NEWS
Two high-profile speakers highlighted a week of events for Pride Week, presented by the Alliance of Lesbian-Bi-Gay and Transgendered Students.Kate Bornstein, a nationally-renowned transgender author, activist and playwright, spoke to a crowd of about 100 in the Union Ballroom Tuesday night.Keith Boykin, author of “One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America,” spoke to nearly 100 people about race and sexuality Wednesday night in the Union.Saying that all members of the LBGT community are “transgressly gendered,” Bornstein said during her speech that people must work to define their sexual identities outside of gender roles set by American society.“The eyes of those who would make us men or women only do not have to be our eyes, their voices don’t have to be our voices and their politics do not need to set the standard for our politics,” she said.Bornstein’s presence at MSU was well received by Carrie Copeland, a co-director for the Alliance.Copeland said ever since reading Bornstein’s book “Gender Outlaw,” she felt university classes dealing with sex and gender were often one-sided.“It was very frustrating for me for the professor to refer to gender as only male or female when it was so much more than that,” the interdisciplinary studies in humanities senior said.
