Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Life on the inside; coming out – Ken’s story

2011; Health and Medical Publishing Group; Volume: 101; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.7196/samj.4736

2078-5135

Chris Bateman,

Gender Roles and Identity Studies

Ever since he can remember (at least from around 3 - 5 years old), Ken Loman (pseudonym) (born a girl) identified himself as a boy. His deepest wish was that ‘maybe if I wake up tomorrow my body will be right … that there’s been a big mistake’. Instead he ended up always trying to hide it. ‘I didn’t feel I could tell anybody because they’d think I’m bad or that there was something wrong with me. The clothes I liked to wear and the things I liked to play with were always of the opposite sex.’ Growing up in Utrecht until the age of 7 and then moving with his family to Phalaborwa didn’t exactly provide the optimal social context in which to adjust to gender incongruence, let alone living with a mother and two older sisters who disapproved of his behaviour. A middle-child with sisters 3 and 4 years older ‘who didn’t like me very much – we had lots of fights’ and two brothers, 8 and 15 years younger, Ken found his dad to be ‘sort of OK, especially when I was young’.