who do you think you are essay

Sample Essays on “Who Am I?” How to guide, with Outlines

Published by gudwriter on November 23, 2017 November 23, 2017

How to Write an Essay About Yourself

Many students, from high school to college level, do not know how to describe themselves. They mix up ideas as they do not really know what they need to include in their writing. The main aim of a who am I essay is to make the reader understand who you are and what you believe in. Remember, the essay doesn’t have to be always about the positive side- you can include your weak points as well in a creative way. You can also write about what makes you unique (unique skills, character, etc). If you need help, college admission essay writing services is available to assist you.

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Striking the balance makes your essay realistic and convincing.

Character : What are your character traits? Which habits define you?

Values : What is your value system? Here, you need to include things that inspire you. It is here that you state your beliefs, motivations, principles, and inspirations. The reader expects you to have either staunch stands on certain things and this is the part where you make them know. Do not highlight radical points, though.

Skills : What aptitudes do you have? And, what is the level in each skill? This may include communication, computer, education, languages, leadership, or anything else you find worthy.

Achievements :

Life experiences that influenced your life

Perhaps you would like to read an essay sample on what makes you unique ?

Who Am I Essay Example 1 Outline

Below is a layout you should follow when writing a personal essay to impress your professor.

Hook – The Question – who am I?
Brief summary: Well, I know quite much about myself: I am a social, kind, respectful, and principled young man.
Thesis : I am a kind, friendly, respectful, and principled young person.
Point : Social
Illustration : Meeting new friends
Logic : Makes me dynamic
Thesis relation: A cheerful, social and accommodative person is how many people know me.
Point : Respectful and law abiding
Illustration : Want to get along with everyone- both juniors and seniors. Car seats, polite character
Explanation : I know the limits
Thesis relation : Every day, I want to be known as a person who is respectful even to those who least deserve it.
Point : Hobbies
Illustrations : Sports, chess, music
Explanation : Clear my mind, get healthier.
Thesis relation : Sportsmanship has taught me to be fair other people, diligent and focused.
Point : I am not perfect- when I don’t hit my targets, obvious opposition from people who don’t love progress. My love for novelty makes me uncomfortable with normal rules.
Illustrations : My mum says I am selfish and that I always want everything to go my way. Yet, I’m still the person you will find in doing voluntary community work to help people.
Explanation : I guess my self-esteem is too high for people to put down. This rubs feathers with people who stand my path to success.
Thesis relation : I’d be a liar to say I am a genius, flawless or immortal- and that’s who I am.
Restatement of thesis
Summary of essay
Signing out

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Who Am I Essay Example 1

Who am I? Describing oneself is one of the most complicated tasks. In most cases, we always define ourselves using institutions, other people, or activities. Well, I know quite much about myself: I am a kind, friendly, respectful, and principled young person.

First, I am a sociable person. I love to meet people and make new friends. It’s not that I am an extrovert. However, I always work towards getting along with people. Of course, there are times I enjoy being alone for meditation . However, being around people makes me feel comfortable. I like to utilize every chance I get to make new friends. Interacting with people from different parts of the world makes me a diverse person. I am one of those people who believe that there is richness in human diversity. I am not quite selective of who I socialize with. A cheerful, cordial, and accommodative person is how many people know me.

Second, I am kind and respectful. Well, I appreciate that there is a thin line between being social and respectful. I want to treat everyone – junior or senior- with utmost reverence. In this regard, I am quite a listener. This didn’t start yesterday- I have always loved to give up my seats to elders in the train since I was young. Again, I am firm and at the same time polite. I love to make my points in a way that won’t hurt those around me. I always desire to be respectful even to those who least deserve it. Being respectful does not subtract anything from me after all.

Third, I have a great affection to team play. Well, I probably got this trait from my life as a sportsperson. I have been a school captain in Team Handball and Badminton. Today, I still participate in these games as a coach. I’m adherent to chess and I could become a grandmaster in the next few months. Sports and competitions have trained me to be fair, diligent, hardworking, and focused. As my hobby, chess clears my mind while athletics make me healthy. I’d definitely not tell who I am without mentioning sportsmanship. Actually, sports largely define me.

I am not perfect, though. I can be moody when I don’t hit my targets. My love for novelty makes me uncomfortable with normal rules. My mum says I am selfish and that I always want everything to go my way. Yet, I’m still the person you will find doing voluntary community work to help people. I guess my self-esteem is too high for people to put down. This rubs feathers with anyone who stands on the path to success. I’d be a liar if I said that I am a genius, flawless or immortal- and that’s who I am.

Anyway, it may be a little difficult to explain who I am. However, there are qualities that are an outright depiction of me. Respect, principles, sportsmanship, and leadership are some of them. As a quick learner, I love to change every behavior that doesn’t make me a better person. The desire to be good to everybody has made me who I am today and I intend to keep it that way.

Personal Essay Example 2 Outline

Introduction.

I give a description of myself in relation to my family background, personality, and how I view life.

Paragraph 1:

Family background

Revolves around strong Christian faith since my parents are staunch Roman Catholic faithful
I was born in Chicago, Illinois 21 years ago and I am the third born in a family of four children.
I am a female of African American origin and I am very proud of my cultural background and family values

Paragraph 2:

My personality

I am outspoken and like socializing and making new friends
I value respect and believe it is two way
I am hard working

Paragraph 3:

My view of life

All humans are equal regardless of their cultural, racial and religious backgrounds as well as gender
I am liberal in that I am open to learning new things such as new cultures, religions, and even languages
Divergent views should be tolerated

I can summarize myself as someone who is respectful, accommodating, and open minded. I appreciate that as a human, I need others for my life to be complete. I believe my personality and world views are matching and thus I find life more sociable and interesting.

Personal Essay Example 2

My family background revolves around strong Christian faith since my parents are staunch Roman Catholic faithful. I was born in Chicago, Illinois 21 years ago and I am the third born in a family of four children. I am a female of African-American origin and I am very proud of my cultural background and family values. Like my parents, I have developed the habit and routine of going to church every Sunday in line with Christian doctrines. As a matter of fact, all the members of my family value attending Sunday masses wherever they may find themselves. I grew up in a working-parents family and I have grown to live in harmony with my siblings.

Regarding my personality, I am one person who is outspoken and likes socializing and making new friends. The number of friends I have in college is uncountable because I have no boundaries when it comes to building relationships. That notwithstanding, I value respect and believe it is two way. I expect that anybody I interact with should show me the same level of respect I show them irrespective of their background or status in the society. I am hard working because my parents taught me to loathe laziness since it is the beginning of poverty and miserable life. To me, respect and hard work go hand in hand. Working hard respectfully has opened many doors for me so far in my life.

My view of life is that all humans are equal regardless of their cultural, racial, and religious backgrounds as well as gender. This is why I have friends whose cultural and other backgrounds are diverse. I am also liberal in that I am open to learning new things such as new cultures, religions, and even languages. For instance, I can speak fluent French and Spanish yet I am American. I also believe that divergent views should be tolerated because this is part of enhancing human diversity. My parents had once tried to stop me from being too open minded but I persisted with it. Being open to new things, in my view, amounts to being accommodative to human diversity.

In conclusion, I can summarize myself as someone who is respectful, accommodative, and open minded. I appreciate that as a human, I need others for my life to be complete. When I show that I care for and accommodate different views, I find it easy working with others. I have thus managed to evade suffering any form of racial or cultural profiling because people find me easy to deal with. I believe my personality and world views are matching and thus I find life more sociable and interesting. It is my intention to continue leading this fulfilling life.

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Personal Essay Sample 3 Outline

I am a faithful Christian who is open-minded, friendly, and action-oriented.

Paragraph1:

In spite of being a staunch Christian, I am open to other people’s ways of worship and generally to other people’s way of life and opinions.

I can listen to and understand what other people say and treat it as their opinion to which they are entitled whether or not I agree with it.
I am able to live amongst people of various cultures.
However, I do not let other people’s views or cultures affect my own.

I am a friendly person who highly values friendship.

I have the habit of forming strong friendships both in our neighborhood and at school.
I have quite a number of friends from various backgrounds because I do not choose friends based on their cultural backgrounds.
I believe in genuine friendship and as soon as I detect that one is not a true friend, I drop them.

I follow my decisions and promises with actions as I believe that it is through actions that one can solve their problems and meet their life goals.

I keep to my decisions once I make them.
I have been able to accomplish many of my life’s endeavors especially in my academic life.
I also know that keeping promises is one of the best ways of keeping relationships alive and healthy.
I normally do all it takes to keep a promise irrespective of who I make it to.

Personal Essay Sample 3

As a person, I feel growing over the years has significantly changed who I am. I have had to see and experience many things that I did not get to see in my childhood. I have also met many different people and visited many places. Some of the perspectives I held about people and certain things have certainly changed. In addition, I have undergone significant personal growth which has seen my personality transform as well. I have also become more decisive in my actions and in my relationships with others. I am a faithful Christian who is open-minded, friendly, and action-oriented.

In spite of being a staunch Christian, I am open to other people’s ways of worship and generally to other people’s way of life and opinions. I can listen to and understand what other people say and treat it as their opinion to which they are entitled whether or not I agree with it. This way, I have been able to learn a lot from others and widen my view of life and humanity. I am also able to live amongst people of various cultures. However, I do not let other people’s views or cultures affect my own as much as I may be accommodative to them. This is because I believe that the world has enough space for everyone to practice their own cultures and share their opinions without interfering with others.

I am also a friendly person who highly values friendship. From my childhood, I developed the habit of forming strong friendships both in our neighborhood and at school. I have carried this habit to my adulthood and I have quite a number of friends from various backgrounds because I do not choose friends based on their cultural backgrounds. However, I believe in genuine friendship and as soon as I detect that one is not a true friend, I drop them. To me, a friend should be like family that is always there for one in their better and tough days and moments. Out of this belief, I have helped a number of friends both in and out of school and shared with them some of my innermost secrets. I too have benefited from the loyalty of these friendships.

Further, I follow my decisions and promises with actions as I believe that it is through actions that one can solve their problems and meet their life goals. This virtue has helped me accomplish many of my life’s endeavors especially in my academic life. For example, since my middle school level, I decided that I would not consume television content during examination periods but maximally concentrate on the exams. I have kept to this decision and have thus posted good grades all through because I always have enough time to prepare for exams. I also know that keeping promises is one of the best ways of keeping relationships alive and healthy. I normally do all it takes to keep a promise irrespective of who I make it to. I do keep even as simple a promise as that of sharpening my younger sister’s drawing pencil every morning before she goes to school.

I am an open-minded Christian who values relationships and I act on my decisions and promises. I am accommodative to diverse views and opinions even when they sharply contrast with mine. I pursue my life goals and keep relationships through action. I also have many friends since I believe that genuine friendship is highly beneficial to humans. This personality and values enable me to live a fulfilling life as I am capable of accomplishing my goals and at the same time live harmoniously with others.

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Who Am I Essay: Writing Tips and Sample

Your “Who am I?” essay is a paper where you describe yourself as a person. Mention what inspires and motivates you, what you love and don’t love, your goals and wishes, etc.

In this article, you’ll learn how to write this personal essay. (And please don’t miss a ready-made example to understand what to describe in your work!)

How to Write a “Who Am I” Essay

You’re that person who knows you best, but writing about yourself is still challenging:

You read a writing prompt for a college application or scholarship , and you aren’t sure if you understand it in detail. How do you know what exactly to mention in your essay? You can’t find words to describe your nature and skills. How do you know if that particular accomplishment or story from your life is worth including?

Stick with us here for practical tips on writing a “Who Am I” essay, with a free template to follow.

How to start?

Ask any writer, and they will tell you that the hardest part of the writing process is to start it. It’s a kind of writer’s block when you stare at a blank screen and don’t know what to write. Below are several ideas that can help you craft a compelling essay about yourself:

Think about one sentence that would describe you best. (A technique some authors use for inspiration: Answer the question, “What would friends write on your grave?” or “What do you want the world to remember about you?” You can start an essay with that phrase.
In the introduction, describe yourself in general . (Be truthful and honest.)
Discuss one or two of your hobbies. (Choose those you’re most passionate about, those influencing your mood — and maybe your skills — most.)
Highlight your achievements but don’t boast. ( Be reflective by analyzing and evaluating what you’ve achieved.)
Add some personality to the essay. (Tell anecdotes, include examples, and be creative to keep readers engaged with your story.)

Short Essay About “Who I Am” Sample

You’re welcome to use the below template from our professional writer for crafting your future “Who am I” essays. Here it goes:

Actionable Tips to Improve Your Paper

Ready to start writing? Consider these helpful tips on crafting a person essay about who I am:

1) Understand your audience

Who will read your essay? Is it a college admission officer who knows nothing about you? Or, maybe it’s your school teacher with some background of who you are? Do you plan to publish your reflection for your social media followers or blog readers?

Depending on the audience, your story may change. Add details about what interests your readers: What would they want to know? Understanding your readers will make your essay more compelling (1). It will be easier for you to engage them and make them emotionally connected to your story.

2) Don’t be afraid to look vulnerable

Allow the readers to see your inner feelings. Sincerity and reflection are the new black, you know. It’s okay to speak about your strengths, weaknesses, or worries to the audience. That’s what differentiates you from other people, thus making you an individual.

Here’s the big secret:

Admission committees appreciate students’ understanding of their weaknesses and areas to grow. Communicate the willingness to change and grow. You’re just a human, after all.

Write about what you want to develop in yourself. Or, tell about life experiences that have changed or influenced you most.

3) Proofread and edit your essay

Once your essay is ready, it’s time to proofread and edit it. Here’s a short checklist of the details to fix if any:

Grammar and punctuation mistakes (verb tenses, sentence structure)
Spelling errors and inconsistencies in names or terms
Incorrect capitalization
No logical flow or transitions between paragraphs
Excessive wordiness and repetition
Biased language
Too much passive voice and redundant adverbs
Too sophisticated words and phrases that have simpler alternatives

That’s It: Your “Who Am I” Essay Is Ready

In this blog post, we tried to cover all the core details of personal essay writing. Now you know how to start it, what elements to include, and how to craft it for better readability and emotional connection with the audience.

We hope our 500-word essay example will help you write your perfect story about yourself. If you still have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask our professional writers for help.

References:

https://summer.harvard.edu/blog/12-strategies-to-writing-the-perfect-college-essay/
Essay samples
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Essay Samples on Who Am I

What makes me who i am: understanding the self.

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Best topics on Who Am I

1. What Makes Me Who I Am: Understanding the Self

2. How to Answer “Who Am I?”: the Omportance of Self-reflection

3. Exploring What Makes Me Different From Others

4. Exploring What Makes You Who You Are

5. Describe Yourself: My Journey of Self-Discovery and Self-Reflection

6. Life in a Mixtape: Describing Yourself Through Songs

7. All About Me: Re-Descovering Personality and Traits

8. How to Define Yourself by Chuck Clifton Book Analysis

9. Beneath The Layers: Personal Description

10. Personal Evaluation: Learning From Struggles

11. An Individual’s Thoughts on Self-Discovery

12. An Independent Report on Life-Changing Events

13. Examining Socrates Arguments on the Impact of the Physical Appearance

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Who Am I Essay

500 words essay on who am i.

The population of the world now is more than a whopping seven billion. In spite of such a massive population, one important fact remains that each person has their own unique personality and individuality. Let us focus on personality and individuality with this who am I essay.

Who am I Essay

My Inspiration

I am a young boy who is still learning in life. Furthermore, I won’t go deep into revealing personal information, like where I come from, which school I went to, my age, and the identity of my parents. The reason for this is that although these factors represent me, they certainly do not define me.

So, what exactly are the qualities that define me or for that matter anyone else? Well, these qualities are character and persona. As such when writing about oneself, one must stick to talking about one’s character and personality.

I consider myself an ambitious person who has big dreams in life. Moreover, doctors have always been my inspiration and I wanted to become one myself. Also, my father is a doctor himself so I had the opportunity of observing a doctor closely.

I came to realize that doctors have a really busy life. This I can certainly say with conviction as I have seen my father sacrifice his free time in order to save lives at hospitals. Most noteworthy, my ambition is to become a successful doctor in future and save the lives of people.

My Personality and Beliefs

I am an ambivert person by nature. This means I enjoy socialising with people but not too much. I also prefer to spend time alone as I find comfort in my own company.

This nature of mine has proven to be helpful when it comes to studies. This is because I have the patience to study for long hours. Moreover, for a subject that is too difficult, I and my friends take part in a group study.

Spending time alone, I have the habit of engaging in activities like reading a book or learning to play a musical instrument. Furthermore, I am a religious person who strongly believes in God. My belief in God certainly boosts my self confidence .

I feel sad that in the modern era, many people don’t believe in God. I, on the other hand, certainly do believe in the existence of a superpower that controls the entire universe. Most noteworthy, my belief in an all-powerful creator has helped me become a better person.

The important thing to remember is that a God-fearing person is likely to be good. The reason for this is that such a person would act righteously due to the belief that God is always watching.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of Who am I Essay

‘Who am I’ is an extremely important question that every individual must find an answer to. Furthermore, to find the answer, people must reflect and ponder on themselves and their surroundings. Most noteworthy, those who have the answer to this are able to live a life of happiness and contentment.

FAQs For Who am I Essay

Question 1: What is the meaning of who am I?

Answer 1: The concept of who am I refers to one’s identity. Furthermore, identity is the all-encompassing system of relationships, values, experience, memories, feelings, and thoughts that define who a person really is.

Question 2: What is meant by true self?

Answer 2: True self is also known as real self, original self, or authentic self. Furthermore, all of these terms refer to the most honest aspect of a person. In other words, true self is an individual’s most authentic version keeping aside all the pretensions, affectations, and masks.

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Essay Sample: Who Am I?

26 March, 2020

7 minutes read

Author: Richard Pircher

This essay sample is written by Handmadewriting staff as an example of a reflective essay. It will demonstrate how to craft such an essay step by step on a simple yet popular topic.

The question of who am I seems to be the simplest question one can answer. Yet, when I took the time to try and figure out Who am I, I found this question is the one that requires critical thinking. In general, the answer to this question is that I am a regular person who loves spending quality time with the people I appreciate. In addition, I dedicate myself to completing my duties, and I have a dream of becoming a great person. However, there are so many other things that make me a person. I always try to use every opportunity to have more free time for my hobbies.

For one to be a great person in life, it is critical that they ask themselves this question, especially given that it is a question that helps a person be in a position of evaluating themselves. Overall, the question of who am I is possible to give an answer by categorizing the general characteristics of an individual’s life into three divisions. The three categories are spiritual, personal traits and how I perceive life and the society around me.

Me as a Spiritual Identity

In terms of the spiritual division, I would consider myself as a relatively spiritual person basing on the life that I have been nurtured through. The matter is that all my life, I have been raised up by parents who are staunch Christians and who have taught me the importance of leading a spiritual life. When I was young, I could describe my life to be majorly guarded by religion since what I remembered most of the time is going to church, singing gospel songs and praying.

Whenever I was in trouble, I never thought of any other solution rather than to pray to God for help. For example, I was taught in my early life that God was the solution and provider of everything that mankind ever needed. As a result, I have lived to believe this up to now. Moreover, I can also attest that it’s through religion that all my morals are based. Nonetheless, it will be a lie if I say that I still hold spirituality dear as I used to when I was growing up. And to be honest, it’s dismal for me to admit it.

