Charles Horton Cooley's The Looking Glass Self

Although Bo and I have very district pathways into My mother and grandma performed their gender identities of being a woman by cleaning, cooking, and taking car of the children. This began my developing definition of what it means to be a girl. However, I did not consciously accept this identity until I was in elementary school. One day after school I went into my mother’s closet and put on a pair of her heels. This instance could be referred to as an identity contingency. According to Claude steel, identify contingencies are “ the things that you have to deal with in a situation because you have a given societal identity”. In this revelation, my given social identity was my gender as a girl and I realized this when I put on my mother heels

In this statement Cooley is explaining how we come to identity ourselves, solely based on social interactions where we first, imagine how others perceive us. The we imagine the other’s judgment of what they see in us. And finally we act in way that pleases the other person In relation to what we think, that they think of us. In this case, Bo was not who he thought he was which was one of the boys, he became who he thought his dad wanted him to be which was a boy. However, at the time he did not have the language to express his identity as a trans-man. As a result, he reluctantly conceded into what society expected of him but also acted out as a child, in aggressive, and troublesome

Bo’s identity into a trans- man is not socially accepted and a as result has been much more difficult to accept. In order for him to come to terms with his identity he had to be certain that this is what he wanted to become because being a trans-man is expensive. Once Bo came to accept this gender identity he began to perform his identity. To perform his trans-man identity, he but on masculine attire, began a rigorous workout routine, and became to absorbs the normative masculine characteristics of what tit means to be a man. He had to embody what society says is socially acceptable to act like a man like, hiding his feelings, act in a hyper-sexual way. According to Bo, in his definition of a trans-man the only difference is trans-man was born female and is thought to be a girl so he was to start all over and learn how it is to be a man. This changed his frame of the situation because now out side others will observe him as a cis-male. Instead of a butch female, and now he is granted the privilege that men are granted in society because that is what people classify him