April 13, 2016 The Signal page 21
Features
Speaker highlights trans issues and identities
David Colby / Photo Assistant
Students listen as Ford speaks about their experience with gender. By Melissa Reed Correspondent
Students sat eagerly waiting for transgender writer, speaker and media personality Tyler Ford to grace the Library Auditorium stage on Thursday, April 7. Ford’s visit to the College was part of PRISM’s annual Trans Awareness Week, which is designed to educate the College’s student body on trans identities and issues. “We saw the opportunity to bring Tyler and jumped on it,” sophomore chemistry major and Education Advocacy Chair for PRISM Max Nazario said. “Tyler is a major figure in today’s socialmedia-centered world and they’re working hard to further the conversation on gender to include talk of nonbinary and
gender-nonconforming identities. We saw bringing them to campus as a great way to bring that conversation to the student body at TCNJ.” Ford, who is best known for starring on “The Glee Project” and collaborating with Miley Cyrus on a clothing line, identifies as an agender person and prefers to be identified using the pronouns they, their and they’re, rather than be restricted by traditional gender pronouns. “It has been incredibly important for me in contextualizing myself and my life,” Ford said. “As a kid, I knew that gender and my experience as gender was out of my grasp. I couldn’t define it. I couldn’t talk about it and no one else was talking about it.” Ford identifies as a queer, non-binary,
trans and asexual person. As a child, they grew up questioning their identity and had a hard time trying to figure out who they were. “I spent a lot of my childhood really, really confused,” Ford said. “No one was talking about gender, but everyone seemed to be able to get by and defined it for themselves.” At the age of 12, Ford opened up to their mom about their sexual identity and their desire to wear girls’ clothes. Astonished by their mom’s approval, they began shopping at places like Abercrombie & Fitch and Sephora. “I started making up my face and wearing really short miny skirts and hot pink bras,” Ford said. “I tried to make myself into something that I thought would make me feel like a women. If I can do X,Y and Z, which are characteristics of a women, then I would feel like a woman and be a woman.” Although they experienced a transition throughout middle school that made them feel comfortable, they experienced an extreme amount of discomfort in high school. No longer able to identify with womanhood, Ford looked for other terms to identify with and questioned both their gender and sexuality. “I decided that I had to live the questions in order to answer them,” Ford said. “There was no other way to find answers. This wasn’t one of the things I could Google because there were no results that came up when I searched for anything about this.” It wasn’t until Ford came across the term agender on Tumblr that they decided that
this was the word they had been searching for. Since then, Ford has come to take pride in their identity as an agender, asexual and non-binary person. “(I’ve) been out as agender for two years now,” Ford said. “Being non-binary in this world is difficult. I’m always trying to find space for myself or make space for myself, and space that does not exist. I am constantly having to explain my rights to anything.” The event opened the floor for a conversation on campus surrounding contemporary gender roles and issues. Ford encouraged audience members to leave the lecture with an open mind and to be respectful toward any and everyone in the LGBTQ+ community. “(It) takes a lot of unlearning,” Ford said. “The key is just to be really conscious of how you are referring to people and how you are perceiving people. For instance, I use gender neutral pronouns to refer to people because I would want someone to do the same for me.” According to Nazario, Trans Awareness Week on the College’s campus is an important mechanism for informing students about the different identities within and outside of the LGBTQ+ spectrum. “We are trying to build understanding and we are trying to make people aware that trans people do exist,” Nazario said. “We are trying to get people to understand who trans people are, what they’re feelings really mean, what makes them trans as opposed to just putting this label on them that does not necessarily have a meaning for people and we’re trying to contextualize the word.”
Geocaching opportunities available on campus By Colleen Murphy Editor-in-Chief
Picture yourself on a treasure hunt. OK, now imagine the “treasure” you’re looking for is not treasure at all, just a knick knack with a piece of paper inside of it to log the date and your name. Oh, and most of the time, you don’t keep what you find. You leave it there for the next person to discover. Sound fun? I promise, it is. It really is. Geocaching is the perfect activity for all the adventurous nerds out there (like me). Using a GPS, participants can navigate their way to the specific coordinates where someone has hidden a cache. A cache is a container with a piece of paper inside on which people can record their name and the date they found the cache. The containers come in all shapes and sizes. The first one I ever found was a simple, small metal capsule. The second one I found was an R2-D2 toy. Geocaching has picked up in popularity since it was first created in 2000. To start your search for caches, you must register for free on the Website, geocaching.com. When the site launched 16 years ago, there were 75 known caches in the world. Today, there are more than 1.4 million caches hidden
Kim Iannaraone / Photo Editor
One of the two active caches can be found near the gazebo at Lake Ceva. around the world, according to the geocaching Website, and two of those caches can be found right here on the College’s campus. I first geocached in Ocean City, Md., this summer. I went along the boardwalk, looking behind dumpsters and in front of shops to find the hidden items. It was so much fun and I wondered if there would be any caches for me to find when I got back to school. When I logged onto my Geocache account to see if anybody had ever hidden a cache on campus, I was thrilled to see that in 2011, someone had placed three of them at the College (one has since been taken off the
site). So, the other day, my roommate and I embarked on a geocaching adventure to find what the person had hidden. I first told the site my location. It provided me a list of all the caches in the Ewing area. In fact, there are 22 caches less than two miles from campus. But because I was doing this on-foot and there was a thunderstorm coming, I decided to stick with the two on campus. I plugged the coordinates of the first cache the site provided me into my phone and our hunt started. Each cache geocaching.com suggests to you comes with a description of what the item looks
like and hints on how to find it. Other participants leave comments on when they found the item and their experiences of the search. Some of those commenters also provide photos of either the cache itself or the surrounding area, and you can use those as help to find the cache. Because I looked at the pictures, the first one was pretty easy to find. Still, it was really exciting to discover this little, tubular novelty that someone has planted as his or her cache. I won’t say where it was, in case you want to go find it yourself, but it was tucked away in a cranny, so you’ll need good eyes to find it. (Note:
The site says this cache is “disabled,” but that’s just because the log sheet inside the cache is full — it’s still there to find.) I wasn’t able to find the second one. My GPS led me to the white gazebo on Lake Ceva. The hints on the Website told me that the cache there is a trinket with a whale on it. My roommate and I looked all over, risking falling into the lake and getting stung by a bee to locate the cache. With the thunderstorm getting closer, we disappointingly had to give up on our search. But I plan to return to find it, so if any of you find it in the meantime, please give me some more hints. Geocaching is certainly a lot of fun (just ask any of the 4 million people worldwide who do it), and we are lucky enough to have two on our campus for you to start off with. So get out there and join in the ranks of “Jeopardy” champion Ken Jennings, writer Perez Hilton and actors Hugh Jackman, Melissa Joan Hart, Ryan Phillippe and Ruby Rose — all of whom have declared their love for geocaching, according to the geocaching Website. Or, if you don’t want to look like a weirdo looking for something in random places, then hide some more for me so that I can take on that role for you.