July 6, 2015
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A BUG'S LIFE
VOLLEYBALL COACH WINS WITH TEAM USA
Professor uses apiary on campus to teach students about bees
Coach travels with women's senior team to Peru, returns with gold medal
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HONING THEIR CRAFT Team of professors, students create game based off of Minecraft to help students learn about science
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Mr. SMITH, MS. SMITH and MX. SMITH Examining the unique challenges transgender students, individuals face within society STORY BY: NIDHI GOTGI | MANAGING EDITOR & CARA SANTUCCI | MERCURY STAFF PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY: ANDREW GALLEGOS | PHOTO EDITOR
The gender neutral honorific "Mx." (pronounced mix) is used by some members of the transgender community who don't feel that a gender title such as Mr. or Ms. reflects their gender identity. It has recently been considered for inclusion in the online version of The Oxford English Dictionary.
-Editor's Note-
Due to concerns about their safety and privacy, no photos of the transgender individuals interviewed for this story were taken and some of their names were changed or partially redacted.
Also, some transgender individuals do not identify with a specific gender. In this story, a source is referred to with the pronouns "they","their" and "them" to reflect their gender identfication.
T
hey remember not feeling right about being a girl. They would wear loose t-shirts and huge khaki pants to hide the feminine attributes they were born with. The idea of telling their family what they were experiencing scared them because they had no words for it themselves. For most of their life, they felt out of place. Angel is a junior who identifies as agender, meaning the absence of having a gender. Growing up in a Pakistani household, where everything was heavily gendered, made being transgender very difficult. “It’s not safe to be transgender, especially in the Desi community and the Pakistani community,” Angel said. “My mother was very upset. She wanted me to fit better. She wanted me to look like the girls in my community.”
They explained that transgender people are stereotypically known as home wreckers in the Pakistani community. “They are said to be intentionally trying to shame the family,” Angel said. "This perception of people as being intentionally harmful or intentionally full of malice, it scares me.” Trans Experience (first inklings) There are approximately 700,000 transgender individuals in the United States. Stories like Angel’s, where young people feel confused and scared when they start to realize that their gender doesn’t match the sex they were born with, are common within the transgender community. Alexander Kujak, a healthcare studies senior and a transgender man who was born with a female sex, first felt an inkling of this gender dysphoria when he was in elementary school. As a child, he was frequently called a tomboy and recalls not truly feeling like a girl. “My parents always said (I’d) grow out of it,” Kujak said. “As I got older, it just morphed into, ‘I’m not a tomboy. I’m a boy.’” At the time, he said he thought he would have to be a girl for the rest of his life. Back when he was growing up, Kujak remembers “transgender” was a highly stigmatized word. It was often equated to
cross-dressing, given a negative connotation and denounced publicly. Not wanting to align with that definition, Kujak distanced himself. It wasn’t until he entered high school that he discovered what the term really means: that one’s biological sex at birth does not align with one’s gender identity. “It was kind of like a light switch turned on,” Kujak said. “(It) explained everything I experienced when I was younger.” Not every transgender person experiences the revelation of their actual gender as though a switch had been flipped. Zackary, a junior in literary studies and a transgender man, described his discovery as gradual at first, and then all at once. The summer after his freshman year, he lived in a male friend’s apartment. Over the course of the year, he found that the more feminine habits he had started to fade away. He stopped wearing makeup, dresses and heels. These behaviors began under the influence of his mom, but were continued as he compensated for feeling uncomfortable with his gender. Zackary said that these feelings of dysphoria are very common in transgender individuals. “It’s kind of weird because I had the same experience when I realized that I was not straight,” Zackary said. “I think one day I was just like, ‘Wow, I think I’m not straight,’ and it was like (all) the previous
years made sense.” A major element of the transitioning process involves the medical changes. This deals with everything from hormone treatments to mastectomies. Before any physical changes can take place, however, an intricate web of checks and balances must take place first. This requires going to counseling to get a letter, going to a doctor that will treat transgender patients, paying for hormones and finally waiting for gender confirming surgeries based on insurance plans. A significant barrier to medical transition is the cost. Many insurance plans, especially those in Texas, are trans-exclusive, meaning they don’t cover anything related to transitioning. Kujak ended up paying for his double mastectomy out of pocket, a procedure that costs $6,000. For others, just deciding to pay just for hormone therapy still costs a significant amount of money. “My friend spends $70 a month on hormones… and that’s not even counting the doctor visits,” Zackary said. “It is very expensive.” Because insurance plans are trans-exclusive, college students frequently don’t have the funds to pay for medical treatments. Even if a transgender person has the means to
→ SEE TRANSGENDER, PAGE 7
Same-sex ruling brings joy, determination DANIEL Discrimination issues still stand for LGBT community despite landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage DEPARTS ESTEBAN BUSTILLOS Editor-in-Chief
LINDA NGUYEN | MERCURY STAFF
Former President David E. Daniel perfroms "The Whoosh" at a a ceremony on June 30 honoring his tenure at UTD. Daniel, who has been hired as the deputy chancellor and chief operatig officer for the UT System, was the fourth president in UTD's history. He will be replaced in the interim by the current provost and executive vice president, Hobson Wildenthal. During Daniel's presidency, UTD's student population grew from 13,000 to 23,000. See page 6 for more from the ceremony.
When a 5-4 vote made by the Supreme Court on June 26 legalized same-sex marriages in all 50 states, members of the LGBT community around the country, including those at UTD, celebrated the decision. Mechanical engineering junior Evan Fowler, who is gay, was at work on campus when he heard the announcement. Even though he was expecting the court to legalize same-sex marriages, it took a while for the idea of marriage equality in every state to sink in for Fowler. “I was kind of thinking, ‘We finally did it,’” he said. “There’s obviously still a lot more to do, but this is something that we’ve been working for a long time and it’s finally a reality.” The ruling has allowed gay and lesbian couples in Texas to get married in state as opposed to having to travel to another state. Justin Keeling, a software engineering senior, said he and his fiancée had been planning to have their wedding in another state before the ruling came down. Since Texas doesn’t have a state income tax, the couple wasn’t as concerned with the economic effects of the state not recognizing their marriage as the federal government would recognize their marriage anyways. Still, not having to travel has lifted a large burden off of the couple’s shoulders. “It was just something that we were always planning on, flying somewhere and doing it in a different state,” he said. “But now it really simplifies things.
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Adam Richards, president of the UTD chapter of Rainbow Guard, said while the Supreme Court decision is a victory for LGBT individuals, more still needs to be done to bring attention to other challenges such as the lack of attention for transgender and bisexual individuals.
We can actually have family there to celebrate with us.” Anthony Champagne, who teaches constitutional law, said he believed the court would rule in the favor of marriage equality. After looking at state decisions on the issue from the past, he was convinced that not allowing same-sex
couples to marry was a denial of the equal protection of the law that is guaranteed to United States citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment. “That’s basically why I supported the decision,” Champagne said. “It’s just after reading the decisions, I
→ SEE LGBT, PAGE 10