"A Boy's Life" by Hanna Rosin

This is by far my favorite thing we have read in class to date. Knowing that our unit is gender I read the title and thought ok this is going to be a story about how a boy realizes he's a "man." Then I saw that it was a female author and thought, "oh snap" this is going to be a story about a boy wishing he was a boy. I was right but there is just so much more to this story. This story was truly moving and the entire time I could only think about how much I loved it.

This story just makes me wish even more that this world just didn't have any labels. There would be no need for a little boy at age of four to wish that his was a little girl. We would all just be humans beings and if a boy wanted to wear a dress and makeup it would be ok because there's no right way of acting like a boy or girl. This story literally broke my heart reading all the stories of these kids. Its such an emotional process and life that they have to go through, its just not fair. People and myself included walk around not having a care in the world just because we fit in to the mold that the world has made for and just because they want to be a little different their world is turned upside down.

Many things in this story blew my mind.  It really surprised was how young these kids were and yet they knew that they wanted to be the other sex. When I was young I remember playing with Barbies but I don't remember it having such an importance behind it. It is repeatedly shown that kids at a very young age know who they are what they want to be. The drug that stops puberty from happening is a great finding;  it saves kids so much trouble and saves them being ridiculed at school. Zuckers practice of literally forcing children to just act the gender that they were born just made me so upset. There are plenty of kids that are black and act white or vice versa, no one tells them that they can't. Another thing that really bothered me is that they kept calling transgender a disorder. That to me just isn't right. Its how you feel and you shouldn't be punished for wanting to act a certain way.

I always want to give each and every parent that has to deal with a situation like this. I can only imagine how draining it can be, emotionally, physically, and money wise. They have a lot of problems and no ever really wonders how they feel. Obviously its ultimately about the child but when they talked about how parents would mourn the child they were suppose to have that just made my heartache. Being gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, transgender are all labels that this world could really to better without. Just like we try to teach our children no to see color we should also teach our children to not see sex.