As one grows and discovers many things around the world, especially during the teenage period, we start questioning the very ideals we were taught, and in my case, spirituality. In other words, my high school moments changed me a lot. Though I eased on the issue of divinities, I still try to hold spirituality dear to me, and I can confirm that I am more independent in making spiritual decisions compared to when I was young. This is due to the shifts and turns that have taken place in my life since I was young. From my religious journey, I deemed it important to learn other religious views in order to be familiar with some of them. I strongly believe that it is very wrong to spread rivalry among religions.

Furthermore, I feel like we all have the right to worship in any dominion or religion we consider to be the closest to heart and soul. Through my study of different religions, I have become a person who loves and always supports diversity in different sectors.

Me as Personality

Regarding my personality, I think that I am a very friendly person deducing from how I relate to my peers, children and older people. Personally I like being optimistic, and I like talking about positive things in life since I believe that people have the capacity to do great things as long as they believe in themselves. Among other things, I am slow at judging people on the decisions that they make. Besides, I like treating people equally since I believe everyone has the right to be perceived so. But still it this does not mean that I am a very indulgent and naive person.

When I am wrong, I become angry, just like anyone does, and there are moments whereby I find it hard to manage my anger. Therefore, I can assert that this is the greatest challenge that I am facing. That’s why I am doing my best to learn how to make rational decisions when I am angry. I have healthy self-esteem, I am confident, and I do not easily shy away from talking to people either individually or in a group. Generally, I can say that I am a kind and loving person – someone who always advocates for the right things to be done in society.

Me as an Insightful Person

Lastly, speaking of my perception about the world and the society around me, I think that I am an open-minded individual who believes that the world is a good place to live in, only it has been destroyed by people. Therefore, it is our call as human beings to do out best and make contributions to turn the world into a much better place. I believe that change starts with an individual, but many people are afraid of this change. When evaluating the society I am living in, I believe that its imperfections is a result of human acts. Hence, a solution to the faults within the contemporary society can be implemented by teaching children to become people of integrity when they grow up. All in all, everything of the above mentioned is me – it is what I stand for.

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, 'who are you' essay tips.

Hey everyone! I'm working on writing my college application essays, and one of the prompts asks me to describe myself and who I am. Does anyone have any tips on how to tackle this topic? What are some good examples or ideas that I can use to guide me as I write about myself?

Hi there! Writing a "Who are you" essay can be a great opportunity to showcase your unique qualities and share your personal experiences. Here are a few tips and ideas to help you get started:

1. Reflect on your passions and interests: Focus on the things that genuinely excite you. Discuss how you discovered these passions, their impact on your life, and how they shaped your personality or perspective.

2. Share a defining moment or challenge: Think about a pivotal moment when you faced a significant challenge or experienced personal growth. Explain how that moment shaped your character, values, and the person you are today.

3. Highlight your goals and aspirations: Discuss your ambitions and what you hope to achieve in the future. Be specific and explain how these goals align with your passion and interests.

4. Show, don't tell: Use anecdotes and vivid descriptions to illustrate your points. Paint a picture of your experiences to give the reader a sense of who you are instead of simply listing your characteristics.

5. Be authentic: Use your natural voice and be genuine when sharing personal stories. Avoid trying to sound overly intellectual or impressive. Let your personality and experiences speak for themselves.

6. Be concise and focused: Rather than attempting to cover every single aspect of your life, choose a few key experiences or traits that represent who you are and center the essay around these themes.

7. Avoid clichés and overused themes: Popular topics such as sports victories, milestone accomplishments, or overcoming adversity can be effective if you can bring a unique angle that sets you apart. Make sure your essay reflects your distinct experiences or perspective.

8. Edit and revise: Take the time to polish your essay, focusing on grammar, organization, and flow. Ask for feedback from trusted friends, family members, or teachers who can provide an objective opinion and help you refine your essay.

Think about what makes you unique, and try to find a balance between showcasing your best qualities while still being authentic and genuine. Good luck with your essay!

About CollegeVine’s Expert FAQ

CollegeVine’s Q&A seeks to offer informed perspectives on commonly asked admissions questions. Every answer is refined and validated by our team of admissions experts to ensure it resonates with trusted knowledge in the field.

How to Write Who Am I Essay

“Who am I?” Human beings are the only creatures on the planet who can ask themselves this question. Other animals don’t have problems with self-identity. Lions, dolphins, and zebras don’t ask questions. They just try to survive in this cruel world. But we can’t live without inventing problems regularly. That’s why the question, “How should I write my essay about who I am?” is so popular.

In truth, we like digging in our heads and souls, looking for answers. We genuinely believe that our actions and feelings have a logical explanation, and every habit or trait has its root. Maybe we’re doing everything right. Maybe we care too much. Yet, we are here not to debate but to find out how to write my college essay about “Who Am I.”

First, let’s figure out when to write my assignment on the “Who Am I” topic.

When do you need a “who am I” essay

In short, you might need a “Who am I” essay for college, for work, for your bio, or simply for yourself. When you write it for yourself or for your bio, you don’t have any particular purpose but self-analysis. Sure, there are no concrete rules or requirements, and you can write it the way you want (or pay for essay to get qualified help and save your time).

But when it comes to work or college, everything is a bit more complicated. Your “Who Am I” essay can become a part of the application process or job interview. An employer or an admissions committee can look closely at your personality through your writing. Your essay has to convince them that you’re the best candidate for the scholarship or the job. Thus, you need a few tips on how to write my personal statement to make a good impression.

10 “who am I” essay ideas to amaze your readers

We’re sure that your personality is outstanding, and colleges and companies should fight for your excellence. But they don’t know about it yet. Even the sweetest candy and the most interesting books needs a bright cover to be noticed, right? Make your “Who Am I” essay sample so brilliant that nobody can resist the temptation to meet you personally and learn more about you.

1. Be honest, but delicate

Admissions officers and hiring managers read many CVs, application essays, and cover letters. Do you think they can’t distinguish lies from truth? Don’t even try to add some fake facts to your essay. Firstly, some data is easy to check. Secondly, your life is exciting enough without any fantasies. Finally, you have a conscience, right? Being honest but delicate is also a good tip for writing an expressing opinion essay .

2. Write about your passion

When you write about something you really like, your essay is filled with positive energy. Thus, it makes a good impression on the readers. If you’re going to apply for the position of interpreter, you don’t have to write about learning languages. For example, you can emphasize that the best about this profession is communicating with people if you really enjoy a social life.

3. Share an interesting story

When you compose a “Who Am I” essay, not just for yourself, ensure it will interest your audience. Your childhood memories can be priceless for you and your parents, but they’re not likely to interest the admissions officers unless you were an extraordinary child. If you don’t know how to write about your life interestingly, it is better to get our help. For example, you can ask us, “ Write my APA paper ,” the writer will present your story to grab the admission committee’s attention. Moreover, the expert will write the paper using the chosen format.

4. Switch on your creativity

“Who Am I” essay samples don’t belong to the academic writing category, so forget the rules! Of course, not all the rules. We still don’t recommend you use jargon or contractions. However, you are not limited to the standard critical essay format or specified sources. Moreover, you don’t even have to quote anybody, as the only person who has a right to express his opinion about you is, actually, YOU!

5. Use make-up

Not real make-up, for sure. You’d use metaphorical make-up. Hide or smooth your weaknesses and highlight your strengths. That’s what professional make-up artists do! Your inner beauty and qualities can also be emphasized!

6. Tell them more

Both hiring managers and the admissions board know everything about your academic achievements or work experience from your CV or resume. You don’t have to share this information again in your essay. Your task is to give them something more and to show them what kind of person you are. A human being is not just a bunch of numbers and facts! Numbers and facts are more suitable for a formal paper. By the way, you can learn how to write a formal essay by checking out our blog.

7. Avoid boasting

Nobody likes upstarts. Sure, you have to demonstrate your positive qualities and achievements to make a good impression. But it doesn’t mean that you should sound arrogant. Readers should understand that your victories aren’t a gift or luck but the result of hard work and self-development.

8. Show your perspective

Admissions officers and hiring managers are interested in your thinking process. A “Who Am I” essay requires no additional sources or quotes. Your thoughts are enough to create a brilliant piece of writing. Don’t try to be someone else! Your personality is worth seeing. However, if you don’t know how to show your personality in writing, get our help by leaving a “ write my paper for cheap ” request.

9. Think about the impression

Being honest and being yourself are very good principles when we talk about how to write “Who Am I” essay. However, you should always keep the balance between frankness and a positive impression. If you choose to write about your mistake or failure, mention how this negative experience has made you a better person. Imperfections make us unique, but in your essay, they should look charming and interesting, not abominable.

10. Demonstrate your potential

Don’t forget to mention your plans for the future. Smart people always think about perspectives and opportunities. If you write a “Who Am I” college essay, explain how you can contribute to the development of the college community. When it comes to a job interview, you can mention how you want to improve the working process or how your skills will help this company to grow.

These 10 tips will guarantee the success of your essay! We know that general recommendations are not enough for you – you can either request write my paper for me help, or continue learning our guide.

So, don’t hesitate! Move on to the list of good and bad topics for your “Who Am I” essay for college or work!

“Who am I” essay ideas to write and to avoid

We should remind you one more time that we’re talking mostly about essays for college or work. When you compose an essay exclusively for self-analysis, it doesn’t matter what topic you pick. But when you need to impress someone, you should be more careful with your choice. Below, you’ll find a list of “Who Am I” Essay Ideas that you should and shouldn’t use for your writing.

5 good topics for a “who am I” essay

Achievement

That’s classic. If you don’t seek originality and want to choose a time-tested option, this topic is perfect for you. Of course, there is one necessary condition: you need a really meaningful achievement to write about. Baking a cake or getting a high GPA is not enough! It should be something impressive like climbing Mount Everest or saving the planet from an alien invasion. So choose wisely!

Fixed mistake

If there is one topic even more impressive than a personal achievement, it is a fixed mistake. People love stories about falls and rises because we enjoy dramas. In your “Who Am I” essay sample, you should not only tell about your failure and your solution. The most important here is to underline how this situation has influenced your character, values, and worldview. Explain to your readers how this mistake has made you a better person.

Dramatic change

Headings like “From Accountant to Famous Artist in One Year” or “A Life-Changing Journey to Africa” always attract our attention. Audiences like miraculous changes. When we read such stories, we start believing that something similar will happen to us and change our lives forever. Look back at your life. Who or what is responsible for the most dramatic twist of your fate? Maybe this story is worth sharing.

Leadership experience

Both colleges and companies are looking for leaders. No one likes sheep, and everybody wants to see a shepherd as a part of their community. Of course, it is impossible to build a good team exclusively from leaders. However, if you feel like you can bring people together and give them the right directions, write about this quality in your “Who Am I” essay. Provide a real-life example in order not to sound baseless.

Questioned belief

Doubts are an indispensable part of life, especially for people who learn new things about the world around them every day. For example, you’ve always believed that men are braver than women.

5 bad topics for a “who am I” essay

Other persons

We know that you love your parents, your teachers, and other great people around you. However, they are not the ones who are going to enter the university or apply for the position of manager. It’s you! So, please, write about you! Of course, you can mention other people, but they should never be the main characters of your “Who Am I” essay.

School achievements

School is far from real life. If you’re applying for college, you don’t have much choice, because your school years are the only period you’ve already lived through. Yet, if you are around 30 years old, don’t write about your school life in the essay. It was a long time ago! We’re sure that you’ve had much more exciting experiences than history tests or bullying.

Being philosophical is not bad when you have a philosophical conversation. But it’s not good when you have to write about yourself! You’re not a philosophical concept. You’re a real person with real problems, real friends, and real actions. Your aim is not to find the meaning of life in your essay. Your task is to show your personality.

Sports victory

If you aren’t a professional sportsman, your sports victories are not interesting to anybody. Just face it! You can be proud of the winning goal or your personal record, but your employer or admissions committee doesn’t really care. They want to learn more about your goals, principles, professional experience, and personal qualities.

Religion and politics

It’s a bit old-fashioned to claim that these topics are not for the dinner table, especially when you have dinner with a group of close friends. It’s totally fine to talk about faith, elections, and religion among your pals. However, it is still unacceptable for the application process. You don’t know the person who is going to read your writing very well. He or she might have an extremely different worldview. So, don’t take the risk of hurting their feelings!

That’s enough instruction for now, guys! There is another efficient way to teach you how to write “Who Am I” essay in addition to writing assistance from our cheap essay writing service . We’ll give you a nice well-written example so you’ll have a good template for your own writing.

“Who am I” essay example

You can use our sample to learn how actually a “Who Am I” essay outline should look. In your own essay, you don’t have to divide the text into separate sections by subheadings. We’ve added them to our sample only for comfortable reading. We kindly ask you not to plagiarize our text. Enjoy reading!

“Who Am I” Essay: Introduction

When do people become adults? What is the moment when they cross the line and leave their careless childhood behind? I think that it’s not the easiest question to ask. However, I considered myself to be an adult, even though I’m only 21 years old for a good reason.

“Who Am I” Essay: Main Body

The first time when I thought that I was an adult was when I moved out of my parents’ house and entered the university. I left my small native town behind and became a rightful citizen of the capital. I felt so independent and free but not for long. You see, everybody needs money to live independently. At that time, my only income was my parents’ money. So, it was too early to call myself an adult. But I wanted that so much!

Later, I got my first real job. For a couple of months, I felt really adult because I started to earn my own money. Unfortunately, my first serious job was not well paid. I understood that I had to move out of the dorm as I was not a student anymore. I had no other choice but to ask my parents for financial support to rent an apartment. I was so disappointed as I had lost my right to call myself an adult again.

Since one year ago, my whole world has changed. I’ve got a new job, and I’ve found many interesting and amazing people who inspire me every day. My life is great and full of bright and positive emotions. But it has also become much harder. I think a lot about my career, my private life, my plans, my skills, and other numerous things. I don’t dream about my future as I used to when I was a child. I think about the future, and I really worry about it.

“Who Am I” Essay: Conclusion

Now, I understand that I don’t want to be an adult, because that means to be the only person who is responsible for my life and success. Ironically, I think that exactly this understanding is what makes me an adult.

“Who am I” essay writing steps infographic

We hope that you’ve learned how to start a “Who Am I” essay and how to make it brilliant from our guide. We are glad to share this information with you, as we strongly believe that all people should have the opportunity to look inside themselves and provide a proper self-analysis. Moreover, you should know how to present your strengths and impress your hiring manager or admissions officer. Finally, you can use our guide when you write a bio for your blog or social media profile.

Can you see now how helpful this guide is? Anyway, we’ve done our best composing it. Now, it’s your turn to work a bit and amaze the world with your outstanding writing.

Pro help with “who am I” essay writing

On the other hand, not all of us have enough time or energy to create awesome papers. Some people think, “I don’t have time to write my term paper ,” while others claim that they don’t possess good essay-writing skills.

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Who Am I Essay

Introduction on who am i essay.

Who am I? This is a question that keeps bothering you at times. Isn’t it? You want to know what I am and what are qualities that make you unique from others. Before someone asks about you, there has to be a proper understanding of who you are and the things that you do are different. The reason is that when such questions are prompted, you must be in a position to speak fearlessly about yourself without hesitation. Most of the time, you just speak in short sentences about yourself, which includes, name, class, or place that you belong to. But there are people who might be interested in knowing more about you than the brief introduction. It can include your likes, dislikes, passions, goals, dreams, etc. Therefore, you need to analyze yourself and come up with things that you are good at. In this particular who am I essay, you have to speak about yourselves and the things that you like to do. Here is an example for you.

Who Am I Essay Example

I am in grade 5 and live in California. We are a family of four members. My father is an architect and my mother is a teacher. I have two siblings who are older than me. I am someone who is an extremely shy and quiet person. This often makes people misunderstand that I cannot speak confidently. But, it is not true as I have immense knowledge on different things. However, I like to assess the place and situation before speaking. When someone approaches me, I would like to be humble and kind enough to answer their questions.

Most importantly, I’m comfortable with people whom I know, so that the information being conveyed will be interpreted easily. While studying or participating in any activities, I try to focus so that my concentration is towards the things that I’m doing. My hobbies are basically reading, drawing, singing, playing sports, and many more things that fascinate me. I try to give my best in all the activities that I participate in. Moreover, I believe that all the activities require complete focus and dedication in order to gain knowledge and develop essential skills. I dislike or have fear of certain things like slimy creatures, cockroaches, and heights. But, my focus is also towards overcoming these fears.

I have a lot of belief in dreaming big and setting goals for myself. There are many things that I would like to achieve and do systematically in life. It includes taking care of my parents, siblings, and people around me. The most important thing is to dedicate myself to the service of others. There is nothing more satisfying than helping others. Therefore, I have to educate myself really well on things that I want to do. Apart from this, I am keen on learning new things each and every day. While learning, I pay attention to developing important skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, decision making, analytical and communication skills. Moreover, I’m very punctual and like to do things on time.

I am extremely friendly to all the people around me which makes me a happy person. There is a sense of happiness in spending time with friends. This also gives an opportunity to be part of their lives. We all hang out together and eat delicious food prepared at home or sometimes visit restaurants. Occasionally, we go for a picnic or tour with friends and family members. I am fortunate enough to see beautiful places and learn new things from there. Besides this, I like to do crafts activities at home. This will enhance my creativity and imagination to do something better.

Hence, the who am I essay is extremely beneficial in extracting the areas that you are interested in. Sometimes, we might not express all this information when you try to communicate with others. This also gives an opportunity to explore your likes and dislikes.

Also explore: Personality essay and friendship essay .

We hope you found this who am I essay helpful. For more essays, check Osmo’s essays for kids .

Frequently Asked Questions on Who Am I Essay

How can you write a who am i essay in less than 100 words.

Here is an example of a who am I essay in less than 100 words: I’m the youngest member of my family, but I have several other roles to play. I’m a good and responsible daughter to my parents, a good sister to my siblings and a supportive and understanding friend. I set goals for myself and work hard to achieve them. I love to play basketball and I am learning to play the piano too. My hobbies include reading, baking and listening to music. Like everyone I too have bad habits, but I constantly work towards making myself better person.

How to write a good essay on yourself?

Some of the steps to write a good essay about yourself are 1. Describe yourself in detail with honesty. 2. Write about your hobbies and interests. 3. Include your achievements but avoid boasting about yourself. 4. Use personal experiences and examples. 5. Add some personality and creativity to make the essay more interesting.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Who Am I — Who Am I: Essay about Myself

Who Am I: Essay About Myself

Categories: About Myself Finding Yourself Who Am I

About this sample

Words: 1699 |

Updated: 18 July, 2024

Words: 1699 | Pages: 4 | 9 min read

Who I Am as a Person

Discover the essence of identity in this reflective essay on “Who Am I”. Starting with a conventional introduction, the author delves deeper into what truly defines him beyond basic attributes. The narrative unfolds personal experiences, challenges, and growth, revealing the complexity of answering “Who am I?” This essay offers a thoughtful exploration of self-discovery and the factors that shape who we are.

Works Cited

Bradbury, R. (2012). Fahrenheit 451. Simon and Schuster.
Bloom, H. (Ed.). (2010). Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Infobase Publishing.
Cadden, M. (1995). Science fiction and the mass cultural genre system. Science-Fiction Studies, 22(3), 317-328.
Coale, S. (2004). “Out of Bounds and Out of Control”: Reading Race, Space, and Class in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Science Fiction Studies, 31(3), 349-367.
Hiner, S. E. (2003). The perfectibility of man and society in Fahrenheit 451. The Midwest Quarterly, 45(2), 282-296.
Isaacs, L. D. (2002). Ray Bradbury. Salem Press.
Jaffa, H. V. (2003). Fahrenheit 451: Misinterpreting a classic. Academic Questions, 16(3), 16-21.
Larrick, N. (1967). The all-white world of children’s books. The Saturday Review, 50(42), 63-65.
Schaub, J. F. (2011). The mind’s I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul. University of Notre Dame Press.
Simkin, J. (2018). Social criticism in Fahrenheit 451 and 1984. The Explicator, 76(4), 225-230.

