My name is Oliver O’Dell. I am a 24 year old student at TRU. I am working on my Bachelor of Arts, my major is History and my minor is English.
I have not always been called Oliver, in fact, for nearly 22 years of my life I had never been called Oliver (except in reference to the poor orphan boy of Victorian London, Oliver Twist).
An important part of my identity and my life experience is that I am transgender. I was born female and my name was Cassandra — I preferred to go by Cassie because I was embarrassed by a name with nine letters. It’s no wonder then that I picked another name with six letters.
The first story I will share with you is about the person that I was before I became Oliver, it’s about Cassie.
She was never a great student, her attendance had always been a ‘problem’, and she rarely did her homework but she loved to learn and she was good at it. The subject she excelled in most was English and the one she held the most disdain for was social studies (also known as there Canadian high school version of history). Perhaps this was because she always based her interest in topics on the passion of who taught her; it was always easy to tell who was interested in what they taught and who had lost their fervour.
This passion which Cassie held in such high esteem was exuded by her high school English teacher and drove her toward an ardour for both the subject and the language. This avidity of her high school English teacher inspired Cassie’s desire to learn and grow as a young person. Despite a passion for learning, Cassie did not expect to continue her education after high school. She knew it was expensive and that she would never make enough money to prevent needing student loans. Although talented, this young girl held many doubts about herself and struggled deeply with untreated mental health issues. She knew there was still so much left to figure out about herself and she was growing more unsure of whether or not school would help her figure that out.
One day, nearing the end of her high school education, Cassie went to her English teacher, who had become like a mentor to her, and confessed that she did not believe she would be able to follow through with going to university. She did not believe in herself or in her ability to succeed at a higher level of education. There were a number of barriers which led her to believe she would never take that next step in her education despite having the dream of someday becoming a teacher. Cassie stood and expressed to her teacher the fear and doubt she held about her own future potential and the response she received changed the outcome of her life forever. When she finished her speech, she let the words “I don’t think I will ever go back to school again after I graduate” hang in the air for hardly a moment before her teacher said with complete confidence and without hesitation, “Yes, you will.” Cassie’s teacher explained that it was okay to take a year or two off of school but that she needed to return because she held untapped potential that could very well be unearthed if only she gave herself the chance to work for it.
This young girl graduated from high school in 2011 and in 2012 she decided to listen to the words of encouragement that her high school English teacher imparted on her and enrolled in a local university.
Flash forward to September 2016.
It was the first semester of university that I had actually passed in university as a man. I had been on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for nearly a year by then. My voice had deepened and my facial features were becoming more masculinized, I finally felt comfortable introducing myself as Oliver. My peers would finally see me, hear me, and experience me as who I always felt but could never quite convey until then.
During this semester, I retook a creative writing course that I had failed a few years prior. There are a number of reasons why I failed that class the first time around but an inability to write creatively was not one of them. Though I had been encouraged to pursue writing in my adult-life by various instructors in high-school, I did not live up to that potential in my second semester of university when I flunked out of a first year creative writing class. Four years later, and I finally prove to myself that I did not fail that class because I was not capable, I failed it because I did not try. What I learned through that initial failure was that my passion had shifted from English to History.
I retook that writing class and I passed it with a really good mark that my mother was proud of, and for the record I was too. But what that taught me was not just that I could overcome failures. Even more important than that, what the combination of each of these stories and experiences have taught me is that everything is fluid and subject to change. Perhaps for some people the changes are less dramatic than a transition of gender from female to male. For some the shift is as small or significant as a passion for learning that transfers from one subject to another.