Transgender activist Kate Bornstein delivered a poetry reading that focused on a personal struggle for sexual identity at the Graduate School of Education last night.

The talk, entitled "Y2Kate--Gender Virus 2000," focused on the speaker's past experiences in the transition from birth as a boy to a self-proclaimed gender change to a female identity, and later to rejection of both "labels" to assert an identity that defies pronouns.

Bornstein commenced the reading with a piece that was originally written for The New York Times, called "Who Are You?"

Although it was edited to print as "Her Son/Daughter," she delivered the piece in its original form, including such details as her former work in phone sex and a less auspicious career as a "reluctant evangelist" for the Church of Scientology.

The first reading dealt with the funeral of her mother, where other attendees looked askance at Bornstein, asking, "Mildred had a daughter?"

Although her new self-defined gender role as a woman met suspicion in her native Orthodox Jewish community, Bornstein reconciled with her ailing mother, who had acknowledged her son-turned-daughter as a "lesbian" in a very closely-knit circle of friends.

But the speaker said she does not accept societal labels.

Bornstein, a former Yale student and "hippie boy" of the 1960s, said she rejects traditional conceptions of gender and other conventions, equating them to the rigidity of a "leather-bound dictionary."