FAQ on Who Am I Essay

How to Write a “Who Am I” Essay?

To write a “Who Am I” essay, start by brainstorming key experiences and qualities that define you. Create an outline with an engaging introduction, detailed body paragraphs, and a reflective conclusion. Use specific examples and anecdotes to illustrate your points. Ensure your essay is authentic and introspective, providing a clear and honest representation of who you are.

How to Answer a “Who Am I” in an Essay?

To answer a “Who Am I” essay, reflect deeply on your experiences, values, and aspirations. Introduce yourself engagingly, discuss key experiences that shaped you, and highlight your unique qualities with specific examples. Conclude by summarizing your insights and reflecting on your self-discovery journey. Be genuine and introspective, offering a comprehensive view of your identity.

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How to write an argumentative essay | Examples & tips

How to Write an Argumentative Essay | Examples & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

An argumentative essay expresses an extended argument for a particular thesis statement . The author takes a clearly defined stance on their subject and builds up an evidence-based case for it.

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When do you write an argumentative essay, approaches to argumentative essays, introducing your argument, the body: developing your argument, concluding your argument, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about argumentative essays.

You might be assigned an argumentative essay as a writing exercise in high school or in a composition class. The prompt will often ask you to argue for one of two positions, and may include terms like “argue” or “argument.” It will frequently take the form of a question.

The prompt may also be more open-ended in terms of the possible arguments you could make.

Argumentative writing at college level

At university, the vast majority of essays or papers you write will involve some form of argumentation. For example, both rhetorical analysis and literary analysis essays involve making arguments about texts.

In this context, you won’t necessarily be told to write an argumentative essay—but making an evidence-based argument is an essential goal of most academic writing, and this should be your default approach unless you’re told otherwise.

Examples of argumentative essay prompts

At a university level, all the prompts below imply an argumentative essay as the appropriate response.

Your research should lead you to develop a specific position on the topic. The essay then argues for that position and aims to convince the reader by presenting your evidence, evaluation and analysis.

Don’t just list all the effects you can think of.
Do develop a focused argument about the overall effect and why it matters, backed up by evidence from sources.
Don’t just provide a selection of data on the measures’ effectiveness.
Do build up your own argument about which kinds of measures have been most or least effective, and why.
Don’t just analyze a random selection of doppelgänger characters.
Do form an argument about specific texts, comparing and contrasting how they express their thematic concerns through doppelgänger characters.

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An argumentative essay should be objective in its approach; your arguments should rely on logic and evidence, not on exaggeration or appeals to emotion.

There are many possible approaches to argumentative essays, but there are two common models that can help you start outlining your arguments: The Toulmin model and the Rogerian model.

Toulmin arguments

The Toulmin model consists of four steps, which may be repeated as many times as necessary for the argument:

Make a claim
Provide the grounds (evidence) for the claim
Explain the warrant (how the grounds support the claim)
Discuss possible rebuttals to the claim, identifying the limits of the argument and showing that you have considered alternative perspectives

The Toulmin model is a common approach in academic essays. You don’t have to use these specific terms (grounds, warrants, rebuttals), but establishing a clear connection between your claims and the evidence supporting them is crucial in an argumentative essay.

Say you’re making an argument about the effectiveness of workplace anti-discrimination measures. You might:

Claim that unconscious bias training does not have the desired results, and resources would be better spent on other approaches
Cite data to support your claim
Explain how the data indicates that the method is ineffective
Anticipate objections to your claim based on other data, indicating whether these objections are valid, and if not, why not.

Rogerian arguments

The Rogerian model also consists of four steps you might repeat throughout your essay:

Discuss what the opposing position gets right and why people might hold this position
Highlight the problems with this position
Present your own position , showing how it addresses these problems
Suggest a possible compromise —what elements of your position would proponents of the opposing position benefit from adopting?

This model builds up a clear picture of both sides of an argument and seeks a compromise. It is particularly useful when people tend to disagree strongly on the issue discussed, allowing you to approach opposing arguments in good faith.

Say you want to argue that the internet has had a positive impact on education. You might:

Acknowledge that students rely too much on websites like Wikipedia
Argue that teachers view Wikipedia as more unreliable than it really is
Suggest that Wikipedia’s system of citations can actually teach students about referencing
Suggest critical engagement with Wikipedia as a possible assignment for teachers who are skeptical of its usefulness.

You don’t necessarily have to pick one of these models—you may even use elements of both in different parts of your essay—but it’s worth considering them if you struggle to structure your arguments.

Regardless of which approach you take, your essay should always be structured using an introduction , a body , and a conclusion .

Like other academic essays, an argumentative essay begins with an introduction . The introduction serves to capture the reader’s interest, provide background information, present your thesis statement , and (in longer essays) to summarize the structure of the body.

Hover over different parts of the example below to see how a typical introduction works.

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its critical benefits for students and educators—as a uniquely comprehensive and accessible information source; a means of exposure to and engagement with different perspectives; and a highly flexible learning environment.

The body of an argumentative essay is where you develop your arguments in detail. Here you’ll present evidence, analysis, and reasoning to convince the reader that your thesis statement is true.

In the standard five-paragraph format for short essays, the body takes up three of your five paragraphs. In longer essays, it will be more paragraphs, and might be divided into sections with headings.

Each paragraph covers its own topic, introduced with a topic sentence . Each of these topics must contribute to your overall argument; don’t include irrelevant information.

This example paragraph takes a Rogerian approach: It first acknowledges the merits of the opposing position and then highlights problems with that position.

Hover over different parts of the example to see how a body paragraph is constructed.

A common frustration for teachers is students’ use of Wikipedia as a source in their writing. Its prevalence among students is not exaggerated; a survey found that the vast majority of the students surveyed used Wikipedia (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). An article in The Guardian stresses a common objection to its use: “a reliance on Wikipedia can discourage students from engaging with genuine academic writing” (Coomer, 2013). Teachers are clearly not mistaken in viewing Wikipedia usage as ubiquitous among their students; but the claim that it discourages engagement with academic sources requires further investigation. This point is treated as self-evident by many teachers, but Wikipedia itself explicitly encourages students to look into other sources. Its articles often provide references to academic publications and include warning notes where citations are missing; the site’s own guidelines for research make clear that it should be used as a starting point, emphasizing that users should always “read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says” (“Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia,” 2020). Indeed, for many students, Wikipedia is their first encounter with the concepts of citation and referencing. The use of Wikipedia therefore has a positive side that merits deeper consideration than it often receives.

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An argumentative essay ends with a conclusion that summarizes and reflects on the arguments made in the body.

No new arguments or evidence appear here, but in longer essays you may discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your argument and suggest topics for future research. In all conclusions, you should stress the relevance and importance of your argument.

Hover over the following example to see the typical elements of a conclusion.

The internet has had a major positive impact on the world of education; occasional pitfalls aside, its value is evident in numerous applications. The future of teaching lies in the possibilities the internet opens up for communication, research, and interactivity. As the popularity of distance learning shows, students value the flexibility and accessibility offered by digital education, and educators should fully embrace these advantages. The internet’s dangers, real and imaginary, have been documented exhaustively by skeptics, but the internet is here to stay; it is time to focus seriously on its potential for good.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

Ad hominem fallacy
Post hoc fallacy
Appeal to authority fallacy
False cause fallacy
Sunk cost fallacy

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An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.

An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

The majority of the essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Unless otherwise specified, you can assume that the goal of any essay you’re asked to write is argumentative: To convince the reader of your position using evidence and reasoning.

In composition classes you might be given assignments that specifically test your ability to write an argumentative essay. Look out for prompts including instructions like “argue,” “assess,” or “discuss” to see if this is the goal.

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S ometime in the 1970s, at the home of the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, I found myself in the company of another critic, who had just returned to London from the Berlin Film Festival. Over dinner he took pleasure in regaling us with stories of the male to female transsexual prostitutes he had met on the city’s streets, and how difficult it was to ‘complete’ the transaction since the transsexual body interprets the surgically created vagina as a wound which it tries to close. The nature of his interaction with these women was unclear, but his delight in telling the tale of sexual encounters which, by his account, could only be sadistic on the part of the man and painful for the women involved, was repellent. He was boasting. Doubtless he thought he was promoting their case. He registered my disapproval. Twice I declined when he offered to refill my glass with red wine. Finally I put my hand over the glass to make myself clear. Refusing to take no for an answer, he proceeded to pour the wine over the back of my hand.

Just a few years earlier, in 1969, Arthur Corbett, first husband of the famous male-to-female transsexual April Ashley, sought an annulment of their marriage on the grounds that at the time of the ceremony, Ashley was ‘a person of the male sex’. In the course of the proceedings, Corbett – ‘The Honourable Arthur Cameron Corbett’, as he introduced himself to Ashley after initially using the alias ‘Frank’ – presented himself as a frequenter of male brothels and a cross-dresser who, when he looked into the mirror, never liked what he saw: ‘You want the fantasy to appear right. It utterly failed to appear right in my eyes.’ He then explained how, from their first meeting at the Caprice, he had been mesmerised by Ashley. She was so much more than he could ‘ever hope to be’: ‘The reality … far outstripped any fantasy for myself. I could never have contemplated it for myself.’ * It took a while for Ashley, along with her medical and legal advisers, to realise what Corbett was up to (nine medical practitioners gave evidence in court). He was, in her words, portraying their marriage as a ‘squalid prank, a deliberate mockery of moral society perpetrated by a couple of queers for their own twisted amusement’.

Corbett’s ploy was successful: the marriage was annulled. The case is commonly seen as having set back the cause of transsexual women and men for decades. Transsexual people lost all marriage rights for more than thirty years. The decision ruled out any change to their birth certificate, a right they had enjoyed since 1944, and thereby denied them legal recognition of their gender. In 1986, female-to-male transsexual Mark Rees, in the first challenge to the ruling, lost his case at the European Court of Human Rights against the UK government for its non-recognition of his status as male, loss of privacy and barring his marriage to a woman. Only with the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 was the law changed to permit transsexuals to marry, on condition that they first obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate. The House of Commons report Transgender Equality , published in January this year, notes that the medicalised certificate pathologises transsexuality and ‘is contrary to the dignity and personal autonomy of applicants’. Describing the act as pioneering but outdated, it calls for a further change in the law. ‘Not since the Oscar Wilde trial,’ Ashley comments on Corbett v. Corbett in her 2006 memoir, The First Lady , ‘had a civil matter led to such socially disastrous consequences.’

For Justice Ormrod, the case – ‘the first occasion on which a court in England has been called on to decide the sex of an individual’ – was straightforward. Because Ashley had been registered as a boy at birth, she should be treated as male in perpetuity. The suggestion that she be categorised as intersex was dismissed: medical evidence attested that she was born with male gonads, chromosomes and genitalia. Although there had been minimal development at puberty, no facial hair, some breast formation, and what Ashley referred to as a ‘virginal penis’ because of its diminutive size, the judge also ruled out these factors (he believed the breast formation had been artificially induced by hormones). That Ashley had undergone full surgical genital reconstruction – there had been some (unsatisfactory) penetrative sex between her and Corbett – made no difference: ‘The respondent was physically incapable of consummating a marriage as intercourse using the completely artificially constructed cavity could never constitute true intercourse’ (what would constitute ‘true intercourse’ is not specified). Ashley was not, to Ormrod’s mind, a woman. This was more to the point, as far as Ormrod was concerned, than asking whether or not Ashley was still a man. At first he had been sympathetic to her, but as the hearing proceeded, he became progressively less persuaded of her case: ‘Her outward appearance, at first sight, was convincingly feminine, but on closer and longer examination in the witness box it was much less so. The voice, manner, gestures and attitude became increasingly reminiscent of the accomplished female impersonator.’ In the words of one of the expert witnesses, her ‘pastiche of femininity was convincing’ (you could argue that a convincing pastiche is a contradiction in terms).

Ormond may have found for the plaintiff on the grounds that Ashley couldn’t fulfil the role of a wife (‘the essential role of a woman in marriage’), but it is obvious from Corbett’s statements that this was never exactly what he had had in mind. For Corbett, Ashley was not an object of desire, but of envy. He coveted her freedom, her scandalous violation and embodiment of the norm. She was someone he wanted to emulate. Corbett’s wording is precise. Ashley was his fantasy or dream come true, the life he most wanted, but could not hope for, for himself: ‘The reality … far outstripped any fantasy for myself. I could never have contemplated it for myself .’ He did not want her, as in desire; he wanted to be her, as in identification (in psychoanalysis this is a rudimentary distinction), or rather the first only as an effect of the second. In this, without knowing it, he can be seen as coming close to obeying a more recent transsexual injunction, or piece of transsexual worldly advice. As Kate Bornstein, one of today’s best-known and most controversial male-to-female transsexuals, puts it towards the end of her account of her complex (to say the least) journey as a transsexual: ‘Never fuck anyone you wouldn’t wanna be.’ (Bornstein’s memoir is called A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy who joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today .)

One of the ways trans people challenge the popular image of human sexuality is by insisting, in the words of the writer and activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, that ‘it is not about who you want to go to bed with , it’s who you want to go to bed as .’ This, it can be argued, is the province of gender: how, in terms of the categories of male and female, you see yourself and wish to be seen. In fact the modern distinction between sex and gender was created with reference to transsexuality a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender – the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many transsexual people today say the same). Talk of a gender dysphoria syndrome was therefore as inappropriate as talk of a ‘suicide syndrome, or an incest syndrome, or a wanderlust syndrome’. Stoller’s most famous transsexual case was Agnes, who had secured genital reassignment surgery having duped Stoller and his associate Harold Garfinkel into believing that her female development at puberty was natural (they diagnosed her as a rare instance of intersex in which an apparently male body spontaneously feminises at puberty). Five years later, she returned to tell them that since puberty she had regularly been taking oestrogens prescribed for her mother: ‘My chagrin at learning this,’ Stoller wrote, ‘was matched by my amusement that she could have pulled off this coup with such skill.’

Cruel and outdated as the Corbett case may be, it makes a number of important things clear. The transsexual woman or man is not the only one performing; she or he does not have a monopoly on gender uncertainty; what makes a marriage is open to interpretation and fantasy – there is strictly no limit to what two people can do to, and ask of, each other. Above all perhaps, the Corbett case suggests that a transsexual person’s enemy may also be their greatest rival, embroiled in a deep unconscious identification with the one they love to hate; while the seeming friend, even potential husband, may be the one furthest from having their interests, their chance of living a viable life, at heart. After the annulment, Ashley fell back into penury, where, like many transsexual women, she has lived a large part of her life (her fortunes fluctuate wildly). Both Mark Rees and Juliet Jacques, the author of the 2015 memoir, Trans, fall in and out of the dole queue. Even before the trial, Ashley’s career as one of the UK’s most successful models had been brought to an abrupt end when she was outed by the press. Up to that point, like many transsexual people who aim to pass, she had lived in fear of ‘detection and ruin’ (in the words of Garfinkel, one of the first medical commentators to write sympathetically about transsexuality).

As Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura write in their introduction to the second of Routledge’s two monumental Transgender Studies readers , published in 2006 and 2013, however obsessed we may be with the most glamorous instances, most transsexual lives ‘are not fabulous’. In 2013 the level of unemployment among trans people in the US was reported to be 14 per cent, double the level in the general population; 44 per cent were underemployed, while 15 per cent have a household income of less than $10,000 compared to 4 per cent of the general population. Jacques gives statistics showing that 26 per cent of trans people in Brighton and Hove are unemployed, and another 60 per cent earn less than £10,000 a year. This is also the reason so many, especially male-to-female transsexuals, take to the streets (to survive materially but also to raise the money for surgery). ‘Suddenly,’ Jacques writes, ‘I understood why, historically, so many trans people had done sex work … I started to wonder if sex work might be the only place where people like me were actually wanted .’

T ranssexual people are brilliant at telling their stories. That has been a central part of their increasingly successful struggle for acceptance. But it is one of the ironies of their situation that attention sought and gained is not always in their best interest, since the most engaged, enthusiastic audience may have a prurient, or brutal, agenda of its own. Being seen is, however, key. Whatever stage of the trans journey or form of transition, the crucial question is whether you will be recognised as the other sex, the sex which, contrary to your birth assignment, you wish and believe yourself to be. Even if, as can also be the case, transition does not so much mean crossing from one side to the other as hovering in the space in between, something has to be acknowledged by the watching world (out of an estimated 700,000 trans women and men in the United States, only about a quarter of the trans women have had genital surgery). Despite much progress, transsexuality – ‘transsexualism’ is the preferred term – is still treated today as an anomaly or exception. However normalised, it unsettles the way most people prefer to think of themselves and pretty much everyone else. In fact, no human can survive without recognition. To survive, we all have to be seen. A transsexual person merely brings that fact to the surface, exposing the latent violence lurking behind the banal truth of our dependency on other people. After all, if I can’t exist without you, then you have, among other things, the power to kill me.

The rate of physical assault and murder of trans people is a great deal higher than it is for the general population. A 1992 London survey reported 52 per cent MTF and 43 per cent FTM transsexuals physically assaulted that year. A 1997 survey by GenderPAC found that 60 per cent of transgender-identified people had experienced some kind of harassment or physical abuse. † The violence would seem to be on the rise. In the first seven weeks of 2015, seven trans women were killed in the US (compared with 13 over the whole of the previous year). In July 2015, two trans women were reported killed in one week, one in California, one in Florida. In the US just 19 states have laws to protect transgender workers (only in 2014 did the Justice Department start taking the position that discrimination on the basis of gender identity, including transgender, constitutes discrimination under the Civil Rights Act). The House of Commons report Transgender Equality notes the serious consequences of the high levels of prejudice (including in the provision of public services) experienced by trans people on a daily basis. Half of young trans people and a third of adult trans people attempt suicide. The report singles out the recent deaths in custody of two trans women, Vicky Thompson and Joanne Latham, and the case of Tara Hudson, a trans woman who was placed in a men’s prison, as ‘particularly stark illustrations’ (after public pressure, Hudson was moved to a women’s jail). ‘I saw,’ Jacques writes in Trans , ‘that for many people around the world, expressing themselves as they wished meant risking death.’

In 2007, Kellie Telesford, a trans woman from Trinidad, was murdered on Thornton Heath. Telesford’s 18-year-old killer was acquitted on the grounds that Telesford may have died from a consensual sex game that went wrong or may have inflicted the fatal injuries herself (since she was strangled with a scarf, how she would have managed this is unclear). As Jacques points out in Trans , the Sun headline, ‘Trannie killed in sex mix up’, anticipates the ‘transsexual panic’ defence which argues that if a trans person fails to disclose before the sexual encounter, she is accountable for whatever happens next. Murder, this suggests, is the logical response to an unexpected transsexual revelation. ‘Those points,’ Jacques writes, ‘where men are attracted to us when we “pass” and then repulsed when we don’t are the most terrifying … all bets are off.’ ‘She had hoped to avoid the worst possibilities of her new life,’ the narrator of Roz Kaveney’s novel Tiny Pieces of Skull observes after a particularly ugly encounter between the main transsexual character, Annabelle, and a policeman with a knife. (The novel, written in the 1980s but only published last year, is based on Kaveney’s post-transition life in Chicago in the 1970s.) In fact, whatever may have been said in court, we have no way of knowing whether Telesford’s killer was aware that she was trans, whether her identity was in some way ambiguous, whether – as with Corbett – this may indeed have been the lure. Either way, ‘transsexual panic’ suggests that confrontation with a trans woman is something that the average man on the street can’t be expected to survive. Damage to him outweighs, nullifies, her death. Not to speak of the unspoken assumption that thwarting an aroused man whatever the reason is a mortal offence.

