Topic: Miqqi Gilbert

by Miqqi A. Gilbert

The initial installment of this column appeared in Transgender Tapestry #098, Summer 2002 and continued with this column in Transgender Tapestry #099, Fall 2002.


III

Back in my office, I watched the clock as time approached for my lecture. The course, Gender and Sexuality, is in a lecture hall that seats about 130, but there are only about 90 in the class. I timed my arrival for a few minutes after the start, so I wouldn?t be standing around waiting for the class to begin. I entered, butterflies fluttering away, walked to my table, put down my books and purse, and faced the class. A round of applause started, begun by a wonderful gang of students from the TBLGay club, who had come to offer support and make sure I was all right. These are young people who have come out at a tender age. Most have suffered as they discovered their own non-mainstream identities early in life, so they know how important support is.

by Miqqi A. Gilbert
12 November, 1996

Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #098, Summer 2002

It?s the day before my first time ever going to work dressed en femme. This is a major part of my coming out process?not, as you might imagine, as a transsexual who is going full-time, but as a crossdresser who is public about his pastime. I am, just so you know, quite nervous about the whole thing. I?m also excited. It?s going to be a wild, crazy, emotionally tumultuous day that I will remember forever.

Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #097, Spring 2002.

by Miqqi A Gilbert, Ph.D.

Gender is a complex concept that changes depending on your perspective. There is assigned gender?a legal concept that places you in a certain category. There is social gender?the assignment made on you by the people with whom you interact. And there is self-gender, which you feel internally is correct. Difficulties arise, we know all too well, when self-gender and social-gender do not coincide, since one of the most basic rules is that you are one gender, and that gender is the one people can identify. You are supposed to be what you appear to be.

What is Gender?
Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #096, Winter 2001.

The question ?What is gender?? has been answered in many ways by many different thinkers. From all of this a number of things do become clear, or, to be more accurate, a lot of things are seen to be unclear. What do I mean by this?

Well, the basic, simple model embraced in recent times holds that there are two basic aspects to a person?s identity, with one being sex and the other being gender. Sex is described as the biological fact of being male or female, and gender is described as being the social role of being a man or a woman. In the simplistic model, an individual is assigned a sex at birth?his or her ?birth-designated sex??and that assignment matches the behavior and self-identity acquired through acculturation, training, socialization, and personal choice. To put it simply, once the doctor looks between your legs and makes the pronouncement, your role is laid out before you and you continue on that path until death. Sex, we are told, is biological; gender is social.