Transgender

For most people, sexuality is a pretty basic thing. You're attracted to men, you're attracted to women or you're attracted to men and women. However, gender doesn't matter to me. I'm all right with blurring or even completely ignoring gender lines, as long as I find the person attractive.

Thomas Beatie gives The Advocate a first-person account of how it feels to be pregnant and carrying a child for his wife and himself.

To our neighbors, my wife, Nancy, and I don't appear in the least unusual. To those in the quiet Oregon community where we live, we are viewed just as we are -- a happy couple deeply in love. Our desire to work hard, buy our first home, and start a family was nothing out of the ordinary. That is, until we decided that I would carry our child.

As students begin to settle in a routine at Columbia-finding their place in campus activities, learning the bureaucracy of the system, and slowly becoming caffeine addicts-a small group of students begins to question where it belongs.

Transgender people, those who choose to identify with the gender opposite to their sex, have a history of not fitting in. Defying their sex, transgender people break away from the gender and sexual binaries, so they fit in as neither women nor men, neither gay nor straight. Rather, they are a combination, a mix-and-match of characteristics that are difficult to define at first glance. For this reason, many find that students at Columbia, as well as the University's general policies, do not know how to deal with transgender students.