Author

RoxAnne Moore

Date of Award

12-1-2010

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Abstract

OUT OF THE BLUE: A MOTHER'S MEMOIR OF OUR FAMILY'S TRANSGENDER EXPERIENCE is a memoir about what it has been like to discover that the baby girl I gave birth to almost forty years ago, now identifies as a female to male transgender person. He began his transformation both physically and legally over five years ago. Though it is a story about our entire family's transformation, it focuses mainly on what this has been like for me as a mother and the relationship I have with my first-born child.

Noted psychologist, Arlene Ishtar Lev states in Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working with Gender-Variant People and Their Families "Transgendered people have too often been viewed as people without families, or, sadly, as though their families are disposable" (Lev, 271). One of the purposes of this memoir is an effort to dispel that view. Transgender people do have families and the transformation process is a "family" process. Our family stories need to be heard. This is one of them.

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