That Telesford was a woman of colour is also crucial. If the number of trans people who are murdered is disproportionate, trans people of colour constitute by far the largest subset – the seven trans women murdered in the US in the first seven weeks of 2015 were all women of colour. Today, those fighting for trans freedom are increasingly keen to address this racial factor (like the feminists before them who also ignored it at first) – in the name of social justice and equality, but also because placing trans in the wider picture can help challenge the assumption that transsexuality is an isolated phenomenon, beyond human endurance in and of itself. It is a paradox of the transsexual bid for emancipation that the more visible trans people become, the more they seem to excite, as well as greater acceptance, a peculiarly murderous hatred. ‘I know people have to learn about other people’s lives in order to become more tolerant,’ Jayne County writes in Man Enough to Be a Woman (one of Jacques’s main inspirations), but ‘sometimes that makes bigotry worse. The more straight people know about us, the more they have to hate.’

Feminists have always had to confront the violence they expose, and – in exposing – provoke, but when a transsexual person is involved, the gap between progressive moment and crushing payback seems even shorter. County exposes the myth, one of liberalism’s most potent, that knowing – finding oneself face to face with something or someone outside one’s usual frame of reference – is the first step on the path to understanding. What distinguishes the transsexual woman or man, the psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici writes in Please Select Your Gender, her study of transsexual patients, is that ‘the almost infinite distance between one face and the other will be crossed by one single person’. Perhaps this is the real scandal. Not crossing the line of gender – although that is scandal enough – but blurring psychic boundaries, placing in such intimate proximity parts of the mind which non-trans people have the luxury of believing they can safely keep apart.

T rans is not one thing. In the public mind crossing over – the Caitlyn Jenner option – is the most familiar version, but there are as many trans people who do not choose this path. In addition to ‘transition’ (‘A to B’) and ‘transitional’ (‘between A and B’), trans can also mean ‘A as well as B’ or ‘neither A nor B’ – that’s to say, ‘transcending’, as in ‘above’, or ‘in a different realm from’, both. Thus Jan Morris in Conundrum in 1974: ‘There is neither man nor woman … I shall transcend both.’ Even that is not all. If transsexuality is subsumed in the broader category of transgender, as it is for example in the Transgender Studies readers, then there would seem to be no limit; one of the greatest pleasures of falling outside the norm is the freedom to pile category upon category, as in Borges’s fantastic animal taxonomy which Foucault borrowed to open The Order of Things (no order to speak of), or the catechisms of the ‘Ithaca’ chapter in Ulysses , whose interminable lists doggedly outstrip the mind’s capacity to hold anything in its proper place. At a Binary Defiance workshop held at the 2015 True Colours Conference, an annual event for gay and transgender youth at the University of Connecticut, the following were listed on the blackboard: non-binary, gender queer, bigender, trigender, agender, intergender, pangender, neutrois, third gender, androgyne, two-spirit, self-coined, genderfluid. In 2011 the New York-based journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues brought out a special issue on transgender subjectivities. ‘In these pages,’ the psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner wrote in her editor’s note, ‘you will meet persons who could be characterised, and could recognise themselves, as one – or some – of the following: a girl and a boy, a girl in a boy, a boy who is a girl, a girl who is a boy dressed as a girl, a girl who has to be a boy to be a girl.’ We are dealing, Stryker explains, with ‘a heteroglossic outpouring of gender positions from which to speak’.

These are not, however, the versions of trans that make the news. At the end of her photo session with Annie Leibovitz, Jenner looked at the gold medal she had won as Bruce Jenner in the 1976 Olympic decathlon, and commented as ‘her eyes rimmed red and her voice grew soft’: ‘That was a good day. But the last couple of days were better.’ It’s as if – even allowing for the additional pathos injected by Buzz Bissinger, who wrote the famous piece on Jenner for Vanity Fair – the photographic session, rather than hormones or surgery, were the culmination of the process (though Leibovitz herself insists the photos were secondary to the project of helping Caitlyn to ‘emerge’). What happens, Jacques asks in relation to the whole genre of ‘before’ and ‘after’ transsexual photography, ‘once the cameras go away?’ Not for the first time, the still visual image – unlike the rolling camera of Keeping up with the Kardashians – finds itself under instruction to halt the world and, if only for a split second, make it seem safe (like the answer to a prayer). The non-transsexual viewer can then bask in the power to confer (or not confer) recognition on the newly claimed gender identity. The power is real (plaudits laced with cruelty). It is the premise – you are male or female – which is at fault. There has been much criticism of Jenner, often snide, for decking herself out in the most clichéd, extravagant trappings of femininity. But her desire would be meaningless were it not reciprocated by a whole feverish world racing to classify humans according to how neatly they can be pigeonholed into their gendered place. This is the coercive violence of gendering which, Stryker is not alone in pointing out, is the founding condition of human subjectivity. A form of knowledge which, as Garfinkel already described it in the 1960s, makes its way into the unconscious cultural lexicon ‘without even being noticed’ as ‘a matter of objective, institutionalised facts, i.e. moral facts’. Today this view is as pervasive as ever. Writing in the Evening Standard in January this year, Melanie McDonagh lamented the relative ease of ‘sex-change’ which she sees around her: ‘The boy-girl identity is what shapes us most … the most fundamental … the most basic aspect of our personhood.’ Her article is entitled ‘Changing sex is not to be done just on a whim’. A whim? She has obviously not spoken to any transsexual people or read a word they have written.

In her current TV series I Am Cait , Jenner is keen to extend a hand to transsexual women and men who don’t enjoy her material privileges. She has made a point of giving space to minority transsexuals such as Zeam Porter who face double discrimination as both black and trans, although it is Laverne Cox in Orange Is the New Black who has truly taken on the mantle of presenting to the world what it means to be a black, incarcerated, transsexual woman. Cox also insists that, even now she has the money, she won’t undergo surgery to feminise her face. Jenner’s facial surgery lasted ten hours and led to her one panic attack: ‘What did I just do? What did I just do to myself?’ But, despite her greater inclusivity, faced with Kate Bornstein exhorting her to ‘accept the freakdom’, Jenner seemed nonplussed (as one commentator pointed out, Bornstein used the word ‘freak’ six times in a three-minute interview). This was not a meeting of true minds, even though in the second series of I Am Cait Bornstein is given a more prominent role. Like Stryker, Bornstein believes it is the strangeness of being trans, the threat it poses to those who are looking on whether with or without sympathy, that’s the point. Compare the impeccable, Hollywood moodboarded images of Jenner broadcast across the world – ‘moodboarded’, the word used by the stylist on the shoot, refers to a collage of images used in production to get the right feel or flow – with the image of Stryker in 1994 welcoming monstrosity via an analogy between herself and Frankenstein: ‘The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.’ Stryker stood at the podium wearing what she calls ‘genderfuck drag’:

combat boots, threadbare Levi 501s over a black lace bodysuit, a shredded Transgender Nation T-shirt with the neck and sleeves cut out, a pink triangle, quartz crystal pendant, grunge metal jewellery, and a six inch long marlin hook dangling around my neck on a length of heavy stainless steel chain. I decorated the set by draping my black leather biker jacket over my chair at the panellists’ table. The jacket had handcuffs on the left shoulder, rainbow freedom rings on the right side lacings, and Queer Nation-style stickers reading SEX CHANGE , DYKE and FUCK YOUR TRANSPHOBIA plastered on the back.

She was – is – wholly serious. It is the myth of the natural, for all of us, which she has in her sights. This is her justly renowned, exhortatory moment, unsurpassed in anything else I have read:

Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.

For many post-operative transsexual people, the charge of bodily mutilation is a slur arising from pure prejudice. It’s true that without medical technology none of this would have been possible. It’s also the case that the need for, extent and pain of medical intervention puts a strain on the argument that the transsexual woman or man is simply returning to her or his naturally ordained place – with the surgeon as nature’s agent who restores what nature intended to be there in the first place. Kaveney’s medical transition, for example, lasted two years, involving 25 general anaesthetics, a ten-stone weight gain, thromboses, more than one major haemorrhage, fistula and infections. She barely survived, though none of this has stopped her from going on to lead one of the most effective campaigning lives as a transsexual woman. In 1931, Lili Elbe died after a third and failed operation to create an artificial womb (the film The Danish Girl sentimentally changes this to the prior operation to create a vagina so that she dies having fulfilled her dream). When I met April Ashley in Oxford in the early 1970s – she was in the midst of the legal hearing and Oxford was a kind of retreat – she expressed her sorrow that she would never be a mother. On this, female-to-male transsexuals have gone further. In 2007, Thomas Beatie, having retained his female reproductive organs on transition, gave birth to triplets through artificial insemination. They died, but he has since given birth to three children.

But for Stryker, mutilation is at once a badge of honour and a counter to the myth of nature in a pure state. There is no body without debilitation and pain. We are all made up of endlessly permuting bits and pieces which sometimes do, mostly do not, align with each other. We are all always adjusting, manipulating, perfecting, sometimes damaging (sometimes perfecting and damaging) ourselves. Today non-trans women, at the mercy of the cosmetic industry, increasingly submit to surgical intervention as a way of conforming to an image; failure makes them feel worthless (since nature is equated with youth, this also turns the natural process of ageing into some kind of aberration). ‘I’ve seen women mutilate themselves to try to meet that norm,’ says Melissa, mother of Skylar, who had top surgery with his parents’ permission at the age of 16. Shakespeare described man as a thing of ‘shreds and patches’, Freud as a ‘prosthetic God’, Donna Haraway as a cyborg. Rebarbative as it may at first seem, Stryker’s vision is the most inclusive. Enter my world: ‘I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I.’ What you would most violently repudiate is an inherent and potentially creative part of the self.

T he image of the trans world as an open church that includes all comers, all variants on the possibilities of sex, is therefore misleading. There are strong disagreements between those who see transition as a means, the only means, to true embodiment, and those who see transgenderism as upending all sexual categories. For the first, the aim is a bodily and psychic integrity that has been thwarted since birth: ‘Lili Elbe’s story,’ Niels Hoyer writes, ‘is above all a human story and each faltering step she takes is an awakening of her true self … [she] was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to become the person within.’ (Hoyer is the editor of Elbe’s own notes and diaries, not to be confused with David Ebershoff, on whose ghastly novel The Danish Girl is based.) Jan Morris defines her transition as a journey on the path to identity: ‘I had reached Identity’; Ashley speaks of her desire ‘to be whole’, and her ‘great sense of purpose to make things right, make everything correct’; Chelsea Manning writes of ‘physically transitioning to the woman I have always been’. Such accounts seem to be the ones that most easily make it into the public eye, as if a shocked world can heave something like a collective sigh of relief (‘at least that much is clear, then’).

For those who, on the other hand, see transgenderism as a challenge to such clarity, the last thing it should do is claim to be the answer to its own question, or pretend that the world has been, could ever be, put to rights. This is simply a normative delusion, exacerbated by a neoliberal world order that offers itself as the only true dispensation and which now more or less covers the earth – rather like Scientology, of which Bornstein was a paid-up member in what we might call her formative years. Scientology, Bornstein tells us, ‘is supposed to erase all the pain and suffering you’ve ever felt in this and every other lifetime’. It is also a type of surveillance state which prohibits any kind of secrecy or privacy on the part of its members (unflinching eye-to-eye contact obligatory during any conversation), and which cast Bornstein into the wilderness as a ‘suppressive person’ as soon as her ambiguous sexuality was revealed. This despite the fact that, according to Scientology, each human contains a thetan, a spirit which – unlike in, say, Christianity – isn’t separate from the body but embedded within it. Crucially, thetans have no gender. Bornstein’s transsexuality is, therefore, indebted as much to Scientology (something she acknowledges) as it is her escape from it.

For Bornstein in her new life, as for Stryker, transsexuality is an infinite confusion of tongues. Neither of them is arriving anywhere. For Jay Prosser by contrast, the transsexual man or woman is enfolded in their new body like a second skin (his 1998 book, one of the most widely circulated and debated on the topic, has the title Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality ). As he describes on the first page, two weeks after completing a course of massive testosterone treatment, he began living full-time as a man – ‘documents all changed to reflect a new, unambivalent status’. As it happens, Prosser is completely attuned to the ambiguities of sexual identity. He knows that transition, however real, is achieved at least partly by means of fiction, that it is through story-making that transsexual people arrive at the resolution they seek (hence the ‘body narratives’ of the title, narratives which in his analysis track the complexities of sexual being carried and enacted by these narratives). Partly because he is so immersed in psychoanalytic thinking, he understands how far sexual being – on the skin and in the bloodstream – reaches into the roots of who we are. Transition is testament to the fact, at once alterable and non-negotiable, of sexual difference: ‘In transsexual accounts,’ he writes, ‘transition does not shift the subject away from the embodiment of sexual difference but more fully into it.’ This is why, for some, transsexuality, or rather this version of transsexuality, is conservative, reinforcing the binary from which we all – trans and non-trans – suffer. Freud, for example, described the long and circuitous path to so-called normal femininity for the girl – originally bisexual, wildly energised by being all over the place – as nothing short of a catastrophe (admittedly, this isn’t the version of female sexuality for which he is best known).

Yet for Prosser, to move from A to B is a conclusive self-fashioning or it is nothing. In the special issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues on transsexual subjectivities, Madeleine Suchet draws on Prosser in her analysis of Raphael, a female-to-male transsexual who explains: ‘Boy has to be written on the body’ – an idea she struggles to accept. She has to move from her original stance that sexual ambiguity should be sustainable without any need for bodily change (‘Crossing Over’, the title of her essay, refers as much to her journey as it does to his). Prosser talks of ‘restoration’ of the body. Note how ‘restoration’ chimes with the ‘born in the wrong body’ mantra which, while deeply felt by many trans people, is also the child of a medical profession which for a long time would accept nothing less as the basis for hormonal or surgical intervention. In the 1960s, the profiles of candidates for medical transition were found to be strangely in harmony with Harry Benjamin’s then definitive textbook on the subject: ‘strangely’, until it was realised that all of them had been reading it and brushing up their lines.

But if the longing is for restoration, arrival, the end of ambivalence, then the infinite variables of trans identity – which the Commons report Transgender Equality admits it cannot keep up with – are a bit of a scam, or at least a smokescreen covering over the materiality of a body in the throes of transition. A year after his book was published, Prosser wrote a palinode in which he criticised his own account of the body as pure matter, the irreducible ground of all that we are, and allowed much more space to the irreducible, even unspeakable agony of transition. But the living flesh of the argument remains, however scarred and traumatised. In a move whose rhetorical violence he was willing to acknowledge, Prosser suggested in Second Skins that endorsing the performativity of trans, or rather trans as performativity (that is, trans as something that exposes gender as a masquerade for all of us), verges on ‘critical perversity’. Judith Butler was the target, charged with celebrating as transgressive the hovering, unsettled condition, which, as Teleford, Jacques and Kaveney testify, places transsexual people at risk of violence. There is another distinction at work here, a division of labour between exhilaration and pain, brashness and dread, pleasure or danger. Or to put it another way, according to this logic, ‘queers can’t die and transsexuals can’t laugh’ – a formula lifted from a commentary on the work of the trans cabaret artist Nina Arsenault, who, while modelling herself on a Barbie doll, manages to cover all the options by performing herself as both real and fake. There are no lengths to which Arsenault has not gone, no procedures she hasn’t suffered, to craft herself as a woman, but she has done this, not so much in order to embody femininity as to expose it, to push it right over the edge. Hence her parody of Pamela Anderson (who is of course already a parody of herself): an ‘imitation of an imitation of an idea of a woman. An image which has never existed in nature.’

T he question of embodiment therefore brings another with it. Does the transsexual woman or man, in her or his new identity, count as real? I am genuinely baffled how anyone can believe themselves qualified to legislate on the reality, or not, of anyone else, without claiming divine authority (or worse). ‘Once you decide that some people’s lives are not real,’ Kaveney wrote, ‘it becomes okay to abuse them.’ Nonetheless, in 1979 Janice Raymond pronounced in The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male that male-to-female transsexuals are frauds (on this issue, female-to-male seem to pose less of a problem even though surgical transition is much harder in their case, as phalloplasty is rarely a complete success) and should therefore be excluded from women-only spaces, since these are spaces which feminists have struggled, after centuries of male oppression, to create for themselves. In today’s parlance, Raymond was the first TERF, or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’ (the term used by some trans people and by those feminists who oppose her position). For Raymond, male-to-female transsexuals are patriarchy writ large, the worst embodiments of a phallic power willing to resort to just about anything to fulfil itself – hence ‘transsexual empire ’. Although I am sure this was not the intention, I have always found this argument extremely helpful in explaining to students the difference, indeed the gulf, between phallus and penis since, according to this logic, the authority and stature of the former would seem to require the surgical removal of the latter.

Raymond hasn’t been without influence. In 1980 she was commissioned by the US National Centre for Healthcare Technology to write a paper on the social and ethical aspects of transsexual surgery, which was followed by the elimination of federal and state aid for indigent and imprisoned transsexual women and men (Raymond has denied her paper played any part in the decision). A year later, Medicare stopped covering sex-reassignment, a decision only overturned in May 2014. That didn’t stop the South Dakota State Senate from passing a bill in February requiring transgender students to use locker rooms and toilets that correspond to their birth-assigned gender, on the grounds that male-to-female transsexuals sneaking into women’s toilets were a danger to women (similar legislation has been proposed in Texas, Arizona and Florida). This completely ignores the fact that it is the trans woman forced to use men’s toilets and locker rooms who is likely to be subject to sexual assault.

Germaine Greer is perhaps the best-known advocate of this position, or a version of it. She famously described male-to-female transsexuals as ‘pantomime dames’, had to resign as a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge more or less as a consequence (after opposing the appointment of transgender Rachel Padman to a fellowship), and is now the object of a no-platform campaign. ‘What they are saying,’ Greer responded when the issue arose again in November 2015, ‘is that because I don’t think surgery will turn a man into a woman I should not be allowed to speak anywhere.’ She is being disingenuous. This is Greer in 1989 (the quotation courtesy of Paris Lees, one of the most vocal trans activists in the UK today):

On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. ‘Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls!’ I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy, beringed paw that clutched it … Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women’s liberation emblem. I should have said: ‘You’re a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.’ The transvestite held me in a rapist’s grip.

‘All transsexuals,’ Raymond stated, ‘rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact.’ With the exception of incitement, of which this could be read as an instance, I tend to be opposed to no-platforming: better to have the worst that can be said out in the open in order to take it down. I also owe Greer a personal debt. Hearing her as an undergraduate in Oxford in 1970 was a key moment in setting me on the path of feminism. But reading this, I am pretty sure that, were I transsexual, I wouldn’t want Greer on any platform of mine.

