ABSTRACT
The author's story of gender has been one of migration, change, evolution, and inconsistency and now, only now, have the author learned that this is actually a constant. Young in life, she would always felt claustrophobic by the closed nature of binary gender boxes. Shaun was his name—the first transgender person the author had met, the first person she had met who challenged gender construction at all, really. It was her sophomore year of college, and she did not know then how thankful she would be that he came into her life. For some time, The author tried to step out of a gendered world and was expectedly met with challenges. She claimed no gender identity but was referred to as woman. She claimed a preference of being pronounless but was referred to as she/her.
