Transgender Activist Stages Poetry Reading

Transgender activist Kate Bornstein delivered a poetry reading that focused on a personal struggle for sexual identity at the Graduate School of Education last night.

The talk, entitled "Y2Kate--Gender Virus 2000," focused on the speaker's past experiences in the transition from birth as a boy to a self-proclaimed gender change to a female identity, and later to rejection of both "labels" to assert an identity that defies pronouns.

Bornstein commenced the reading with a piece that was originally written for The New York Times, called "Who Are You?"

Although it was edited to print as "Her Son/Daughter," she delivered the piece in its original form, including such details as her former work in phone sex and a less auspicious career as a "reluctant evangelist" for the Church of Scientology.

The first reading dealt with the funeral of her mother, where other attendees looked askance at Bornstein, asking, "Mildred had a daughter?"

Although her new self-defined gender role as a woman met suspicion in her native Orthodox Jewish community, Bornstein reconciled with her ailing mother, who had acknowledged her son-turned-daughter as a "lesbian" in a very closely-knit circle of friends.

But the speaker said she does not accept societal labels.

Bornstein, a former Yale student and "hippie boy" of the 1960s, said she rejects traditional conceptions of gender and other conventions, equating them to the rigidity of a "leather-bound dictionary."

With language filled with expletives, she described the utter scorn she said she though these definitions deserve.

Indeed, Bornstein openly declared that in her former existence as a woman, she had a lesbian lover who later became convinced that she should be a man.

Bornstein jokingly remarked on their relationship as "living for a few years as a heterosexual couple."

In her readings, she added sensual imagery taken from pornographic novels--"the erotica of my people," she said.

But the readings also focused on Bornstein's struggle with her sex change.

Although she said she initially felt triumphant, declaring that "the war was over," she later remained dissatisfied with her new gender role, unable to assimilate it.

"I never went to bed one night in my life knowing I was a man, or one night knowing I was a woman," Bornstein said.

At one point, Bornstein offered a plea to those in the audience who felt confident in womanhood to tell her what it is like.

Years after her operation, Bornstein said she began to view gender roles with criticism, saying she believed that "we were forced into our genders," compelled by doctors and fashion magazines.

In defiance of both gender roles, Bornstein claims to be neither a man nor a woman.

She draws parallels between the radical disfigurement of surgery and her changes in identity.

"I have shed my identities like I shed my dead and dying cells," Bornstein said. "[I will soon become] the one the dictionary will have trouble labeling."