Signing up for a beginner’s Italian class is usually a simple enough task, but for Sebastian, a second-year student at Smith College in the US, it proved complicated. Smith has always been a school for women, which is what Sebastian was when he began a bachelor’s degree there in 2001. But since then, he has become a man. At least that is how she thinks of herself. Himself. That is how his friends think of him, too, but it isn’t necessarily how a new Italian teacher would see him. And since Italian is such a gender-specific language, Sebastian needed to let the teacher know before the semester began that there would be a new studente in class, not a studentessa. Feeling apprehensive, he asked an Italian-speaking friend, who was also “transgender”, to go with him to the teacher’s office. “Can you help us,” asked the friend. “This semester my friend needs to speak Italian like a boy.”
”Ma certo,” came the reply. No problem. And that was it. If accommodating Smith’s growing number of transgender students was always that easy, life would be a lot more straightforward, both for the students and the college itself. But it rarely is.
