Canadian Lawyer 4Students

BY VICTORIA PTASHNICK the law into his own Taking A first-year Osgoode student is taking his own experiences with gender identity and hoping to make changes to the laws for others going through the same trials. said it was bath time and because I was a girl and he was a boy, we would be bathed separately, B en Vandorpe fi rst knew some- thing was wrong when he, then a seven-year-old girl, was forced to have a separate bath from his male friend. "We had been playing and his mother ber crying non-stop and for the fi rst time, being really aware of my gender, many for Vandorpe, now 22 and iden- tifying as a queer transgender man. He says his personal journey is what in- spired him to apply to Osgoode Hall Law School. He was accepted and be- gins in September. "Now I'll have a shot at changing legislation that makes life hard for trans people. I couldn't be doing this now, though, without having gone through everything in my past," he says. Vandorpe was born a girl in Halifax It was the fi rst painful realization of " says Vandorpe. "I just remem- " he says. hands "When I was about 3, I insisted on being called Nick, which is the male derivative of what my then-female name was." Vandorpe says his family embraced accept in society," he says. him as a tomboy and let him cut his hair short, abandon dresses, and watched as he then, a little girl, attempted to shave his face with his dad's razor. At his pri- vate elementary school, he happily chose the uniform of a tie and dress pants over a shirt and skirt. "It all seemed like it was fi ne and then came puberty. It was the worst. My childhood ended, at 12 as the worst day of his life. "Right then and there, there was this thing that happened, this undeniable red stain, and it proved what I had always wanted to re- ject, that I was a woman," he says. In junior high school, Vandorpe says Vandorpe describes his fi rst period " he says. to a "typical" family. He has a younger brother, a mother who stayed home to take care of her kids, and a father who's a doctor. Shortly aſt er he was born, his par- ents divorced and he lived with his moth- er. From the get-go, he said the yearning to be perceived as male was always there. some relief in thinking he might simply like women and that' so diff erent. He says suddenly he felt like he was handed a diagnosis, and best of all, he knew there was a lesbian community that could support him. "Th at was short- lived though, because I realized that it was a lot more complicated than that. At about 14, I knew that I liked men, but I simply felt like the wrong gender. I wanted to be perceived as a man," he says. Back then, the words transgender and Temporarily, Vandorpe says he felt s why he always felt he tried to be feminine and fi t in — grow- ing long hair, wearing feminine clothing, and toying with makeup. At about the same time, he started questioning his sex- ual orientation, which he stresses is dif- ferent than gender orientation. "Because I changed from a female to a male, a lot of people associate that with lesbianism. Th at I must sexually prefer women, so I changed my gender to make that easier to transsexual weren't even in his vocabu- lary. He started going to a lesbian, gay, bi- sexual, transgender organization in Hali- fax as he began high school, and quickly realized what he had known deep inside all along. "I wanted to be a man. And aſt er realizing that, I felt overwhelmed, because I knew there would be so many challenges ahead — this realization was actually the easy part," he says with a smile. He volunteered with the group and started binding his C-cup breasts until it appeared he was fl at-chested, which he describes as painful but necessary. He changed his MSN Messenger name to a male one, and when that went alright C ANADIAN Lawyer 4STUDENTS FALL 2012 25 *

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