During swim lessons at the YMCA Stonestown, the younger students often ask their instructor, “Are you a boy or a girl?” Mookey Goh always answers back, “I am Mookey.”

Goh, 22, a junior in the BECA program at SF State, identifies as a gender queer, or a transgender person that does not fit into the category of male or female. Goh prefers to be called a “ze" rather than a he or a she. This is a gender neutral term according to http://www.transpride.org. Goh has not gone through surgical or hormonal treatment.

Goh, who has short hair and two little rings attached to the right eyelid, plans to go through the process to become a trans-male in the future, when it is proved safe for the body.

Transgender people deal with many stereotypes and transphobias. Since 1970, 207 transgender people have been killed, according to the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition. In San Francisco, there have been eight transgender murders.

Goh has experienced embarrassment on and off campus because of the way ze looks. A few years ago, ze was escorted out of the women’s bathroom in front of students on the first floor of the Humanities building when an older lady called campus security.

“She felt uncomfortable with my presence, and said I looked like a sexual predator,” said Goh. “The security [guard] was giving me an attitude that he didn’t want to deal with this. I was the one who had been harassed. He said it was my fault that I went to the bathroom.”

The security guard told Goh to use the bathroom on the higher floor, even though Goh’s classroom was on the first floor.

“Even though all the experiences are bad, it just kind of makes me stronger because you just have to build up another level of toughness,” said Goh. “If I show to the people that I have to conform to them, that means I lose myself, my self-confidence and my own person. If I show I am going to be who I am still, I would show them that I can stretch off and express off their ignorance and still be myself and take their ignorance.”

Goh was born and raised as a female on the East Coast. Goh had confused feelings about identity and had suicidal tendencies. Goh’s family could not understand the identity issues.

The San Francisco gay and lesbian community, along with the ethnic studies and radio production departments at SF State attracted Goh after high school.
“There are positive things, even though the stuff happened,” said Goh. "Sometimes it gets to us at some extent, but it’s our life, and this is who we are.”

Jessi Gan, a 24-year-old transgender, who graduated from SF State last May with a women’s studies degree, said she felt isolation at school because of the lack of support system for transgender people on campus.

“If you are left out of the curriculum, it deepens the isolation. I felt that definitely,” said Gan, who plans to go to graduate school to study the history of transgender.

Gan was born male and hated pretending to feel comfortable in her body. When she was in high school, she felt like she could not fit in, so she dropped out. Gan started to take hormonal treatment when she was 19-years-old and began to feel happier.

“A lot of life quality depends on how good you look. If I was a hulking man, six feet, two-inches tall; and had big bones, hands and feet, my life quality would go down. But I look pretty good. That’s unfortunate, but that’s what it is,” said Gan.

Gan, who works as a web developer in Mountain View, is concerned about the difficulties transgenders have to deal with because of how they look. She thinks she is lucky to have the job she has now because transgender people usually are not favored for office jobs.

“If you go to the Tenderloin or Polk Street, you will see [many] trans people who are sex workers working on the street,” said Gan, who gives transgender workshops at SF State and UC Santa Cruz for United Genders of the Universe, a Berkeley-based organization that supports transgender. “Some of them are drug addicts. It’s very common. You face a lot of discrimination everyday. It’s hard to get a job. It’s hard to get an apartment sometimes.”

Amy Sueyoshi, an assistant professor in the human sexuality studies department at SF State, often has transgender students in her class. She tries to create a safe environment and a comfortable space for transgender students in her class, but it does not always succeed because students often use wrong pronouns for transgender students. Whenever it happens, she always corrects the students.

“I think that it is more of a conscientious kind of issue and [a] consciousness type of thing. I was more vigilant about it in class,” said Sueyoshi, who teaches Introduction to Human Sexuality and Coloring Queer. “But, those are issues that transgender students have to deal with on a daily basis.”

Courtney Hosmon, 21, a women’s studies major and human sexuality studies minor, has been a friend of Goh since they met at the Queer Alliance, a campus-based club that supports gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders.

“Society as a whole has been conditioned with this gender binary. That’s what happens. You get escorted from the bathroom. You get cussed out. We are living in a binary gender system,” said Hosmon, the event coordinator for the alliance. “I hope that we can open up our community a little bit to transgender and gender-queer people at any aspect, not just in the bathroom, but everything.”

Justine Meunier Fiebelkorn, 23, a junior dietetics major, was born and raised in San Francisco, so having transgender students along with many different types of people is just a normal part of her everyday life.

“Every person has a right to be who they want to be,” said Fiebelkorn.