Apart from being hateful, Raymond, Greer and their ilk show the scantest respect for what many trans people have had to say on this topic. However fervently desired, however much the fulfilment of a hitherto thwarted destiny, transition rarely seems to give the transsexual woman or man unassailable confidence in who they are (and not just because of the risk of ‘detection and ruin’). Rather, it would seem from their own comments that the process opens up a question about sexual being to which it is more often than not impossible to offer a definitive reply. This is of course true for all human subjects. The bar of sexual difference is ruthless but that doesn’t mean that those who believe they subscribe to its law have any more idea of what is going on beneath the surface than the one who submits less willingly. For psychoanalysis, it is axiomatic, however clear you are in your own mind about being a man or a woman, that the unconscious knows better. Given a primary, universal bisexuality, sex, Freud said, is an act involving at least four people. The ‘cis’ – i.e. non-trans – woman or man is a decoy, the outcome of multiple repressions whose unlived stories surface nightly in our dreams. From the Latin root meaning ‘on this side of’ as opposed to ‘across from’, ‘cis’ is generally conflated with normativity, implying ‘comfortable in your skin’, as if that were the beginning and end of the matter.

Who, exactly, we may therefore ask – trans or non-trans – is fooling whom? Who do you think you are? – the question anyone hostile to transsexual people should surely be asking themselves. So-called normality can be the cover for a multitude of ‘sins’. The psychoanalyst Adam Limentani described the case of an apparently perfectly heterosexual ‘vagina man’ who during intercourse fantasised that he was himself being penetrated, which meant that to have sex was to be unfaithful to himself (he was fucking another woman), and that he could never, psychically, be father to his own child – whose child would it be? Women can share the same syndrome: a fantasy that their vagina is not really their own but belongs to somebody else, although, since they appear to be ‘normal,’ no one would ever guess. Even with the apparently straightest man or woman, there is no telling.

This is a selection of quotes from transsexual narratives, suggesting that as often as not the authors both know and don’t know who they are, or even – in some cases – who precisely they want to be:

Some transsexuals are no happier after surgery, and there are many suicides. Their dream is to become a normal man or woman. This is not possible, can never be possible, through surgery. Transsexuals should not delude themselves on this score. If they do, they are setting themselves up for a big, possibly lethal, disappointment. It is important that they learn to understand themselves as transsexuals.

April Ashley, The First Lady

The trans prefix implies that one moves across from one sex to another. That is impossible … I was not reared as a boy or as a young man. My experience can include neither normal heterosexual relations with a woman nor fatherhood. I have not shared the psychological experience of being a woman or the physical one of being a man.

Mark Rees, Dear Sir or Madam

‘I live as a woman every day.’ ‘Do you consider yourself to be a woman?’ ‘I consider … Yes, yes, but I know what I – I know what I am … I do everything like a woman. I act like a woman, I move like a woman … I know I’m gay and I know I’m a man.’

Anita, a Puerto Rican transgender sex worker interviewed by David Valentine in Imagining Transgender

My body can’t do that [give birth]; I can’t even bleed without a wound, and yet I claim to be a woman … I can never be a woman like other women, but I could never be a man.

Susan Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein’

I certainly wouldn’t be happy with the idea of being a man, and I don’t consider myself a man, but I’m not going to try and convince anyone that I’m really a woman.

Jayne County, Man Enough to be a Woman

It had been such a relief for me when I could stop pretending to be a man. Well, it was a similar relief not to have to pretend that I was a woman … I was now a lesbian with a boyfriend, but I wasn’t a real lesbian and he wasn’t a real boy … no matter what I bought – I’d look in the mirror and see myself as a man in a dress. Sure, I knew I wasn’t a man. But I also knew I wasn’t a woman.

Kate Bornstein, Queer and Pleasant Danger

I have a male and female side … I don’t know how they relate … [I] had to ask myself: how trans did I want to be?

Juliet Jacques, Trans

As the oestrogen started to change her body, Jacques felt for the first time ‘unburdened by that disconnect between body and mind.’ She even wondered whether one day the original disconnect might be ‘hard to recall’. But this didn’t stop her in the same moment asking: ‘ What kind of woman have I become? ’ Soft-spoken and deep-voiced, understated and urgent, Jacques comes across as a woman carrying an ambiguity she doesn’t seem to want or feel able fully to shed. She is also as keen to talk about Norwich City Football Club and the underground music and counter-culture scene as she is to tell her tale of transition – why is it assumed that transition is all transsexual people have to talk about? No performance (except to the extent that anyone appearing in public is of necessity performing); no exhilaration (she is one of the few transsexual people I have read or heard willing to explore her own depression); no definitive arrival anywhere. Affirmed and subdued by her own experience, she confounds the distinction, not just between male and female, but also between the emotional atmospheres which the various trans identities are meant – ‘instructed’ may be the right word – to personify. On this matter, the argument, the insistence on playing it one way or the other, can be virulent.

The statements I quoted are not uncontroversial. Bornstein has been labelled ‘transphobic’ and picketed by some in the trans community for refusing to identify as either man or woman, and for her stance on the issue of women-only spaces: ‘I thought every private space has the right to admit whomever they want – I told them … it was their responsibility to define the word woman. And I told the trans women to stop acting like men with a sense of entitlement.’ ‘I give great soundbites when it’s about sex,’ she apologises to a furious Riki Anne Wilchins who had invited her to speak, ‘but I always fuck up politics.’ In a wondrous twist, Paris Lees credits Germaine Greer with guiding her to insight on this matter:

Greer caused me to question my identity, and form a more complex one . She was right: I am not a woman in the way my mother is; I haven’t experienced female childhood; I don’t menstruate. I won’t give birth. Yes, I have no idea what it feels like to be another woman – but nor do I know what it feels like to be another man. How can anyone know what it feels like to be anyone but themselves?

Not all trans people take this position. At the In Conversation with the Women’s Liberation Movement conference, held in London in October 2013, I sat behind two trans women who objected when the historian Sue O’Sullivan described how 1970s feminism had allowed young women for the first time to explore their own vagina, to claim it as intimate companion. Her account was seen by them as transphobic for excluding trans women who most likely will not have had that experience in their youth but who are ‘no less women’ for that (there are trans women for whom, on similar grounds, the word ‘vagina’ or ‘vulva’ shouldn’t ever be used). But this is not the whole story – or even half of it. I would say it is because of the journey they have made, and because so many of them have suffered such pain in prising open the question ‘Who is a real woman?’ that transgender women should be listened to. And not just because it is so manifestly self-defeating for feminism and trans, two movements fighting oppression, not to talk to each other.

A further reason why trans and feminism should be natural bedfellows is that male-to-female transsexuals expose, and then reject, masculinity in its darkest guise. This side of the argument is missed by Greer et al, who tend to overlook the fact that if you want more than anything in the world to become a woman, then chances are there is somewhere a man who, just as passionately, you do not want to be. ‘I stopped my life living as a man,’ Bornstein writes of her father in the prologue to A Queer and Pleasant Danger, ‘in large part because I never wanted to be a man like him’ (coming to terms with his ghost is one of her motives in writing the memoir). One of Nina Arsenault’s earliest memories is of boys knifing magazine images of women: ‘I know that this is exactly what I will be when I grow up.’

In the first half of Conundrum, Morris offers the reader a paean to maleness: the feeling of being a man ‘springs … specifically from the body’, a body which, ‘when it is working properly’, she recalls, is ‘a marvellous thing to inhabit … Nothing sags in him’ (never?). But this selfsame masculinity, epitomised by an assault on Everest timed to coincide with the queen’s coronation, is ‘snatching at air’, a ‘nothingness’, that leaves Morris dissatisfied – ‘as I think,’ she concludes, ‘it would leave most women’. ‘Even now I dislike that emptiness at its climax, that perfect uselessness’ (as good a diagnosis of the vacuity of phallic power as you might hope to find). If you are a man, you can spend a lifetime striving for this version of masculinity, never to discover the emptiness and fraudulence at its core. Somewhere Morris is, or rather was, an upper-class English gent imbued with the values of his sex and class – the family on his mother’s side descends from ‘modest English squires’. When Morris sheds maleness, it is therefore a patriotic, militarist identity, with its accompanying imperial prejudice, that is, at least in part, discarded: ‘I still would not want to be ruled by Africans, but then they did not want to rule me’ (though even this does not quite make it to the question of who Africans might want, and not want, to be ruled by). This legacy is hard to relinquish. Released from ‘my own last remnants of maleness’, she returns from Morocco where she underwent her transition, ‘like a princess emancipated from her degrading disguise, or something new out of Africa’. Morris was operated on by Georges Burou, the surgeon who had operated on Ashley in 1960 and one of the first to undertake the procedure. By 1972, the operation was available in the UK, but Morris chose to go abroad when it was made a legal condition that before having surgery she divorce her wife with whom she had fathered five children.

The issue of masculinity is in some ways more present for female-to-male transsexuals. In Nebraska in 1993, female-to-male transsexual Brandon Teena was murdered along with two others (the story was the basis for the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry ). After the murders, it became a matter of debate whether Teena should be seen as a female-to-male transsexual without access to sex reassignment surgery or a transgender butch who had chosen not to transition. We will never know. What we do know is that he was raped shortly before he was murdered by a group of local boys in one sense intent on returning him to the body which in their eyes he denied, in another enraged at the success he was having with local girls. ‘ This case itself hinges on the production of a “counterfeit” masculinity,’ Jack Halberstam writes in his in-depth analysis of Teena’s murder in In a Queer Time and Place , ‘that even though it depends on deceit and illegality, turns out to be more compelling, seductive and convincing than the so-called real masculinities with which it competes.’ For this reason, he continues, ‘the contradiction of his body … signified no obstacle at all as far as Brandon’s girlfriends were concerned.’ Indeed it may have been the draw. In the small-town rural America where Teena lived, male crime passed effortlessly down the generations. ‘You keep seeing the same faces,’ Judge Robert Finn told John Gregory Dunne, who wrote about the case in 1997. ‘I’m into third-generation domestic abuse and restraining orders.’ He was talking about husbands and lovers whose fathers and grandfathers had appeared before him on the same charges in the course of his 16 years on the bench. Teena offered the girls ‘sex without pregnancy or fisticuffs’. Skylar decided not to go for genital reconstruction, not feeling the need to be, in his words, ‘macho bro’.

W hat are you letting yourself in for if you choose to become a man? What is the deal? At a key stage of his transition, Raphael, the female-to-male transsexual who believes ‘boy has to be written on the body’, said to his analyst: ‘If I want them to treat me like a guy, I have to be a guy.’

‘He is quiet. We are both quiet,’ Suchet observes. ‘There is a growing sense of unease in the space between us. I sense my body tensing up. Who am I going to end up sitting in the room with?’

‘You really think you have to be a misogynist to be recognised as a guy?’ she asks him.

‘I am afraid I am going to become a complete asshole,’ Raphael replies. ‘What if I am this sexist bastard?’

It turns out that it is only as a man that Raphael can allow himself a form of passivity and surrender that was too dangerous for him as a girl. Over the years the analysis uncovers that as a female child he had been the receptacle of vicious maternal projections and may have been abused by his mother. Becoming a man allows him, among other things, to become the girl who, as long as he was lodged in a female body, he could never dare to be. ‘I want my body to say: “Here this is Raphael. He’s a guy, but he’s not only a guy. He’s a female guy, who sometimes wants to be able to be a girl.”’ (Raphael is the patient Virginia Goldner describes as ‘the girl who has to be a boy to be a girl’.)

Raphael doesn’t welcome the link Suchet proposes between his being transsexual and his childhood abuse and complains that she delegitimises and invalidates his experience by analysing it as the disturbed outcome of a traumatic past (although, as should not need stating, trauma is not pathology but history). He isn’t alone in making this case. Although the incidence of mental disturbance among transsexual people is no greater than among the population at large, transsexual people have to fight the stigma of psychopathology, not least because any sign of it during medical consultation is likely to disqualify them from surgery, where the only narrative that passes is the one that confidently asserts that they have always known who they really are. In 1980, transsexuality (adults) and Gender Identity Disorder (children) entered the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSMIII) – homosexuality had been officially removed from the registry in 1973. The struggle to have these categories dropped in turn, precisely as delegitimising, then runs up against the problem of seeming to imply that all other disorders in the manual legitimately belong there. Gender Identity Disorder was subsequently replaced with Gender Dysphoria, intended to be less pathologising (being included in the manual has the ‘advantage’ of allowing some insurance companies to cover the transition process).

In Imagining Transgender , one of David Valentine’s key informants, Cindy, suffers from depression. ‘Her history of child abuse, rape, drug addiction, alcoholism, suppression of feelings,’ he writes, ‘is one that is all too common among transgender-identified people.’ And among many non-trans people (the class issue here is glaring). It’s the link, balance or causal relation between inner distress and the world’s cruelty that is so hard, and sometimes impossible, to gauge. ‘How,’ Goldner asks, ‘are we to distinguish “psychodynamic” suffering from the transphobic “cultural suffering” caused by stigma, fear, hatred?’ ‘I know,’ Jacques writes, ‘there will be difficulties, both with things inside my head, and with intolerant people in the outside world.’ In response to this ambiguity, and to the misuse of intimate, personal history to run the transsexual person to ground, some argue that aetiology or the search for causes should simply be dropped. ‘[When] it comes to the origin of sexual identity,’ the New York psychoanalyst Ken Corbett (no relation to Arthur) wrote in 1997, ‘I am willing to live with not knowing. Indeed, I believe in not knowing … [I am not interested in] the ill-conceived aetiological question of “ Why ” [someone is homosexual], I am interested in how someone is homosexual.’

For me this is a false alternative. Why, in an ideal world (not that we are living in one), should the ethical question of how we live be severed from knowledge of how we have come to be who we are? What, we might ask instead, is the psychic repertoire, the available register of admissible feelings, for the oppressed and ostracised? It is a paradox of political emancipation, which the struggle for trans freedom brings starkly into focus, that oppression must be met with self-affirmation, as in: ‘I have dignity. You will not overlook me.’ To vacillate is political death. No second thoughts. No room for doubt or the day-to-day aberrations of being human. At moments, reading trans narratives, I have felt the range of utterances the trans person is permitted narrow into a stranglehold: ‘I am discriminated against.’ ‘I suffer.’ ‘I am perfectly fine.’ ‘There is nothing wrong with me.’ I think this might be the reason I often get the sense of a psychic beat missed, of there being parts of the story which do, and don’t, want to be told, moments that reach the surface, only to be forgotten or brushed aside in the forward march of narrative time. As though the personal could also be a front for the personal, covering over what it ostensibly, even generously displays (or as Jacques puts it in relation to ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs, having ‘the strange effect of masking the process of change as they appear to reveal it’). Mark Rees was one of girl twins, registered as a girl at birth: his twin sister died five days later and his parents tried to hide their disappointment when three years later another girl was born – they had wanted a boy – who then turned out, compared with Mark, to be the ‘perfect’ female child. A male-to-female transsexual who prefers not to be named was identified as dyspraxic as a young male child, born to a mother who had earlier suffered an ectopic pregnancy and who subsequently gave birth to a girl child with no trace of disability who at last fulfilled the parents’ dreams. There can be no ‘wild’ analysis of these histories, but it is hard not to see the shadow of death and an intolerable burden of idealisation fall, along the rigid axis of sexual difference, on these young bodies and minds. These moments are coercive, but given their due place, they also increase the options for understanding. They show transsexuality, like all psychic identities, as an exit strategy as much as a journey home.

There is rage against the original body in many of these stories, especially in the male-to-female narratives I have read. April Ashley, Mark Rees, Juliet Jacques all write of the hatred, revulsion, abhorrence (their words) with which they viewed their male genitals before surgery. Jacques: ‘I just want this fucking thing off my body right now.’ Weeks after her surgery, she wakes up to the ‘horrific realisation’ that ‘ It’s still there! ’ before remembering that transsexual women who underwent surgery before her had warned her that this is the dream. ‘Other forces,’ Lili Elbe wrote in her memoir, ‘began to stir in my brain and to choke whatever remnant of Andreas [Einer Wegener] still remained there … Andreas has been obliterated in me – is dead.’ The pre-surgical body is, it seems, ungrievable (Judith Butler speaks of ‘ungrievable’ lives, referring to the dead bodies of the enemy in wartime that do not count or matter). But without some recognition of how deep the stakes, how driven the impulse, the story is hard to fathom and risks being delivered straight into the arms of a crazy narrative, beyond all human understanding. Nor do such insights necessarily undermine the more straightforward tale of a mistake being at last redressed. They are rarely to be found in each other’s company, but no one gains by believing that the two forms of understanding are unable to tolerate each other.

In saying this, realise I am repeating, in psychoanalytic terms, the call made by Sandy Stone as early as 1987, in her reply to Janice Raymond, ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-transsexual Manifesto’, in which she writes about having been personally attacked for working at an all-woman music collective. The process of ‘ constructing a plausible history’ , in other words ‘learning to lie effectively about one’s past’, Stone wrote, was blocking the ability of trans people to represent the full ‘complexities and ambiguities of lived experience’. The one thing Dean Spade learns from counselling sessions, is that ‘in order to be deemed real, I need to want to pass as male all the time, and not feel ambivalent about this.’ ‘We have foreclosed the possibility of analysing desire and motivational complexity in a manner which adequately describes the multiple contradictions of individual lived experience,’ Stone warned. ‘Plausible’ is the problem. It obliges the trans person, whatever the complexity of their experience, to hold fast to the rails of identity. It turns the demand to take control of one’s own life, which is and has to be politically non-negotiable, into a vision of the mind as subordinate to the will (the opposite of what the psychic life can ever be). And it leaves no room for sexuality as the disruptive, excessive reality and experience it mostly is. I have been struck at how little space for sex many of these accounts, before and after, seem to offer. Bornstein is one exception (she always pushes the boat out). In discussion with Paris Lees in London in February this year, her refrain, first spoken loud and clear and then muttered more or less throughout the exchange, was ‘sex, sex, sex’. In A Queer and Pleasant Danger, she invites her readers, should they be so inclined, to skip several pages near the end of the book where she recounts an intense, in the end personally self-defeating, sado-masochistic interlude. Bornstein herself makes the link back to the operating table. In the prologue, she describes cutting a valentine’s heart above her heart as one way of dealing with searing pain. Once one barrier falls, then, if you choose not to keep the lid on, so, potentially at least, do all the rest.

T oday trans is everywhere. Not just the most photogenic instances such as Bruce Jenner and Laverne Cox, or The Danish Girl at a cinema near you, or the special August 2015 issue of Vanity Fair on ‘Trans America’ (co-edited by GQ, the New Yorker, Vogue and Glamour), from which a number of my stories are taken; but also, for instance, the somewhat unlikely, sympathetic front-page spread of the Sun in January 2015 on the British Army’s only transgender officer (‘an officer and a gentlewoman’), plus the Netflix series Transparent , Bethany Black, Doctor Who ’s first trans actress, EastEnders ’s Riley Carter Millington, the first trans actor in a mainstream UK soap opera, and Rebecca Root of Boy Meets Girl, the first trans star of a British TV show; or again reports of the first trans adopters and foster carers, or the 100 per cent surge in children seeking gender change, as shown in figures released by the Tavistock Clinic in November 2015. From 2009 to 2014, the number of cases referred to the Portman NHS Trust’s Gender Identity Service rose from 97 to 697.

