talking in my low voice to give them a sample of how I used to sound.) Some touchier topics have included how to tell a person that I might date that I am a transsexual, to more intricate details of the surgery.

I like having classes that ask questions, though, because you get to see more of what they are thinking and what they might not understand. Because, seriously, most people have no idea what we are all about.