On April 8th, I attended a Women’s Studies Brown Bag titled “Gender Transition and the Intergenerational Relationships Across the Life Course”. The presenters were a group of Professors and graduate students from Syracuse University who were conducting research on gender transition across various demographics. A main component of their research was that gender transition does not have to occur during puberty as many people believe, but can occur during any age or stage of life. The study is composed of interviews from a group of transgendered people who shared their experiences of their gender transition and how the people close to them reacted. In most cases, we heard about the experiences of their parents, while some of the more unique cases discussed how their intimate relationship with their significant others was affected.
When discussing gender transitions, I feel as if we focus on the negative results as opposed to the possible positive outcomes that can be a result. While a common outcome of gender transition can be the rejection of the individual by the family members, such as the case where the father made sure his daughter appeared like a girl for school even though she felt like a boy, not all situations end with this type of rejection. We learned about another situation where a woman was in a later stage of her life and had a child, and decided that she better identified as a male. Her relationship with her son was very interesting because while the son was completely understanding and did not show any signs of discomfort, he continued to call his mother, now his father, mom. Adding a child as a factor to a gender transition has the potential to make the shift much more complicated. I was inspired by this story because it began with a complicated situation that had the potential for an unfortunate conclusion, and ended with a good, positive result.
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