Transsexuality in the public eye

[serielle.livejournal.com]

In my school, we have to do an exhibition, or a final project each quarter for whatever morning class we happen to be in. Last quarter, mine was Race and Gender in American History, and we had free reign to choose whatever topics we wanted, and I thought it was a perfect example to educate my already liberal school on some of the basics of transsexuality.

What I've noticed is, people have absolutely no conception that FtM transsexuals exist. I couldn't go three minutes in my lecture without someone interrupting me with a question about this or that (not something I mind), but in the gajjilion of questions that I got, not one of them dealt with FtMs. It seems to be completly out of the popular awareness.

After the presentation (which I gave twice), I got a lot of curious students who hadn't attended come up to me to ask various questions and quite a few discussions between students popped up on the subject. Again, no one seems to be aware that you can get sex changes both ways. I've honestly been baffled over this, and it's a little sad to see that we're so focused on the male that we even give more attention to them when they're getting a sex change so that they're not male anymore.

I think I stressed the point enough in my presentation, but it doesn't seem to have made a difference. Actually, I'm also saddened to see that the presentation didn't seem to have any affect in other areas anyway, the popular consensus in the school remains "What do you mean she's a guy????"

Ugh. It's an odd world we live in.