Download a PDF of the story as it appeared in print
in The Nevada Sagebrush.

By Jessica Fryman

The term transsexual woman fits 33-year-old student Corinna Cohn, but her identity goes deeper than what her body shows.

“I want to be considered as somebody who is an economist, somebody who is libertarian and conservative in principle. Somebody who is smart. Somebody who’s friendly,” Cohn, who plans to graduate later this month, said. “I’m kind of nerdy … I really dig politics. I think that makes a lot more of who my identity is than what is or isn’t between my legs.”

Since her transition from male to female 14 years ago, Cohn said she has no regrets but still faces the painful reality that she’ll never fully be a woman.

“Looking in the mirror, looking at how like deficient my body is in ways and how ugly I am sometimes. It’s sad sometimes,” she said. “I have to find happiness in life that doesn’t revolve around me having to be 100 percent genetically female and people are so much more than what their bodies are so that is OK.”

She said she’s “a million times happier now” than she was before because she never felt comfortable in her own skin — it was as if something didn’t match.

“I couldn’t relate to boys and I couldn’t relate to girls,” she said. “I never really overanalyzed it. It was just always something that was off or weird.”

For Cohn and many other transsexual people, transitioning is not a choice, experts said.

“Many people who are transgender have also said to me, ‘why would I choose to go through this? Why would I choose to endure prejudice, discrimination, possible family rejection, social stigma, violence, etcetera, just to be who I am,’” said Naomi Suskind, who wrote her UNR graduate thesis on gender identity. “The important point here is that it is about identity for people, not sexuality or choice.”

At about 12 years old, television talk shows featuring transsexual people caught Cohn’s attention because she could relate.

“I felt like I was pushed out of my body,” she said. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

After further researching transsexuality, Cohn said she knew it was something she had to do.

In an attempt to avoid possible discrimination and rejection, Cohn said she hid her gender identity and considerations of having a sex change from others for many years.

Once, while sitting around the table for hot chocolate, her dad served her the drink in Cohn’s sister’s Strawberry Shortcake mug. She practically threw a tantrum for being assigned a particularly feminine mug instead of her usual cup.

“There was no way I could allow anyone to suspect that this might actually be OK for me to do,” she laughed, recalling the situation. “I tried to hide it as much as I could.”

Cohn went out of her way to suppress her thoughts of being born in the wrong body until she was a junior in high school when she told a few friends.

“It’s like jumping in a cold pond,” she said. “Once you get in the water, everything is OK.”

Although her classmates were confused, no one was mean. In fact, Cohn admits she isolated herself more than others excluded her.

“I think I was trying to come to terms with what I was going to do,” the Reno High School graduate said. “There’s a difference between the people who know you and love you accepting and having to go out and step out your front door and face the rest of society.”

Because many people hide nonstandard gender identifications, there is no way to track how many transgender students attend UNR or other colleges, said John Burnett, director of the Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Office. There have been no cases filed about discrimination or harassment of transgender individuals on campus, he said.

“With the emergence of acceptance of gay rights, more people are accepting of trans people,” Burnett said. “Today, I just think people are more accepting. (Transgender people) should be respected just like other people. They’re somebody’s child, daughter or son. They’re members of the community.”

Despite rising acceptance, transgender people have been victims of discrimination in the work place, hate crimes and violence in other parts of the country, said Burnett, who has worked with transgender people in other states.

Although Cohn’s friends and the general public were accepting, Cohn faced her mother’s wrath at the idea of having a sex change and was eventually asked to leave home at the age of 17.

Still in search for her identity, Cohn moved to Indiana to complete the process of becoming a woman.

Cohn started taking hormone replacements at 18 years old and had gender reassignment surgery a year later.

Near the start of that process, Cohn used the men’s restroom at Keystone Cue and Cushion because she didn’t want to anger anyone. On her way out of the stall, a man took “a double take and then triple take and then a quadruple take.” Then he told her she was in wrong bathroom.

It was then that Cohn realized she was consistently passing as a female and needed to send more clear gender cues for the comfort of everyone.

The entire transition process from psychological therapy to surgery took Cohn a little more than one year to complete.

“I was in a bit of a hurry,” she said about the process, which also included changing her name and the gender on her driver’s license.

Cohn, who completed her transition 10 years before attending college, said she thinks transitioning while attending school would be particularly difficult.

“You don’t have the confidence you don’t have the support network you don’t have the people that can help you,” she said.

At UNR, the counseling center, the Center for Student Cultural Diversity and the Queer Student Union are supportive of transgender people, but more awareness of those services should be made, Suskind, who works at the diversity center and wrote her thesis on gender identity, said.

“It means not making assumptions and not tolerating hate speech or violence from others on campus,” she said. “It also means not making people feel excluded, different, or outcast, but enveloping everyone into the fold of the university social fabric.  This is much easier said than done, but honestly, it happens one person, one conversation, one class at a time.”

Transsexual students sometimes face obstacles aside from social acceptance of gender identity and expression, said Rabbi Levi Alter, president of FTM (Female-to-Male) International.

He said campuses should protect gender identity and expression in their nondiscrimination policies, as close to 300 campuses already have. UNR hasn’t included those phrases in policies, but Burnett said students are protected from discrimination regardless of the written policy. He said adding gender expression to the policy is on the to-do list.

Handicap or family facilities for locker rooms and restrooms could be used as uni-sex services for the comfort of everyone, Alter said.

When the Nevada State Legislature heard bills about adding gender identity and expression to discrimination policies, the bill failed because the assembly committee on commerce and labor didn’t pass it in time.

While heard in the senate, the bill addressed discrimination in public places of accommodation, like restrooms. Many transgender people shared their stories about being harassed for using the restroom of the gender they identified without having the proper gender specified on their ID.

Opposition on the bill said allowing people who identified as female while still being biologically female would make the general public feel uncomfortable in locker rooms.

Cohn said she is glad the bill failed because the comfort of many shouldn’t be sacrificed for the few. She said owners of fitness centers shouldn’t have to pay to revamp their floor plans to include uni-sex areas either.

Aside from public places of accommodation, Alter, who is also transgender, said schools should be more cooperative in changing documents to match the desired gender and name of trans students.

Alter, who has two college-aged children and works with many college female-to-male transsexuals, said schools should create policies that allow students to affiliate with the correct gender as how they identify and express even if they haven’t yet had an opportunity to have a legal change because that can take a long time.

“Students need to just be aware of that and advocate for themselves and help themselves,” he said.

Cohn brought more awareness about the transgender community to UNR in a column she wrote in The Nevada Sagebrush in November 2008. Shortly after, she shared her personal story with the world on her Facebook page. Cohn said she disclosed her past because she felt as if she needed to be the same person to everyone.

Although Cohn said she’s found her “true self” and is as close to the gender she thinks she should have been born as, she said she’s still “somewhere stuck in the middle.”

“I’ve never had any regrets, but there’s still a sense of displacement,” she said. “I was born male. I was reared, socialized as a male. And there’s going to be that component of me that’s always there. And it’s always going to be my experiences, my life experiences, that divide me from other people in a way.”

This story was originally published in The Nevada Sagebrush
on May 5, 2009.
Original story on The Nevada Sagebrush website.