Drag Ball will have a lot of people thinking and talking about gender, and as part of Trans Awareness Week, that is just what organizers want.
LGBT community coordinator Angela Nichols hopes the week's events, including Drag Ball and numerous speakers, get people thinking about gender outside of the narrow male/female interpretation.
"There is a spectrum of gender rather than just a dichotomy," Nichols said. "Really, gender is just a word. We need to start thinking outside the box a little more."
The Multicultural Resource Center is hosting a string of events for the week, including transsexual speakers, who will talk about their experiences and ideas. This year, Kate Bornstein, an S &M trans activist, will speak on her experience as a male-to -female transsexual who identifies as a lesbian.
Diana Courvant will also visit Oberlin and speak on survivors of sexual assault who are transsexual.
"That should be wonderful," senior Ileane Seoane said. Seoane helped to organize the week both this year and last. She explained how the Trans Awareness Week got started in the first place.
"A few students who identify as transgender and some trans allies felt a need for education," she said. "This also came about because Drag Ball was too straight-oriented."
Indeed, the place Drag Ball plays in Transsexual/Transgender awareness is an issue of contention. According to Seoane, there are two schools of thought.
"Some people feel a lot of college students dressing up in drag and joking about it one night out of the year demonstrates a real lack of knowledge. It's troublesome to some people. But there is also a school of thought that gender is something to be played with and that everybody should play with it," Seoane said.
According to Seoane, transgender is an umbrella term that includes cross-dressers, transvestites and transsexuals both pre-and-post operative.
"There are a lot of misconceptions about what transsexuality is and a lot of transphobia," she said.
Copyright © 1999, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 127, Number 19, April 9, 1999
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