Barnard Talk

So classes are over for the break tonight, and this is the first evening looking forward to a week without school. It seemed appropriate that I begin the week with something VERY different, so I went tonight to hear Professor Jennifer Flynn Boylan speak at Barnard College, which for those who might not know is the college across the street from Columbia. Barnard was originally started by a President of Columbia, because up until the 80’s, Columbia didn’t admit women. Incensed that he couldn’t convince the board of regents to admit women, in a fit of pique he went across the street and started a school for girls. (Strangely, Columbia does of course now admit women, but Barnard does not admit men. I have at times found it very strange that such an uproar is raised over all-male institutions like West Point, yet places like Barnard still exist. This is especially strange to me given that schools like West Point come under fire from the angle of ‘equality’, or ‘equity & fairness’. I think one has to wonder at what point what’s fit for the goose is also fit for the gander …)
At any rate, Prof. Boylan is an English instructor at Colby College in Maine. (I was going to include a link to her site, but I can’t seem to find it right now). She was on campus to do a reading from her book “She’s Not There”, in which she talks about her journey from being a man to becoming a woman. And yes, I mean that literally; she was born a man, and at 43 had surgery to become a woman.
Honestly, it was a fascinating evening, from many different angles. I found her to be funny, very articulate, thoughtful, and she raised some very interesting questions. During & after the book reading, much of the discussion focused on issues related to transgendered persons, which is an umbrella term that could loosely (yet politely) be used to describe persons from cross dressers to those who have had sexual reassignment surgery like Ms. Boylan.
One of the reasons I went to the talk was to gain some perspectives that would be very different from ones I had encountered before. I really appreciated her wit and humor, because she touched on this very thing with a really funny anecdote where she said (and this is going to be a paraphrase quotation), “People have a hard time approaching, talking about, or even thinking about transgendered persons. I mean they’re almost like aliens. People’s first three questions usually seem to be, ‘Why are they here, what do they want, and do they mean us any harm?’” She really hit the nail on the head; everyone laughed good-naturedly, but what she said was so true.
I sent her an email afterwards and thanked her for coming, which she replied to both quickly and graciously. It would take far too long to get into here all the things it gave me to think about, but it was a very illuminating experience, and I appreciated her willingness to share a bit of her life with us that evening.