“I’m Ryan. Call me a boy. Don’t call me Mr Berman. That’s my father,” Berman, the Mount Holyoke junior lounged back in the green lawn chair and smiled. There was Ryan Berman: Mount Holyoke student; theatre major; transgendered dude.
Growing up in New Jersey and attending a Catholic high school, Ryan was involved in theatre and musical performance. These passions led him to apply to several colleges, including Drew, Douglas, Clark and Mount Holyoke.
“Mount Holyoke was my first choice. I got off the bus and saw someone wearing cow-print pajama pants in the afternoon and knew this is where I wanted to go.”
And attend Mount Holyoke he did. Since arriving, Ryan has made his mark on the theatre department and the illustrious M&C’s a capella group. Most importantly, Ryan learned the meaning of a very powerful word: “transgender”.
“I had no clue about trans-anything when I met Miles Goff [’04] my first year. I was at a party and was corrected about his pronouns and was like ‘Whoa…’ I didn’t sleep at all that night.”
What Ryan learned that night about transgenderism is this: “transgendered” refers to a person who feels the gender assigned to him or her at birth does not quite fit their self-definition or identification.
Some transgendered people choose to undergo hormonal therapy, surgeries and name changes in order to completely transition into another social gender. Miles changed his name legally and started hormone therapy (regular injections of testosterone) before graduating. Only time would show Ryan a similar path.
After much research and soul-searching, Ryan tested out what it would be like to live as a male.
“That March I started going by Taylor, then Ryan. Right around then, I hated the fact that I was female, but then I realised how cool it is to be someone’s boyfriend and know what it’s like to have a period, walk down a dark street alone at night with fear, or have guys stare at your breasts when you talk to them.”
While professors’ and friends’ understanding and support have never been a problem for him, Ryan experienced a lot of resistance to his decision at home.
“My mom was like ‘But you don’t even like sports!’ She also said, ‘I’m never going to call you a boy,’ ‘You’ll always be my daughter’ and ‘Why can’t you just be gay?’ This summer she had to call me her son, though, just not to look like a fool. People looked at her weird when she called me her daughter.
“Nobody in my family wants me to take T [testosterone], They’re worried that I’m impulsive, but I’ve been out for a year and a half. Looking back, I’ve always been a guy. I’ve always been uncomfortable with my breasts, so even if I decide not to transition completely, I still want my breasts gone.
“I’ve always imagined having a penis… I’ve never felt sexual as a woman. And I don’t identify penis with male, but rather penis with ego. I don’t need a penis to be a guy.”
A lot of gender theorists would agree with Ryan. As Susan Parsons writes in “The Ethics of Gender”, “Is the amtter of bodies some preexisting stuff onto which cultural definitions and categories write, or do bodies themselves come to matter through our knowing and understanding of them?” In other words, do our biological bodies define themselves or is it society and culture that label them for us? Ryan would rather overlook the question altogether and shoot straight for the point.
“I don’t believe in all that theory. I just know I feel comfortable when people call me ‘he’ or ‘sir’.”
So far, Ryan has met little trouble garnering acceptance from students at Mount Holyoke.
“I’ve never had a problem with students here. They always apologise for asking questions about me and transgenderism, but I want them to ask questions; how else will they ever know? I’d rather them ask than assume.”
Ryan plans on continuing work with his local therapist and has almost enough money saved for his “top surgery” (double masectomy or complete breast removal).
He hopes to soon change his name legally to Ryan but is in no hurrt to start taking testosterone, as the vocal changes might ruin his career as an M&C. His friends, professors and employers know and respect his transition and he hopes to find the same with incoming students and the generations to come.
“This is a very liberal and accepting collehe and it’s the best place to transition, but it’ll be so hard to go in for a job and have an all-women’s college on my resume because I’ll look like a guy.”
“In the meantime, firsties don’t know we exist yet, but they will. Yes, we do go to an all-women’s school. SOme of us don’t identify as women. Some of us don’t identify as anything. Some of us identify as everything. So, don’t assume. You just can’t.”
By: Milo Primeaux ’07
Mount Holyoke News September 16, 2004 page 7
Part One: Finally, a man on campus
