There is a story often read in woman’s studies programs called “X: A Fabulous Child’s Story” by Lois Gould. In it, a child named X is raised in a gender-neutral household. Neither X nor anybody else is privy to X’s biological sex and X is never assigned a gender. The child’s parents buy Barbie dolls and GI Joes, ballet slippers and toy fire trucks. X is allowed to grow up and develop interests independent of what society expects of a female or male child, and in the process, inspires other children to shed their confining gender roles.

While this method of raising a child is far from the norm, LSA senior Cayden Mak sees the value in challenging our society's assumptions about how gender is constructed.

Mak is part of a small and often underrepresented group of transgender students on campus. Transgender, as described by the Spectrum Center, is “having a gender identity or expression that doesn’t fit neatly into the ‘male’ or ‘female’ boxes.” It is gender expression that transcends the societal binary of “man” and “woman” in terms of appearance and behavior.

A female by birth who self-identifies as post-gender, Mak said that he identified more as a boy while growing up than as a girl. He, much like child X, was allowed to play with whichever toys he liked and pursue school subjects and sports that attracted him, even when they were “independent of common patterns seen in the gender roles of little girls.” When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would reply “a priest.” As Mak explains, he grew up in an environment that allowed him to be oblivious of the limitations society would place on him later.

Not all transgender people realize their true gender at such a young age. Charlie, who asked that his full name not be used for privacy reasons, is a University employee who was born a female but prefers to identify as a man. Unlike Mak, Charlie did not fully assume a masculine identity until well into his undergraduate career here at the University.

“I grew up with a very biological viewpoint of what a man and a woman is,” Charlie said. “I was a tomboy but still very feminine because that was what was expected of me.”

Some psychologists have a name for Charlie and Mak’s experience: Gender Identity Disorder. According to Psychology Today, it is characterized by “strong, persistent feelings of identification with the opposite gender and discomfort with one's own assigned sex.” The onset of these feelings usually occurs between the ages of two and four years old, and the feelings often disappear around the age of puberty. Whether or not the feelings change because of social pressures or because the children simply outgrow them was not discerned in the article.

Research conducted on transgender experiences is inconclusive. It’s unknown how many children and adults identify with the opposite gender, and for many years, research on the subject focused mainly on people transitioning from female to male while those transitioning the other way were neglected. A study in Psychology Today indicated that “roughly 1 per 30,000 adult males and 1 per 100,000 adult females seek sex-reassignment surgery.”

But by placing a label such as “Gender Identity Disorder” on those who choose to define themselves outside of conventional gender identities, society simply continues to perpetuate the confining nature of those roles. According to a gender philosophy supported by Mak, we should all strive to see beyond these blue and pink color lines, beyond the tutus and the footballs, and assume post-gender identities. Mak chooses not only to see beyond gender roles but also live beyond them, defining for himself what gender means.

“The way I look at my own gender is that I am post-gender,” Mak said. “I think of myself as sort of a synthesis of various gender stereotypes and roles.”

The idea of creating gender-neutral environments in which one can create one’s own gender identity is a recurrent theme in literature and resources provided by the Spectrum Center. In a DVD titled “It’s Who You Are,” students explain that the greatest challenge to discovering your personal gender identity is that others assign it to you before you have a chance to declare it for yourself. People are constantly judging you on how masculine or feminine you look. The University students in the video describe how gender should be viewed: “It’s not about how or where you go to the bathroom” but rather “how you see yourself inside and out.”

But in a world that is not quite ready to renounce established gender identities and roles, transgender students face challenges every day to their gender philosophies, such as that unavoidable dilemma of which bathroom to use.

The answer to that question is different for every transgender student. Mak, who feels comfortable passing in physical appearance as a man, uses the men’s bathrooms on campus. But Charlie struggles with that idea every day.