Transgender children in the UK today have the option of delaying puberty by taking hormone blockers; they can take cross-sex hormones from 16 and opt for sex reassignment surgery from the age of 18. Cassie Wilson’s daughter Melanie announced he was Tom at the age of two and a half (now five, he has annual appointments at the Tavistock); Callum King decided she was Julia as soon as she could talk. In 2014, the mental health charity Pace surveyed 2000 young people who were questioning their gender: 48 per cent had attempted suicide and 58 per cent self-harmed. ‘They kill themselves,’ Julia’s mother commented: ‘I want a happy daughter, not a dead son.’ Julia gives herself more room for manoeuvre and defines herself as ‘both’. She likes to ask her girlfriends at school if they would like to be a boy for a day just to see what it would feel like and, whatever they answer, she retorts: ‘I don’t have to because I’m both.’

It would seem, then, that the desire for transition comes as much, or more, from the parent and adults than from the child. One mother in San Francisco was told by the school principal that her son should choose one gender or the other because he was being harassed at school. He could either jettison his pink Crocs and cut his long blond hair, or socially transition and come to school as a girl – he’d abandoned the dresses he used to like wearing and had never had any trouble calling himself a boy. She was wary: ‘It can be difficult for people to accept a child who is in a place of ambiguity.’ At a conference in Philadelphia attended by Margaret Talbot, the journalist who wrote about Skylar, one woman admitted that she was the one who needed to know: ‘We want to know – are you trans or not?’ ‘Very little information in the public domain talks about the normality of gender questioning and gender role exploration,’ Walter Meyer, a child psychologist and endocrinologist in Texas, remarks. ‘It may be hard to live with the ambiguity, but just watch and wait.’ ‘How,’ Polly Carmichael of the Tavistock asks, ‘do we keep in mind a diversity of outcomes?’ What desire is being laid on a child who is expected to resolve the question of transition? On whose behalf? Better transition over and done with, it seems, than adults having to acknowledge, remember, relive, the sexual uncertainty of who we all are.

The increase in the number of trans children may be a striking, and for some shocking, new development. But transgenderism is not new. Far from being a modern-day invention, it may be more like a return of the repressed, as humans slowly make their way back, after a long and cruel detour, to where they were meant to be. One of my friends, when she heard I was writing on the topic, said we should all hang on in there, as the ageing body leads everyone to transition in the end anyway. (I told her she had somewhat missed the point.) The Talmud, for example, lists six genders (though Deuteronomy 2 2.5 thunders against cross-dressing). ‘Strange country this,’ Leslie Feinberg quotes a white man arriving in the New World in 1850, ‘where males assume the dress and duties of females, while women turn men and mate with their own sex.’ Colonialists referred to these men and women as berdache , and set wild dogs on them, in many cases torturing and burning them. In pre-capitalist societies, before conquest and exploitation, Feinberg argues, transgender people were honoured and revered. Feinberg’s essay, ‘Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come’, first published in 1992, called for a pangender umbrella to cover all sexual minorities. It was the beginning of a movement. The first Transgender Studies Reader stretches back into the medical archive then forward into the 1990s: the activism of that decade was the ground and precondition of the engagement, the defiance, the manifestos which, in the face of a blind and/or hostile world, the Reader offered. These volumes are vast, they contain multitudes, as if to state: ‘Look how many we are and how much we have to say.’ We need to remember that these bold and unprecedented interventions predated by more than two or even three decades, the phenomenon known as ‘trans’ in popular culture today.

At the end of his foreword to the first Transgender Studies Reader , Stephen Whittle lists as one of the new possibilities for trans people opened up by critical thought the right to claim a ‘unique position of suffering’. But, as with all political movements, and especially any grounded in identity politics, there is always a danger that suffering will become competitive, a prize possession and goal in itself. The example of the berdache , or of Brendon Teena caught in a cycle of deprivation, shows, however, that trans can never be – without travestying itself and the world – its own sole reference point. However distinct a form of being and belonging, it has affiliations that stretch back in time and across the globe. I have mainly focused on stories from the US and UK, but transgender is as much an issue in Tehran, where trans people have had to fight against being co-opted into an anti-Islam argument that makes sexual progressivism an exclusive property of the West (in fact sex reassignment was legalised following a personal diktat from the Ayatollah Khomeini); and in India where the hijra – men who wear female clothing and who renounce sexual desire by undergoing sacrificial emasculation – are recognised and esteemed as a third sex.

Like any story of a person’s life, all the stories I have discussed are caught in histories not of their own choosing. They also need to be told. Ashley, for example, a child of the Second World War, finds herself in a circle that includes Goebbels’s sister-in-law, who inherited Goebbels’s wealth and property after he and his wife murdered their six children and then killed themselves. ‘I was to find,’ Ashley writes of their growing friendship, ‘that most people had secrets – some in their own way, as delicate as mine.’ The link between them goes deeper than she may have realised. Magnus Hirschfield, sexologist, founder of the first gay rights organisation and an early advocate for transgender people, was described by Hitler as ‘the most dangerous man in Germany’; the Nazis destroyed his institute and burned his research collection. The war is her story. Ashley’s mother, who hated her and would regularly pick her up by her ankles and bang her head on the floor, worked at the Fazakerley bomb factory, losing much of her hair and all her teeth from being around TNT. ‘As a child growing up during the Second World War,’ Ashley begins her memoir, ‘I was generally badly treated by everybody.’

Caitlyn Jenner says she will still vote Republican, even for Donald Trump, despite the party’s dire record on LGBT issues. She is being consistent. As Bruce, the famous athlete, Bizzinger recalls, she had been a weapon in the Cold War: ‘Mom and apple pie with a daub of vanilla ice cream for deliciousness in a country desperate for such an image.’ ‘He had beaten the Commie bastards. He was America.’ In an article in the New York Times in 1977, Tony Kornheiser described Jenner as ‘twirling the nation like a baton; he and his wife Chrystie are so high up on the pedestal of American heroism, it would take a crane to get them down.’ Who is to say that something of that dubious political aura has not made its way, like a lingering scent, into the phenomenon that is Caitlyn Jenner today?

For Jayne County being trans was a ticket to the other side, what she calls the ‘flaming side of gay life’. One of the most successful plays she wrote and performed, World: Birth of a Nation , included a scene where John Wayne gives birth to a baby out of his anus (not the way most people like to think of the birth of a nation, or indeed John Wayne). The Village Voice gave it a rave review. County was brought up in right-wing rural America where biblical prophecy ruled and the Beast took the shape of a United Europe with Germany at its head (Germans would apparently unite with the Arab nations against the Jews). She credits Bill Clinton with fostering an atmosphere in the 1990s that made the US ‘wide open for people of all variations of sexuality, including trannies of every shape, size and colour’. But already by the middle of the decade when County returned from the Berlin underground, the Conservative right were taking power, and the Democrats, with their liberal stand on abortion, gay rights and prayer in schools, were seen as disciples of Satan ‘by Baptist bastards, Republican retards and right-wing Christians’ (no change there then). ‘This,’ she asserts, ‘just makes me more defiant than ever. I’ll get more and more outrageous just to freak them out’ (she had been planning to retire to her home community, dress in more subdued fashion, and settle down). These are the last lines of her book. We do trans people no favours if we ignore these contexts. As if, after all, trans is merely a tale transsexuals are telling themselves, cut off and leading a strange life all their own (which must increase the voyeurism, the over-intense focus from which they suffer).

In 1998, the Remembering Our Dead project was founded in the US in response to the killing of Rita Hester, an African American trans woman who was found murdered in her Massachusetts apartment. By 2007, 378 murders had been registered, and the number continues to climb today. Commemoration is crucial but also risky. There is a danger, Sarah Lamble writes in the second Transgender Studies Reader , that ‘the very existence of transgender people is verified by their death’: that trans people come to define themselves as objects of violence over and above everything else (the violence that afflicts them usurping the identity they seek). ‘In this model,’ Lamble continues, ‘justice claims rest on proof that one group is not only most oppressed but also most innocent,’ which implies that trans people can never be implicated in the oppression of others. Apparently, the list of victims in the archives gives no information about age, race, class or circumstances, although the activists are mostly white and the victims almost invariably people of colour, so that when the images are juxtaposed, they reproduce one of the worst tropes of colonialism: whites as redeemers of the black dead. At the core of the remembrance ceremony, individuals step forward to speak in the name of the dead. What is going on here? What fetishisation – Lamble’s word – of death? What is left of these complex lives which, in failing fully to be told, fail fully to be honoured?

On the other hand, I would tentatively suggest that we are witnessing the first signs that the category of the transsexual might one day, as the ultimate act of emancipation, abolish itself. In ‘Women’s Time’ (1981), Julia Kristeva argued that feminists, and indeed the whole world, would enter a third stage in relation to sexual difference: after the demand for equal rights and then the celebration of femininity as other than the norm, a time will come when the distinction between woman and man will finally disappear, a metaphysical relic of a bygone age. In the second Transgender Studies Reader , Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee and Dean Spade call for a trans and queer movement which would set its sights above all on a neoliberal agenda that exacerbates inequality, consolidates state authority and increases the number of incarcerated people across the globe. Today, the official US response to the regular and fatal violence meted out to trans and queer people is hate-crimes legislation, tacked onto Defense Bills, which lengthens prison sentences and strengthens the hand of the local and federal law imposing them. In 2007, the Employment Non-Discrimination Bill was gutted of gender-identity protection. Bill Clinton – pace Jayne County – may have liberalised the sexual life of the nation, but it was on his watch that the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act limited aid and increased penalties for welfare recipients. Viewed in this light, Clinton becomes, like Cameron, a leader whose social liberalism, including on sexual matters, is what allows him to drive through brutally unjust economic policies with such baffling ease.

‘Critical trans resistance to unjust state power,’ Bassichis, Lee and Spade argue, ‘must tackle such problems as poverty, racism and incarceration if it is to do more than consolidate the legitimate citizenship status of the most privileged segments of trans populations.’ As soon as you talk about privilege, everything starts to look different. Bassichis, Lee and Spade call for trans and queer activists to become part of a movement, no longer geared only to sexual minorities but embracing the wider, and now seen as more radical, aim of abolishing prisons in the US. ‘We can no longer,’ they state, ‘allow our deaths to be the justification of so many other people’s deaths through policing, imprisonment and detention.’ Trans people can’t afford to be co-opted by discriminatory and death-dealing state power. The regular and casual police killings of black men on the streets of America comes immediately to mind as part of this larger frame in which, they are insisting, all progressive politics should be set.

Death must not be an excuse for more death. Obviously it is not for me to make this call on behalf of trans people. I have written this essay from the position of a so-called ‘cis’ woman, a category which I believe, as I hope is by this point clear, to be vulnerable to exposure and undoing. Today, trans people – men, women, neither, both – are taking the public stage more than ever before. In the words of a Time magazine cover story in June last year, trans is ‘America’s next civil rights frontier’. Perhaps, even though it doesn’t always look this way on the ground, trans activists will also – just – be in a position to advance what so often seems impossible: a political movement that tells it how it uniquely is, without separating one struggle for equality and human dignity from all the rest.

Among the texts consulted for this article:

The First Lady by April Ashley and Douglas Thompson (Blake, 2006, out of print)

Transgender Equality: First Report of Session 2015-16 by the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee (January)

A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today by Kate Bornstein (Beacon, 258 pp., £11.30, July 2013, 978 0 8070 0183 7)

Dear Sir or Madam by Mark Rees (Mallard, £8, Kindle edition)

Trans: A Memoir by Juliet Jacques (Verso, 330 pp., £16.99, September 2015, 978 1 7847 8164 4)

The Transgender Studies Reader , edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (Routledge, 752 pp., £41.99, 2006, 978 0 415 94709 1)

The Transgender Studies Reader 2 , edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura (Routledge, 693 pp., £46.99, March 2013, 978 0 415 51773 7)

Tiny Pieces of Skull or A Lesson in Manners by Roz Kaveney (Team Angelica, 190 pp., £9.99, April 2015, 978 0 9569719 7 5)

Man Enough to be a Woman by Jayne County and Rupert Smith (Serpent’s Tail, 1996, out of print)

Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratising of Trangenderism by Patricia Gherovici (Routledge, 316 pp., £29.99, February 2010, 978 0 415 80616 9)

Conundrum by Jan Morris (Faber, 160 pp., £8.99, 2002, 978 0 571 20946 7)

Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Vol. 21, Issue 2 (2011), Special Issue: ‘Transgender Subjectivities: Theories and Practices’

Man into Woman: The First Sex Change, a Portrait of Lili Elbe edited by Niels Hoyer (Blue Boat, 2004, out of print)

Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality by Jay Prosser (Columbia, 282 pp., £20, 1998, 978 0 231 10935 2)

Trans(per)forming Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work edited by Judith Rudakoff (Chicago, 160 pp., £20, July 2013, 978 1 84150 571 8)

Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category by David Valentine (Duke, 312 pp., £16.99, 2007, 978 0 8223 3869 7)

Vanity Fair Special Edition: Trans America (August 2015)

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives by Judith Halberstam (NYU, 238 pp., £10, 2005, 978 0 8147 3585 5)

Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transssexual and Transgendered People by Viviane Namaste (Chicago, 354 pp., £22.50, 2000, 978 0 226 56810 2)

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I use ‘he/she’, ‘his/her,’ to reflect the post-transition identity, rather than ze , sie , hir as advocated by some transsexual writers, and as approved for example by Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences for use by students in September last year. I have also used the more familiar term ‘transsexuality’ rather than ‘transsexualism’, and ‘sex or gender reassignment surgery’ rather than ‘gender confirmation surgery’. Unless quoting, I have avoided ‘sex change’ which today is considered denigrating.

GenderPAC is a lobbying group founded in 1996 by trans activist Riki Anne Wilchins with the aim of promoting ‘gender, affectional and racial equality’.

Vol. 38 No. 10 · 19 May 2016

Jacqueline Rose is to be congratulated on her piece on trans narratives, which dealt with a complicated and ever-shifting field as well as anything I have read recently ( LRB , 5 May ). I have just one point of correction. ‘Transsexual people have to fight the stigma of psychopathology,’ Rose states, ‘not least because any sign of it during medical consultation is likely to disqualify them from surgery, where the only narrative that passes is the one that confidently asserts that they have always known who they really are.’

The view of the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists is that while gender dysphoria is not a mental illness or disorder it can coincide with any mental illness, and that a coincidental mental illness would not necessarily preclude treatment for gender dysphoria. Realistically, most patients in any branch of medicine have multiple conditions at any one time and the social strain imposed on anyone with gender dysphoria is, hardly surprisingly, something which makes coincidental depression, anxiety and so forth not uncommon. Further, autistic spectrum disorders are found much more commonly in people with gender dysphoria than mere chance would allow. Any chronic illness, whether psychological or physical, may affect treatment for gender dysphoria but generally speaking if chronic illnesses are under good control treatment is possible. Such chronic illnesses could be asthma or diabetes, schizophrenia or learning disability, Asperger’s Syndrome or personality disorder; the distinction between psychological and physical illness isn’t anything like as important as how well the illness is controlled.

Patients have already advanced perfectly satisfactorily through all stages of treatment with coincidental diagnoses of schizophrenia, chronic renal failure, paraplegia, emotionally unstable personality disorder, learning disability and autism. Patients currently being treated in the UK include those unwell enough to be detained under the Mental Health Act in a secure hospital.

James Barrett British Association of Gender Identity Specialists, London W6

Vol. 38 No. 11 · 2 June 2016

‘I am pretty sure that, were I transsexual, I wouldn’t want [Germaine] Greer on any platform of mine,’ Jacqueline Rose writes ( LRB , 5 May ). But she isn’t transsexual and public platforms don’t belong to her, or to transsexuals or to anyone else: they belong to the collective we – the public. Public platforms aren’t places for chats between pals. They exist in a forum where we, the public, get to hear people, be in their presence, listen, learn, call them to account; a forum where we get to join in public conversation, where we do politics.

Rose understands that of course, and she states her position: ‘I tend to be opposed to no-platforming.’ But she sets Greer up as the demonic person who goes too far, who breaches Rose’s own tendency and warrants banishment. Greer is an easy target. Her opinions on transgender issues are described as ‘hateful’. ‘Hate’ and ‘phobia’ are part of the hyperbolic lexicon of trans debates. Another pioneering feminist activist, Julie Bindel, has been declared ‘vile’ and no-platformed in resolutions affirming trans rights passed by conferences of the National Union of Students. Bindel is cheeky, irreverent and occasionally offensive . She is also an adroit campaigner for justice for the most marginalised and maligned women. But the NUS does not allow students to hear her in person, or to be heard by her.

That is why the no-platforming of feminists in the name of trans sensibilities is so toxic: it not only silences some feminist voices and purges legitimate feminist discourse from some public platforms, it excludes students themselves from active participation, from challenging and changing their own and other people’s minds. I once invited an NUS women’s officer to debate that ban in public. No, she said. So, a feminist is consigned to the NUS proscribed list, along with neo-fascists.

More recently I suggested that one of Britain’s leading gay journals – I won’t name and shame – host a round-table. No, they said. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Are you frightened?’ Yes, they said. I suggested the same thing to an Oxbridge political journal. No, they didn’t think they would or could, they said, because university must be a safe space, like home. As if every home is safe! As if debate is dangerous.

I should declare an interest: Jacqueline and I are old friends, we have enjoyed agreeing and disagreeing with each other for years. But I find myself foxed: why in 15,000 words is Greer’s purported hatefulness flagged, but not the bullying that flays feminism? The sexual revolution wrought by feminist and gay activism has, of course, changed the political landscape in which trans lives can be lived. It co-exists with the commodification of gender archetypes and the reinstatement of seemingly polarised and parodic masculinities and femininities. All of this can be aired in feminist forums and, say, Mumsnet, but not in trans/feminist discourse in the NUS.

As I write, up pops the following notification from ‘youngradfems’:

Unfortunately we’ve had to take down the post ‘how I became a cis-privileged shitlord’ because the author was scared of being outed as a disgusting terf [trans-exclusionary radical feminist] bitch if her fellow students found out about her radical feminist views. Yet another example of radical feminist young women being bullied into silence.

The NUS impulse to no-platform feminists who problematise transsexualism or prostitution, who attract the abusive designation ‘transphobic’ and ‘whorephobic’ (they often go together), has migrated to other venues and organisations.

In February 2015 Deborah Cameron and I gathered more than 130 signatures to a letter published in the Observer opposing no-platforming and the stifling of debate. Rose was not one of them. It was provoked by the Bindel ban, new purges, and threats to feminist students and to the comedian Kate Smurthwaite at Goldsmiths (she has expressed support for the ‘Nordic model’ – criminalising the purchase of sex); it also referred to the Germaine Greer kerfuffle, and the ugly harassment of the philosophy lecturer Rupert Read. He’d written a philosophical essay on transgender and feminist issues in 2013 but two years later he was subjected to a public thrashing. People threatened to picket his election appearances as a Green Party candidate. ‘There are few things more conservative,’ Sarah Brown, a transgender former LibDem councillor in Cambridge, wrote about Read, ‘than the view that trans people are dirty perverts who shouldn’t be indulged in our supposed delusion, that sex workers are wanton harlots who are certainly to be discouraged, and that masturbation is some kind of social ill that needs eradicating.’

Read, of course, held no such opinions. But that didn’t matter. Following relentless attacks on social media, including death threats, and with the Green Party itself thoroughly spooked, Read had to ‘retract’ things that he had never said in the first place. Brown, a leading trans activist, had form, a talent for spite. In a public riposte to a fellow Cambridge councillor, she wrote: ‘I invite you to suck my formaldehyde pickled balls.’ This field is bloodied with ‘hatefulness’.

