Consignment Form Date Student Grade 11: Fill & Download for Free

I was born at the tail end of the Baby Boom (early-mid 1960s). First of all, my parents basically contacted every hospital within a 30-mile radius until they found that one which would allow my father to be present for my birth. It was all but unheard of back then for men to be present for the birth of their children. They were consigned to a waiting area outside the delivery room.It is true that they had been trying specifically for a girl, because my mother had spent her childhood caring for four younger brothers and had had enough of boys. Nevertheless, my parents proceeded to raise me in a gender-free household. I am 100% confident that they would have raised me exactly the same way and had exactly the same expectations of me if I had been born with different plumbing.When I was young, my mother was a stay-at-home mom - not entirely voluntarily, as she had had trouble finding a job after finishing graduate school, which was part of the reason they decided to have a baby at that particular moment in time. That said, my father believed that it was his obligation as a husband and father to spend the same amount of time as his wife taking care of the house and the baby. And he did in fact do this, taking over those responsibilities in the evenings and on weekends.That said, he did have a full-time job as a professor. And my mother certainly did not waste time beginning my education while he was at work. I had already been listening to classical music since before I was born (my mother being an opera fiend). She began teaching me to read at age 11 months, starting with my baby food jars. I was sitting quietly through an evening at the opera by age 3. I knew exactly how babies were made by age 5 - complete with proper medical terminology and pictures drawn on yellow legal paper.Unfortunately, they divorced when I was 4. Finances became very tight after a couple of years. Furthermore, my father had managed to remarry in the meantime, while my mother had not. She decided that given the financial situation and the fact that I would thereby have the opportunity to grow up in a two-parent household, it was better that I go live with my dad and my stepmother. Which I did halfway through first grade. This was a very unorthodox situation in those days, and my mother caught a lot of flack for making that decision, including slanderous accusations concerning her personal morality.My father would come down from work on his bicycle to pick me up after school, and I would come back and hang around in his office, talk to the students in his lab, his secretary, sometimes other professors. Around 5 PM, we would take our places beneath the window in his office and wait to hear the horn of my stepmother’s blue VW Bug arriving from her workplace outside the city - the signal to come downstairs for our ride home.They did everything together - cooking (mostly exotic foreign food - to this day such things as the Thanksgiving turkey, together with a delicious gravy, are my father’s bailiwick; his other signature dishes include Caesar salad, and cheese omelettes miraculously folded in thirds like crêpes), as well as cleaning… The only evidence of gender in our household was that my stepmother and I wore dresses (and in her case, even earrings and makeup) from time to time, and my father didn’t. I was not permitted to have baby dolls or read fairy tales. Only carefully-vetted materials that presented properly egalitarian sex roles, such as Madeline.We moved in the summer before third grade. At age 8, I took up the violin. A lot changed in our household after that, starting with the music we listened to. It took a quite drastic turn in the direction of classical (my father and stepmother having previously been sort of ‘academic hippie types’ who listened to Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and even had some Greek folk music that I used to dance to in the living room).They began accumulating a quite impressive collection of recordings, all carefully arranged by the composer’s birth date. As soon as finances permitted, they upgraded their stereo system. Over time, they became interested in theater and opera, taking vacations further afield than Canada…When I was 10, I stumbled across a vocabulary book intended for adults somewhere on a bookshelf in the living room, and proceeded to devour it. By the time I was done, I was speaking with a college graduate’s vocabulary, thereby making my own positive contribution to the tone of conversation at the dinner table.Thanks to having read this book in my youth, I basically never had to look anything up in the dictionary, for example, while reading material for homework at school. I also managed to get exempted from spelling the next year (sixth grade). That year, I had to write book reports. I chose such items as an 8th-grade science textbook I’d gotten at some flea market and a college music textbook.We didn’t get a TV until I was 11. Grandma bought herself a color TV and ‘bequeathed’ her big old black-and-white to us. I was only permitted to watch two hours weekly of carefully curated programs - as I recall, I was allowed to choose among such programs as Battlestar Galactica, Bionic Woman and Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (I was also allowed to read books from the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series).On the other hand, I was not permitted to watch network news on TV, even if required to do so at school. That did indeed happen once, and my parents responded by setting me an alternate assignment that met their standards and seemed as close as possible to what the teacher wanted. I was supposed to take notes on a news program, to be discussed during class the next day. So I took notes on an approved public radio program. Alas, it was not a close enough fit, and the teacher had to quietly abandon her lesson plan at five minutes’ notice…I never heard such things as ‘you can never win a fight with a boy, he’ll be too strong’. So when I was gearing up to go to junior prom, my stepmother decided to talk about ground rules one night in the kitchen as she was making dinner. It went more or less as follows:Mom: So… you are going to be in a group of people the entire evening, right?I: Mom, I’m a good girl, I don’t do such things!Mom: And what if he isn’t a good boy?I: If he isn’t a good boy, I’ll give him a spanking!Her only response to that was to raise her eyebrow and say, ‘OK…’ Now mind you, I did have the luxury of being 5′11″ and in very good shape (and then there was the question of what I had between my ears…). The fact remains, however: That. Was. It.I also never heard anything along the lines of ‘you can’t do this because you’re a girl’ or ‘you have to do that because you’re a girl’. Quite the contrary: I was taught that ‘everyone is doing it’ is never a good reason to do anything. I was not gender-conforming, and my parents were happy about that. That is one reason it took me as long as it did to figure out that I am transsexual.As I moved into my teenage years, things became very difficult at home. Perhaps the conflicts would have been even worse if I had not become a Christian at just shy of 16. My having done so made it at least more likely than it might otherwise have been that I would try for a peaceful solution first.But the fact remains: most people do not change their religious status at all over their lifetime, much less while still living at home with their parents. And my parents had raised me in an agnostic/atheist environment. So they were not particularly pleased when I chose a religion for myself, but they did not try to prevent me from practicing my religion.Even so, there were constant arguments (and Dad admitted many years later that more often than not, I was right). Sometimes the conflicts were truly horrific. Dad sums up that time as follows: ‘I guess that was the price I paid for raising you to be strong and independent.’ And indeed, once I went away to college, apparently my parents got in the habit of bragging to their friends along the lines of, ‘She’s so independent, we never have to worry about her!’PS Just in case: Back when I was growing up, none of us knew that I was not only gender non-conforming, but actually transsexual, but I have since begun living openly as a man.Another thing: my folks did not really discuss drugs with me in any detail. It wasn’t a taboo subject though. I was aware that my stepmother was teaching a mini-course on the subject during winter break at her university, and that that green book on the living room coffee table was the textbook for said course.In due time, I had a look at it, thereby gaining valuable information about the risks of substance use which helped me to avoid addiction, as it enabled me to be aware that due to such things as tendencies towards depression and social awkwardness that plagued me in my teenage years, I was in a high risk category for developing addictions.I remember being in Germany not too long after that. I was 16 - legally old enough to drink there. And one night, I was deciding whether to have a glass of wine with dinner. Taking cognizance of my condition of feeling down and socially awkward, I decided not to do it - and promised myself that from then on, I would only ever drink if I already felt happy and comfortable.And indeed: none of us knew it at the time, but years later, it would turn out that each of my biological parents had a close family member who suffered from alcoholism. In other words, I probably have a genetic predisposition to addiction, so it was an absolute godsend that I had this info and was able to make the decisions I did early in life.And yet another thing: no doubt it is no surprise, given my parents’ views on gender, that they were also very laid back about homosexuality, but I have recently read a book that made me aware of just how unconventional my parents’ views really were. Back when I was a teenager, it was not unknown for kids to be sent to mental hospitals for ‘treatment’ if they were gay or transgender.I meanwhile not only had no idea that this was the case, but was raised in an environment so open that while I was aware that there was such a thing as ‘coming out of the closet’, as far as my life was concerned, it was a total non-concept. If I tell someone that I am trans or gay (I am in fact both), it does not constitute coming out of the closet, because I was never in the closet to begin with. There was literally no closet for me to come out of.I recall recently visiting a restaurant whose owner I have known for some years, but whom I had not seen since before my transition. So there was a need to explain why I was now walking walking around in men’s clothing and, once I had explained that, why I am not in the market for a girlfriend.After finishing that discussion, I found myself asking, ‘Did I really just announce to the general public in the middle of a restaurant [in a conservative Catholic country, no less] that I am not only transsexual, but also gay?’ And indeed I had - as calmly as if I were talking about the weather.PPS It seems the question has changed a bit since I answered it. So, let me take the opportunity to tie up some loose ends. As I have mentioned before, my parents were in general very careful to model the lifestyle they wanted me to live.This also included speech. So, they never spoke baby talk to me. Only normal adult speech at all times. As I got older, I was discouraged from the colloquial grammatical errors and usages common among the youth of my time.My parents were also very careful to avoid using naughty words around me. Not that I was necessarily punished if I used them - except maybe if I used them as alternative forms of address to my parents during a heated argument or something :P - but there was very clear modeling of a different mode of speech that did not include them.However, the fact that we had heated arguments at all was something of a departure from this. They were in principle pacifists. Had I been assigned male at birth, I would have been perhaps even expected to declare myself a conscientious objector when the time came to deal with draft registration.But they were only human, so… they never did find an ideal way to model a mode of discussion that did not include any heated elements. Nor, for that matter, did I. And I definitely saw the disconnect between what they were saying and what they were actually doing. At any rate, this kind of conflict (at the dinner table, no less) meant that my childhood was much more difficult than it might otherwise have been, than it might have appeared to the outside observer.At a certain point, I was put in group therapy. That is a story in itself. In a nutshell, I had been in individual therapy for some years for reasons that were not explained to me. This fact was not shared with the authorities at my school. I gather my parents were afraid it might cause me to become the object of discrimination.Many years later, I realized that neither my parents nor my therapist knew exactly what was wrong with me. And they couldn’t. No one really knew what Asperger’s syndrome was back then. And I was not in need of sufficient assistance to be diagnosed with full-blown autism.At a certain point, it seemed that the therapy was not helping, and the therapist finally realized there was nothing more to be done. By that time, I had been trying to tell my parents this for over two years, but never mind. At any rate, the therapist recommended psychological testing, and on that basis, referred me for this group therapy. End of digression.So, I was rather shocked to discover that one of the boys there felt that his greatest problem was that he was… too religious. And here I had just recently chosen that religion for myself. And then one day, one of the girls asked, ‘What are you doing here? You don’t smoke, drink, do drugs or party. You’re not having sex, you’re not pregnant. You’re doing well in school. So what’s the deal?’I went home and told my parents I would not go to that group anymore, as I did not feel welcome after hearing something like that. That said, I didn’t really even know how to answer her question. The fact was that I was depressed. Evidently living a clean life and having the kind of opportunities I had is not enough to guarantee happiness…