When Girls Will Be Boys

From The New York Times. Thousands of years ago, so-called "transgender" persons weren't persecuted and treated as social pariahs. Are we getting back to the point, historically, where people with hermaphroditic traits are "coming out" to claim their rights and place in society? By ALISSA QUART Published: March 16, 2008 It was late on a rainy fall day, and a college freshman named Rey was showing me the new tattoo on his arm. It commemorated his 500-mile hike through Europe the previous summer, which happened also to be, he said, the last time he was happy. We sat together for a while in his room talking, his tattoo of a piece with his spiky brown hair, oversize tribal earrings and very baggy jeans. He showed me a photo of himself and his girlfriend kissing, pointed out his small drum kit, a bass guitar that lay next to his rumpled clothes and towels and empty bottles of green tea, one full of dried flowers, and the ink self-portraits and drawings of nudes that he had tacked to the walls. Thick jasmine incense competed with his cigarette smoke. He changed the music on his laptop with the melancholy, slightly startled air of a college boy on his own for the first time. Rey’s story, though, had some unusual dimensions. The elite college he began attending last year in New York City, with its academically competitive, fresh-faced students, happened to be a women’s school, Barnard. That’s because when Rey first entered the freshman class, he was a woman. Rest of article. I only hope that Rey was honest and upfront with his girlfriend and told her that "he" was a actually a she.