Our ‘no to no-platforming’ Observer letter said: ‘You do not have to agree with the views that are being silenced to find these tactics illiberal and undemocratic. Universities have a particular responsibility to resist this kind of bullying. We call on universities and other organisations to stand up to attempts at intimidation and affirm their support for the basic principles of democratic political exchange.’ The signatories included scholars and activists, transsexuals, people for and against prostitution united by commitment to democratic debate and opposition to no-platforming.

One of the signatories was Mary Beard. She – like Deborah and I – didn’t know what all the signatories thought about the contested issues, but the day after the letter appeared she wrote on her blog that they included ‘many I am proud to be next to: Nimko Ali, Peter Tatchell, Lisa Appignanesi, Melissa Benn, Caroline Criado-Perez, Catherine Hall, Gia Milinovich, Sophie Scott, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, and loads more. Hardly the forces of gender darkness, unless you are a real reactionary.’ Yet, she continued,

since the letter was posted on the Guardian website … I have been bombard[ed] by tweets … I got sixty tweets in the space of about an hour from one person alone … Last night I went to bed wanting to weep … It wasn’t the force of any remark, it was the relentless pummelling of attack on the basis of extraordinary loaded, sometimes quite wrong, readings of the letter … You can see why a lot of women (and there is a gender issue here) might choose not to put their heads above the parapet.

Peter Tatchell was also bombarded – all the more galling for him because he is a strong advocate of trans people and sex workers. Many responses, he wrote, ‘were hateful and abusive: homo, foreigner, misogynist, paedophile, nutter and so on. Others were threatening: “I would like to tweet about your murder you f*cking parasite."’ The pioneering trans campaigner Stephen Whittle blogged: ‘I was astonished to discover that those social justice campaigners, Peter Tatchell and Mary Beard, among others, had become the latest attack of the twittering trans-sirens.’ Was this ‘vicious streak’, he wondered, the ‘death of the inclusive, tolerant trans community’? The answer seems to be yes.

Sara Ahmed, professor in race and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, is adamant: ‘There cannot be a dialogue when some at the table are in effect or intent arguing for the elimination of others at the table.’ But speaking is not the same as pointing a gun, as Whittle reminds us. Ahmed organised a group response to our Observer letter, published in the paper a week later: ‘We do not agree that freedom of speech is freedom to speak unaccountably.’ But NUS no-platforming does, precisely, prevent speaking accountably: it not only proscribes speech but students’ active participation – in hearing and, crucially, being heard.

Feminism is nothing if not a politics that problematises gender and the construction of masculinities and femininities; it is bound to get into ‘gender trouble’. Who knows whether ‘What is a woman?’ is a feminist question or a patriarchal conundrum? Transsexuals, including Kate Bornstein and Miranda Yardley, for example, have put these questions on the trans agenda.

If feminism can’t make gender trouble then it can’t talk about anything, indeed it is silenced by Ahmed’s authoritarian notion of ‘dialogue’: language loses meaning and politics is shot.

Beatrix Campbell Beverley, East Riding

Jacqueline Rose’s sympathetic discussion of trans people’s experiences could have done more to acknowledge the genuine concern that some feminists have about aspects of the trans agenda and its implications for women’s rights. Rose rightly describes as hateful the language used by Germaine Greer about trans people. However, many feminists, myself included, are worried by the potential in some coverage of trans people’s stories (such as that of Caitlyn Jenner) for reviving notions of intrinsic masculine and feminine qualities, with their implication that gender is hard-wired in the brain. This version of identity politics feels like a step backwards towards biological determinism and away from feminist debates over many years aimed at transcending the category of gender entirely. A second omission relates to trans children, where there is an important debate to be had about choice and the appropriate age of consent for any potentially irreversible intervention. Addressing these points does not have to take the form of an attack on individual trans people, many of whom, as Rose points out, are as critical of gender as feminists are. Perhaps one way of avoiding the creation of a new trans-TERF binary is to depersonalise the debate (temporarily underplaying ‘the personal is political’) and focus instead on the political agendas served by discrimination against both women and trans people.

Moira Dustin Brighton

Vol. 38 No. 12 · 16 June 2016

Beatrix Campbell conflates not sharing a platform with Germaine Greer with denying her one ( Letters, 2 June ). I opposed no-platforming Greer in Cambridge last year, but that isn’t to say I would want to debate with someone who thinks I am mistaken in believing that I exist. The person inside my head isn’t at all confused about who she is, and is disappointed only that the flesh doesn’t conform as well as it might (which is true of many sixty-somethings). If trans women feel strongly about such views, it isn’t surprising, so might any other group who found a core part of their identity challenged in this way.

On the same page, Moira Dustin appears to believe that gender has to be socially constructed, because the consequences of its having a biological element would undermine years of progress on sexual equality. That is hardly a scientific view: the way the world is cannot be a function of the consequences of its being so. I would simply observe that animals need a programme – a built-in repertoire of feelings and behaviours – to ensure that they reproduce. That programme has to include, at a minimum, mechanisms for identifying potential mates and competing with others of the same sex for access to them, as well as playing an appropriate role in the production (and sometimes nurture) of offspring. For social animals, it includes the ability to recognise others as ‘my sort’ or ‘not my sort’. For me, that is a good, working, biological definition of gender. Humans have a unique ability to ornament gender differences socially, culturally and technologically, but that doesn’t change the underlying truth that they are necessary for the continuation of the species. It is a small step from there to recognising that on occasion an individual of one sex may develop with at least parts of the programme appropriate to the other. This is observed in other animals as well.

Does my having the ‘wrong’ code mean that I am mistaken about my identity? To me mistakes are things like approving of Tony Blair, or getting a bit of algebra wrong. I try to avoid them, and to correct them where I can. I am perfectly happy to agree that in some sense I am a mistake, but it’s nature’s error and not mine. However, I really can’t accept anyone else, who can’t see inside my head, telling me that I am mistaken about who I am, which is very much where Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel and others are coming from. Undoubtedly some aspects of my life would have been easier if I had lived the life suggested by my body. ‘I’ have always been unwilling to sacrifice ‘myself’ – or indeed my self – to do that. Neither do I buy into the idea that I should somehow redeem myself by rejecting gender altogether (which I think means stop claiming a female identity) and devoting myself to creating a brave new world in which gender is irrelevant. My gender is important to me, but it’s only one part of my identity: it’s my day job as a physicist that pays the mortgage.

Rachael Padman Newnham College, Cambridge

Beatrix Campbell reinstates the certainties and divides that are undone and exquisitely crossed by Jacqueline Rose’s essay on trans. ‘The sexual revolution wrought by feminist and gay activism has, of course, changed the political landscape in which trans lives can be lived,’ Campbell writes, as if the reverse were not also true; as if trans lives could not be and were not part of this activism; as if feminist, trans and gay were somehow mutually exclusive categories. Campbell slaps Rose down for the empathic identification with transsexuality that is for me the most moving aspect of her essay. After relating some feminists’ annihilation (among them Greer’s) of transsexuals’ right to identification and existence, Rose reflects: ‘Were I transsexual, I wouldn’t want Greer on any platform of mine.’ Campbell’s comeback: that Rose ‘isn’t transsexual and public platforms … belong to the collective we – the public’ – is a symptom of her not allowing herself to follow Rose’s immersion in trans or the invitation issued by Rose’s title, ‘Who do you think you are?’ – ‘the question anyone hostile to transsexual people should surely be asking themselves’. This analysis of non-trans is perhaps one reason for Rose’s ‘15,000 word’ essay, whose length seems to ‘fox’ Campbell. The crossing of all kinds of divides in the essay – of gender, of sex; of gender/sex; trans/cis; home/strange; complete/mutilated; private/public; trans/feminist; and ultimately of the very structures of the psyche – is a dynamic deserving the term ‘trans’ if ever there was one.

While I am also with Rose on her clearly stated position of generally not supporting no-platforming, I too would refuse to join on a public platform anyone, whoever they are (so insistently secure in their own identity), who denies my right to exist. You can’t have a conversation with someone who thinks you aren’t there.

Jay Prosser University of Leeds

Vol. 38 No. 14 · 14 July 2016

Clearly, Rachael Padman and Jay Prosser exist ( Letters, 16 June ). It is to be hoped that they enjoy well-being, peace and love in their lives. They are part of a movement that has been remarkably successful at the level of law and popular culture. They can surely feel affirmed by Jacqueline Rose’s essay – an exemplar of her talent for inquiry and ambivalence ( LRB , 5 May ). It isn’t their existence that troubles many feminists. Women are all too familiar with the slur that we are not really there, that we are not real women because of our shape, style, sexual orientation or politics. But neither sexism nor feminist challenges to certainties about inherent femininities or masculinities ever stopped women in general – including transwomen – from existing. The philosopher Jane Clare Jones touches a nerve in Trouble and Strife . For ‘many non-trans women’, she writes, ‘the idea that the essence of being a woman resides in “feeling like" a woman is not so much wrong as incomprehensible’. To insist that challenging gender is transphobic, she continues, ‘functions to close down discourse by rendering feminism’s long-held analysis of gender unsayable’.

Debate is not a death sentence and feeling offended is not the same as feeling or being exterminated. There is a human right to life, but there is no right to be not offended. As Gary Younge has put it, ‘being offended is not a political position.’ My challenge is not to trans people, but to the authoritarian turn exemplified by no-platforming, supported by the National Union of Students, and by proscribing feminist challenges to gender – the crux of its emancipatory project.

Padman and Prosser: do you really want to be part of a movement that aims to shut women up – including transwomen – and to make gender critique an offence? You work in universities, the locus of no-platforming, which is bleeding into other arenas. Do you want to participate in reducing students’ participation in democratic debate?

Rachael Padman argues that ‘social animals’ possess the ‘ability to recognise others as “my sort" or “not my sort"’. This is an important part of how we understand ourselves. Nonetheless, if it is impossible for Padman to accept ‘anyone else, who can’t see inside my head, telling me that I am mistaken about who I am’, the same is true for others, including those of us who experience gender not as a form of biologically deterministic coding, but as a location within a social hierarchy. If some of us identify ‘my sort’ as ‘those who have undergone a particular form of embodied experience and social conditioning’ it is not for Padman to tell us we are not who we say we are.

That gender functions as a social hierarchy rooted in the perception of reproductive difference is a demonstrable fact. It is demonstrated by 47,000 female deaths annually due to unsafe abortion; by 830 deaths daily due to preventable complications of pregnancy; by the abortion of female foetuses and abandonment of baby girls leading to distorted sex ratios in countries across the globe. Both Padman and Jay Prosser conflate a failure to acknowledge a person’s self-perception as an objective political reality with denying a person’s ‘right to exist’. In the case of millions of women and girls, however, the denial of the right to exist is literal. If words matter for some, they matter for everyone, and it has to be recognised that the needs of some are greater than those of others.

Victoria Dutchman-Smith Cheltenham

Vol. 38 No. 15 · 28 July 2016

Beatrix Campbell and Victoria Dutchman-Smith both criticise points I did not in fact make ( Letters, 14 July ). I didn’t even attempt to describe my own experience of gender, although I did suggest a possible explanation for why my experience demonstrably differs from that of others with the same XY karyotype. I would not presume to know how anyone else experiences their identity. That unknowability was implicit in my letter, as Dutchman-Smith acknowledges.

Campbell asks whether I want to be part of a movement that aims to shut women up. I am puzzled by this. As far as I know, I am not part of any movement. But it’s possible she and I differ in our understanding of Jacqueline Rose’s ‘share a platform’. As Campbell notes, the ‘platform’ is a public space, over which I have no control other than in exercising judgment as to where and when to participate. When I choose not to share, I choose not to speak; not to exclude.

Campbell also asks whether I want to participate in reducing students’ participation in democratic debate. My full statement opposing the no-platforming of Germaine Greer at the Cambridge Union can be found in an article published online by Varsity on 22 January 2015. As a member of the University Council, I was very pleased last month to approve our strong restatement of support of free speech. The facts speak for themselves.

It is unclear who is being addressed in Beatrix Campbell’s second letter on trans. Rachael Padman, Jay Prosser and myself have all stated that we do not condone no-platforming as general policy. Nor is it clear why she sees this as the most important issue to pursue in her engagement with trans. That trans people might feel defensive about what is said about them surely needs to be understood in context. As Susan Stryker has pointed out, things are said about trans people which, if said about many other minorities, would see print only in the most hate-riddled, white supremacist, Christian fascist rags.

Both Campbell and Victoria Dutchman-Smith seem intent on ignoring or downplaying the violence to which trans people are subjected. Campbell’s portrayal of feminism as the victim of trans in her first letter – ‘the bullying that flays feminism’ – is telling ( Letters, 2 June ). By requiring us to take sides, it repeats the violence it ostensibly laments. Competitions over victimhood are never politically helpful. In the words of Edward Said, in a very different context: ‘There is suffering and injustice enough for everyone.’

Arguments about whether trans women and men reinforce or disrupt conventional gender categories, or whether trans women experience themselves the same way as non-trans feminists, are futile. In the complex realm of human sexual life, no one should be deciding these matters for anyone else. You can – we should – liberalise the law on behalf of oppressed groups, but you cannot legislate the unconscious.

Jacqueline Rose Birkbeck, University of London

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Tips for the College Interview Question "Who Has Most Influenced You?"

Ph.D., English, University of Pennsylvania
M.A., English, University of Pennsylvania
B.S., Materials Science & Engineering and Literature, MIT

Interview questions about influential people can come in many variations: Who is your hero? Who deserves the most credit for your success? Who is your role model? In short, the question is asking you to discuss someone you admire.

Interview Tips: Who Has Most Influenced you?

You don't have to be creative with this question. Just be honest and thoughtful. Family members, teachers, and friends are all fine answers.
Be careful with polarizing political figures since it can a challenge for your interviewer to be entirely unbiased.
Don't try to impress your interviewer with historical figures like Abraham Lincoln or Mother Theresa.
Focus on a human, not a pet.

Good Interview Answers About an Influential Person

So, who should you name as a hero or influential person? Speak from the heart here. There is no right answer other than a sincere answer. Also, realize that unlike a "hero," an influential person isn't always a positive example. You may have grown and changed as a result of someone whose mistakes or inappropriate behavior taught you what not to do with your life. Answers to the question can draw from lots of different options:

A Family Member— For most of us, parents and siblings have a huge impact on our lives. Answering with a family member is fairly predictable but also perfectly appropriate. Just make sure you can articulate the specific ways in which the family member influenced you.
A Teacher— Is there a particular teacher who got you excited about learning, a subject area, or continuing your education? Since you're interviewing in an effort to continue your education, focusing on an educator can be an excellent choice.
A Friend— For good or bad, your close friends have a huge influence on your decisions and behavior. Do you have a close friend who has helped you succeed in high school? Or, depending on how the question is worded, do you have a friend who influenced you in a negative way?
A Coach— Coaches often teach us leadership, responsibility and teamwork. As long as your response doesn't reveal that you value athletics more than academics, a coach can be a great choice. Try to articulate how your coach has helped you succeed in areas other than sports.
A Community Member— Do you have a mentor in the church or some other community organization? Community members often teach us to think outside of the narrow sphere of our families.

Bad Interview Answers

This question about an influential person, like many common interview questions , is not difficult, but you do want to think about it for a few minutes before your interview. A few answers can fall flat, so think twice before giving responses such as these:

Myself— In truth, you probably are the person who is most responsible for your success. You may, in fact, be self-reliant with no real heroes. However, if you answer this question with yourself you will sound self-absorbed and selfish. Colleges want to admit students who help each other out and work as a community. They don't want solitary egotists.
Gandhi or Abe Lincoln— If you have great respect for an admirable historical figure, that's wonderful. Such answers, however, can come across sounding like you're trying to make a good impression, not like you're answering the question sincerely. In your day-to-day life of classes, extracurricular activities , tests, and relationships, is Abe Lincoln really influencing your behavior? If he is, fine. If not, rethink your answer and work to speak from the heart.
Donald Trump or Barack Obama— Here, as with the example above, is the president (or Senator, Governor, etc.) really influencing and guiding you in your day-to-day life? This question has an added danger. Your interviewer will do his or her best to be unbiased, but interviewers are human. If you name a Democrat and your interviewer is a staunch Republican, your response could create a subconscious strike against you in the interviewer's mind. Both Trump and Obama can be polarizing figures, so be aware of the inherent risks before choosing a prominent political figure for your response.
God— At a college with a religious affiliation, God could be a fine answer. At many colleges, however, the answer is a crap shoot. The admissions officer may admire your faith. Some interviewers, however, will be skeptical of students who attribute their successes to prayer and divine guidance rather than commitment and hard work. That said, you certainly don't need to shy away from your faith in your interview, and a priest or rabbi can be an excellent choice for this interview question.
My Dog— Fido may be a great pet who has taught you responsibility and unconditional love, but keep your answer in the world of humans. Colleges are made up of humans.

A Final Word

Whatever your answer, bring the influential person to life for your interviewer. Avoid vague generalities. As with an admissions essay on an influential person , you'll want to provide colorful, entertaining, and specific examples of how the person has influenced you. Also, keep in mind that a strong answer provides a window into your life and personality, not just the admirable qualities of the influential person. The ultimate goal of the interviewer is to get to know you better, not the person you admire.

Finally, make sure you dress appropriately and avoid common interview mistakes . College interviews are generally congenial exchanges of information, so try to relax and have a good time chatting with the college representative.

Why Are You Interested in Our College?
What Can You Contribute to Our University?
What Did You Do This Summer?
Tell Me About Yourself
What Would You Do Differently? Interview Question Tips
How to Answer "What Can I Tell You About Our College?"
High School Grades Don't Always Accurately Reflect Your Ability
What Do You Do Best?
What Do You Do for Fun?
Recommend a Good Book to Me
What Do You Want to Major In?
What Do You See Yourself Doing 10 Years From Now?
College Interview Tips: "Tell Me About a Challenge You Overcame"
Common Application Essay Option 6: Losing Track of Time
What Should a Man Wear to a College Interview?
What Colleges Look for in an Applicant

Who Do You Think You Are?

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Preparing for your ancestor hunt

Investigate the clues you've probably got tucked away in your attic, closets, and basement and call your older relatives (think of them as witnesses to your family history), and you'll avoid getting stumped or derailed early on.

Where Do You Want to Go? A useful starting point is to ask yourself what you hope to accomplish. Do you want to learn more about the origins of your surname or everything you can about your family tree? Is your goal to identify all eight of your great-grandparents, all sixteen great-great-grandparents, or as many ancestors as possible?

Many are simply curious about the entertaining stories that might be found dangling from the branches of their family tree. ... Finding an ancestor who missed the Titanic because of illness or helped build the Erie Canal will suddenly produce an insatiable thirst for knowledge about topics that seemed beyond tedious in your high school history textbooks. How long will all this take? That's up to you. There's always another ancestor to research if you feel like it, and many enjoy the thrill of the hunt so much that they never want it to end.

Go on a Treasure Hunt Now's a good time to rediscover your own home. Most of us are clueless about all the treasures and tidbits lurking in our closets, drawers, basements, and attics. Many a genealogist has been chagrined to finally determine an elusive ancestor's name after a year of research, only to find this same information in a suitcase of papers tucked into the corner of their own cellar. One of the best possible hauls? A stash of old letters--bonus points if they still have their envelopes with precious names and addresses. Other items to keep your eyes open for include:

Birth, marriage, and death certificates

Newspaper clippings, including obituaries and wedding and anniversary announcements

Naturalization and citizenship papers, including passports and visas

Religious records (e.g., baptismal, Bar Mitzvah, etc.)

