Boys Town Internal Training Guide

In this excerpt, the reader meets two characters from The Misfits: Addie, a girl who is exceptionally tall and smart for a middle schooler and Joe, who is creative and feminine in a way that makes his peers nervous.

In this excerpt, Virginia Woolf declares that any talented woman born in the 16th, 17th, 18th or even 19th centuries would have been so hindered from sharing her gifts due to her sex--and if she somehow overcame this obstacle, her name would not have been tied to her work.

This short story—an important piece in early American feminist literature—sheds light on 19th century attitudes toward women with physical and mental illness. In this excerpt, the speaker details her bedroom, a place where her husband and doctors come to encourage her to health. Her ailment is vague; the emphasis is on what others—all men—think and say.

In this video, young people reflect on society's rules for what males and females can and cannot do.

In this personal narrative, Clare explores multiple facets of the self and questions why gender is still discussed as a binary. He acknowledges the tortured lives that many have lived as a result of their gender ambiguity and declares that all those who "gawk," "gape," and "stare" at those who are different never get it right.

Rosie Molinary describes how she felt as a Latina teenager in the United States, caught between disparate and unrealistic beauty standards.

“You said that you were in the wrong body, that you should be a man.”

“I was very strict because I was afraid kids would discover I was gay.”