This spring marks the close of my third year here at CU. After much confusion caused by the absurd pressure to figure out what I want to do with myself, I declared an anthropology major. I also have a minor in philosophy. I love the negotiation between these two disciplines where one asserts the existence of absolute truth while the other acknowledges the fact that our truths are varying depending on our particular slot in life. I will be spending fall ’07 studying African Diaspora in Ghana. I look forward to having my worldview violently shaken out of me.

My passions are numerous and vary from eradicating the world of neo liberalism to avocados with balsamic vinegar. This particular paper deals with the passion that holds the most weight for me. It involves the most intimate of homes that any of us will ever know: our bodies. Our bodies can feel as comfortable and lavish as a mansion or as foreign and unsettling as a run down hotel. This is not the sort of home that we have the privilege of blue printing since child hood and then erecting with our steel titan father. Rather it’s the house that just happens to be available at the time of our birth whether we would have chosen it for ourselves or not. Unfortunately our bodies come along with socially prescribed meanings for how we are told to experience the world. This paper questions what we have been told about gender as well as whose obligation it is to continue the questioning and prompt change. I wrote this paper as a final project for a multicultural topics class. I began knowing that I wanted to learn something about transgender identity but knew nothing about it; now I do.