Family Bible

Diaries and journals

Photo albums (especially photos with the name of the photography studio imprinted or details written on back

Heirlooms such as engraved items, samplers, and quilts

Living Libraries Once you're done looking through Mom's attic, you might want to sit down and talk with her. For that matter, if you have any relatives even twenty minutes older than you, stop reading right now and pick up the phone! What these living libraries can tell you off the top of their heads can shave months off your research time.

You'll want to give some thought to your questions in advance. There are plenty of resources to help you develop a list of likely topics, and the more specific you can be, the better; Older relatives often take the information that lives in their brains for granted and have a tendency to assume you already know what they know. Out of consideration, they'll try to avoid "boring" you, so you can easily wind up missing all sorts of genealogical gems.

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The TeacherVision editorial team is comprised of teachers, experts, and content professionals dedicated to bringing you the most accurate and relevant information in the teaching space.

The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

What this handout is about

This handout will help you understand and write for the appropriate audience when you write an academic essay.

Audience matters

When you’re in the process of writing a paper, it’s easy to forget that you are actually writing to someone. Whether you’ve thought about it consciously or not, you always write to an audience: sometimes your audience is a very generalized group of readers, sometimes you know the individuals who compose the audience, and sometimes you write for yourself. Keeping your audience in mind while you write can help you make good decisions about what material to include, how to organize your ideas, and how best to support your argument.

To illustrate the impact of audience, imagine you’re writing a letter to your grandmother to tell her about your first month of college. What details and stories might you include? What might you leave out? Now imagine that you’re writing on the same topic but your audience is your best friend. Unless you have an extremely cool grandma to whom you’re very close, it’s likely that your two letters would look quite different in terms of content, structure, and even tone.

Isn’t my instructor my audience?

Yes, your instructor or TA is probably the actual audience for your paper. Your instructors read and grade your essays, and you want to keep their needs and perspectives in mind when you write. However, when you write an essay with only your instructor in mind, you might not say as much as you should or say it as clearly as you should, because you assume that the person grading it knows more than you do and will fill in the gaps. This leaves it up to the instructor to decide what you are really saying, and they might decide differently than you expect. For example, they might decide that those gaps show that you don’t know and understand the material. Remember that time when you said to yourself, “I don’t have to explain communism; my instructor knows more about that than I do” and got back a paper that said something like “Shows no understanding of communism”? That’s an example of what can go awry when you think of your instructor as your only audience.

Thinking about your audience differently can improve your writing, especially in terms of how clearly you express your argument. The clearer your points are, the more likely you are to have a strong essay. Your instructor will say, “They really understands communism—they’re able to explain it simply and clearly!” By treating your instructor as an intelligent but uninformed audience, you end up addressing her more effectively.

How do I identify my audience and what they want from me?

Before you even begin the process of writing, take some time to consider who your audience is and what they want from you. Use the following questions to help you identify your audience and what you can do to address their wants and needs:

Who is your audience?
Might you have more than one audience? If so, how many audiences do you have? List them.
Does your assignment itself give any clues about your audience?
What does your audience need? What do they want? What do they value?
What is most important to them?
What are they least likely to care about?
What kind of organization would best help your audience understand and appreciate your argument?
What do you have to say (or what are you doing in your research) that might surprise your audience?
What do you want your audience to think, learn, or assume about you? What impression do you want your writing or your research to convey?

How much should I explain?

This is the hard part. As we said earlier, you want to show your instructor that you know the material. But different assignments call for varying degrees of information. Different fields also have different expectations. For more about what each field tends to expect from an essay, see the Writing Center handouts on writing in specific fields of study. The best place to start figuring out how much you should say about each part of your paper is in a careful reading of the assignment. We give you some tips for reading assignments and figuring them out in our handout on how to read an assignment . The assignment may specify an audience for your paper; sometimes the instructor will ask you to imagine that you are writing to your congressperson, for a professional journal, to a group of specialists in a particular field, or for a group of your peers. If the assignment doesn’t specify an audience, you may find it most useful to imagine your classmates reading the paper, rather than your instructor.

Now, knowing your imaginary audience, what other clues can you get from the assignment? If the assignment asks you to summarize something that you have read, then your reader wants you to include more examples from the text than if the assignment asks you to interpret the passage. Most assignments in college focus on argument rather than the repetition of learned information, so your reader probably doesn’t want a lengthy, detailed, point-by-point summary of your reading (book reports in some classes and argument reconstructions in philosophy classes are big exceptions to this rule). If your assignment asks you to interpret or analyze the text (or an event or idea), then you want to make sure that your explanation of the material is focused and not so detailed that you end up spending more time on examples than on your analysis. If you are not sure about the difference between explaining something and analyzing it, see our handouts on reading the assignment and argument .

Once you have a draft, try your level of explanation out on a friend, a classmate, or a Writing Center coach. Get the person to read your rough draft, and then ask them to talk to you about what they did and didn’t understand. (Now is not the time to talk about proofreading stuff, so make sure they ignore those issues for the time being). You will likely get one of the following responses or a combination of them:

If your listener/reader has tons of questions about what you are saying, then you probably need to explain more. Let’s say you are writing a paper on piranhas, and your reader says, “What’s a piranha? Why do I need to know about them? How would I identify one?” Those are vital questions that you clearly need to answer in your paper. You need more detail and elaboration.
If your reader seems confused, you probably need to explain more clearly. So if they say, “Are there piranhas in the lakes around here?” you may not need to give more examples, but rather focus on making sure your examples and points are clear.
If your reader looks bored and can repeat back to you more details than they need to know to get your point, you probably explained too much. Excessive detail can also be confusing, because it can bog the reader down and keep them from focusing on your main points. You want your reader to say, “So it seems like your paper is saying that piranhas are misunderstood creatures that are essential to South American ecosystems,” not, “Uh…piranhas are important?” or, “Well, I know you said piranhas don’t usually attack people, and they’re usually around 10 inches long, and some people keep them in aquariums as pets, and dolphins are one of their predators, and…a bunch of other stuff, I guess?”

Sometimes it’s not the amount of explanation that matters, but the word choice and tone you adopt. Your word choice and tone need to match your audience’s expectations. For example, imagine you are researching piranhas; you find an article in National Geographic and another one in an academic journal for scientists. How would you expect the two articles to sound? National Geographic is written for a popular audience; you might expect it to have sentences like “The piranha generally lives in shallow rivers and streams in South America.” The scientific journal, on the other hand, might use much more technical language, because it’s written for an audience of specialists. A sentence like “Serrasalmus piraya lives in fresh and brackish intercoastal and proto-arboreal sub-tropical regions between the 45th and 38th parallels” might not be out of place in the journal.

Generally, you want your reader to know enough material to understand the points you are making. It’s like the old forest/trees metaphor. If you give the reader nothing but trees, they won’t see the forest (your thesis, the reason for your paper). If you give them a big forest and no trees, they won’t know how you got to the forest (they might say, “Your point is fine, but you haven’t proven it to me”). You want the reader to say, “Nice forest, and those trees really help me to see it.” Our handout on paragraph development can help you find a good balance of examples and explanation.

Reading your own drafts

Writers tend to read over their own papers pretty quickly, with the knowledge of what they are trying to argue already in their minds. Reading in this way can cause you to skip over gaps in your written argument because the gap-filler is in your head. A problem occurs when your reader falls into these gaps. Your reader wants you to make the necessary connections from one thought or sentence to the next. When you don’t, the reader can become confused or frustrated. Think about when you read something and you struggle to find the most important points or what the writer is trying to say. Isn’t that annoying? Doesn’t it make you want to quit reading and surf the web or call a friend?

Putting yourself in the reader’s position

Instead of reading your draft as if you wrote it and know what you meant, try reading it as if you have no previous knowledge of the material. Have you explained enough? Are the connections clear? This can be hard to do at first. Consider using one of the following strategies:

Take a break from your work—go work out, take a nap, take a day off. This is why the Writing Center and your instructors encourage you to start writing more than a day before the paper is due. If you write the paper the night before it’s due, you make it almost impossible to read the paper with a fresh eye.
Try outlining after writing—after you have a draft, look at each paragraph separately. Write down the main point for each paragraph on a separate sheet of paper, in the order you have put them. Then look at your “outline”—does it reflect what you meant to say, in a logical order? Are some paragraphs hard to reduce to one point? Why? This technique will help you find places where you may have confused your reader by straying from your original plan for the paper.
Read the paper aloud—we do this all the time at the Writing Center, and once you get used to it, you’ll see that it helps you slow down and really consider how your reader experiences your text. It will also help you catch a lot of sentence-level errors, such as misspellings and missing words, which can make it difficult for your reader to focus on your argument.

These techniques can help you read your paper in the same way your reader will and make revisions that help your reader understand your argument. Then, when your instructor finally reads your finished draft, they won’t have to fill in any gaps. The more work you do, the less work your audience will have to do—and the more likely it is that your instructor will follow and understand your argument.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Literary Analysis of the Short Story

Reading who do you think you are as a short story cycle.

Like much of Munro’s work, Who Do You Think You Are? is grounded in the local: her stories often depict Canadian settings, particularly rural Ontario settings that are similar to Wingham, Ontario, where Munro grew up. Who Do You Think You Are? was first published in 1978, and is an example of the kind of short story cycle Gerald Lynch identifies in “The One and the Many.” It consists of ten stories that follow Rose, the cycle’s protagonist, as she grows up in Hanratty and West Hanratty, leaves her small town to attend university, negotiates romantic relationships with men, establishes a career as an actor, and returns home. Unlike a novel, which might depict a protagonist’s life continuously, Who Do You Think You Are? can be categorized as a short story cycle because each story explores a discrete episode or “snapshot” of Rose’s life and functions as a complete story on its own. In fact, before being published together, many of the stories in Who Do You Think You Are? were published individually.

King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1884 (1833-1898). Public Domain, via Wikimedia.

The title story, “Who Do You Think You Are?” appears as the final story of the collection—what Lynch refers to as the “ envoi ,” or concluding statement, of a short story cycle. Lynch argues that, as envoi stories often do, this story offers an answer to the protagonist’s “essential question of selfhood and identity” that the collection’s title asks (“No Honey” 73). By the end of the cycle, Rose’s answer to the question “Who Do You Think You Are?” is found not through romantic love—the solution she turns to often throughout the cycle—but rather through a return to her hometown: she achieves “a stable sense of identity” that is grounded in the place where she grew up (“No Honey” 76).

Halfway through the cycle, in “The Beggar Maid,” Rose’s questions about her identity—including her identity as a woman, as a creative person, and as someone from a poor, rural background—intersect. In this story, Rose’s fiancé, Patrick, implies that their relationship is similar to the one depicted in Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones’ painting “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid.” The painting is based on a legend in which a king falls in love with a poor woman at first sight, marries her, and saves her from a life of poverty. The fact that Rose ends her marriage with Patrick and returns to her poor, rural hometown at the end of the cycle suggests that she does not share Patrick’s interpretation of their relationship, and does not want a relationship that is based on these kinds of socio-economic, and other power, discrepancies.

How Material Conditions of Publication Shape Interpretations

Who Do You Think You Are? offers a good case study for the many ways that outside conditions of publication can affect a literary work’s reception by agents, editors, publishers, and readers. When Who Do You Think You Are? was first published in Canada, its cover featured a reproduction of Canadian painter Ken Danby’s work “ The Sunbather .” When the book was published in the US, however, Danby’s painting was replaced with the painting of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid and the book was published under the title The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose . Lynch suggests that Munro’s American publishers decided to use this alternative title because they found the phrase “Who Do You Think You Are?”—which highlights the question of identity central to the cycle—”too mystifyingly Canadian” ( The One 14). This title change and shift in cover art are just two examples of the ways that material contexts can shape a book’s content and appearance, and inform the ways we as readers make meaning out of a book. In this case, the significant changes resulted from the need to appeal to an American audience.

Reflection Questions

Alice munro and genre.

Literary scholars tend to categorize Alice Munro’s previous collection of connected stories, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), as a novel, and Who Do You Think You Are? as a short story cycle. What elements differentiate these two texts that might account for such categorizations? And how do these definitions influence our interpretations of, or expectations for, the texts?
The German term Bildungsroman describes a coming-of-age novel, while the term Künstlerroman describes the coming-of-age of a writer or artist. After reviewing two or three definitions for either of these terms from different sources, discuss whether or not you think Who Do You Think You Are? possesses the characteristics of either a Bildungsroman or Künstlerroman . How do these characteristics fit with what you’ve learned about the elements of the short story and short story cycle? You might consider how the formal aspects of the short story cycle either enable or weaken our ability to read the book as a Bildungsroman or as a Künstlerroman.

Alice Munro and the Material Aspects of Literary Production

Consider the two paintings used for the different editions of the book: “The Sunbather” for the Canadian edition and “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid” for the American edition. What insights or expectations about the work are produced by each painting? What different readings do the different cover images produce?

Works Cited

Lynch, Gerald. “ No Honey, I’m Home: Place Over Love in Alice Munro’s Short Story Cycle, Who Do You Think You Are? ” Canadian Literature 160 (1999): 73-98. Print.
—. The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. Print
Munro, Alice. The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose . New York: Knopf, 1979. Print.
—. Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Macmillan, 1978. Print.

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5 reasons i never buy early access games, here's why i own both a console and gaming pc, quick links.

A Distraction-Free Gaming Experience
Comfortable Couch Gaming With a Big Screen
Consoles Don’t Need Too Many Upgrades or Tweaks
More Play, Less Troubleshooting
Access to Top-Tier Exclusive Titles
Seamless Multiplayer and Social Integration

Key Takeaways

Gaming consoles offer a hassle-free gaming experience with access to several popular exclusive titles.
Console gaming is ideal for a comfortable couch experience and big-screen immersion.
Gaming consoles provide seamless gameplay without the need for frequent upgrades or troubleshooting, saving both time and money.

In the age-old debate between console and PC gaming, my choice is clear: console reigns supreme. While both platforms offer unique experiences, my preference leans firmly towards consoles for these reasons...

1 A Distraction-Free Gaming Experience

One of the most compelling reasons I prefer gaming on my console over a PC is the distraction-free experience it offers. When I sit down to play a game on my PS5, I know that I'm entering a space designed specifically for gaming—nothing more, nothing less.

This level of focus is difficult to achieve on a PC, where a myriad of background processes, apps, and notifications constantly compete for my attention. In contrast, a console's environment is curated to avoid such interruptions. The only notifications I receive are directly tied to gaming—friend invites, achievement unlocks, or in-game alerts—each of which enhances the experience rather than distracts me.

Moreover, when I want to purchase a digital game or update it, I don't have to navigate through various game management platforms like Steam or the Epic Games Store. Everything is centralized on the console, making the process much simpler and more streamlined.

2 Comfortable Couch Gaming With a Big Screen

a person using the ps5 console while sitting on a couch

Another reason I like console gaming over PC gaming is the ability to enjoy my favorite titles from the comfort of my couch. Since I spend most of my day working at a desk, the last thing I want when I game is to remain hunched over a keyboard and mouse at another desk in front of a monitor.

Console gaming offers a more relaxed experience, allowing me to kick back, unwind, and play from a comfortable seated or reclined position. Also, the couch-friendly nature of consoles enhances social gaming. I often enjoy gaming sessions with my wife and friends and my PS5 provides a superior multiplayer experience for these gatherings.

Playing on a big-screen TV is another major advantage, as it provides visuals that fill my entire field of vision. This setup creates an experience that immerses me in a way that a smaller PC monitor simply can't match.

3 Consoles Don’t Need Too Many Upgrades or Tweaks

Unlike PC gaming, which often requires regular upgrades and tweaks to keep up with the latest games, consoles offer a more straightforward experience. When I buy a console, I know it's designed to handle all the games made for it, without the need for additional hardware or extensive configuration.

With my PS5, I don't have to worry about whether the graphics card is powerful enough to run the latest release or if the drivers are up-to-date. Everything is optimized to work out of the box, providing a seamless gaming experience.

Additionally, console generations typically last several years, allowing me to enjoy all the latest titles without worrying about my gaming setup becoming obsolete. This longevity is a significant advantage for gamers like me who don't want to constantly spend money on upgrading hardware.

4 More Play, Less Troubleshooting

the playstation 5 console and ps5 controller on a table

Since console hardware is standardized, it tends to offer a more consistent gaming experience, free from the constant adjustments and technical issues often associated with PC gaming . As a result, I don't have to deal with frequent crashes due to conflicting software or spend hours searching online forums to figure out why a game isn't running correctly.

I can simply power up my PS5, pick up the controller, and start playing. This reliability is a huge convenience, as it lets me spend more time playing and less time tinkering. The time I save on these tasks allows me to spend more time immersed in the games I love.

While PC gaming can be highly rewarding for some, it often demands a greater level of technical knowledge and a dedication to system maintenance. From dealing with interference by background apps and processes to adjusting in-game settings for optimal performance, there's much more that can go wrong.

5 Access to Top-Tier Exclusive Titles

gran turismo 7 on a screen with a ps5 controller held in front

The availability of top-tier exclusive titles is another factor that keeps me invested in console gaming. While many PC games eventually make their way to consoles, the reverse is much less common. This makes owning a console essential for someone like me who doesn't want to miss out on some of the most anticipated and celebrated games.

Take, for example, Gran Turismo 7, a flagship title for racing enthusiasts that is only available on PlayStation. The same goes for even classic games like Red Dead Redemption, which has only recently been announced for PC after 14 years of being a console exclusive. Looking ahead, GTA 6 is another high-profile title expected to be a console exclusive at launch.

Being a console gamer means having access to a selection of must-play games that aren't available elsewhere. While owning both a PC and a console offers the best of both worlds, if I had to choose between them, the allure of exclusive titles makes consoles the more compelling option.

6 Seamless Multiplayer and Social Integration

Consoles are designed with social gaming in mind. Platforms like the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live offer a range of built-in features that facilitate social interaction. From easy-to-manage friend lists and messaging systems to party chat functionalities, these features are seamlessly integrated into the console's operating system. While playing on a console, I can start a game, quickly invite friends from my list, and jump into a session together with minimal fuss.

This contrasts with the often fragmented experience on PCs, where different games and platforms use varied systems for friend management and social interaction. While PC gamers have access to various services like Steam , Discord, and others, managing these can be cumbersome and fragmented.

So, these are some of the reasons I favor the streamlined gaming experience provided by consoles and steer clear of the complexities often associated with PC gaming. While preferences can vary among gamers, the ease of use and reliability make consoles the ideal choice for my gaming needs.

Gaming Consoles
PlayStation 5

IMAGES

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Creative Writing: Write On--WHO Do You Think You Are? by CK Teaching Aids
Dunne, M. (2011). Who do you think you are… and who do you think you
Identity: Who Do You Think You Are?
Who Do You Think You Are?
Who do you think you are?! ~ Relatively Curious

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The title story, "Who Do You Think You Are?" appears as the final story of the collection—what Lynch refers to as the "envoi," or concluding statement, of a short story cycle.Lynch argues that, as envoi stories often do, this story offers an answer to the protagonist's "essential question of selfhood and identity" that the collection's title asks ("No Honey" 73).
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Since console hardware is standardized, it tends to offer a more consistent gaming experience, free from the constant adjustments and technical issues often associated with PC gaming.As a result, I don't have to deal with frequent crashes due to conflicting software or spend hours searching online forums to figure out why a game isn't running correctly.

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