PART ONE: COMMUTER STUDENT (seven chapters) We meet Derek, a gender nonconforming male, as he registers to take Intro to Women's Studies and some of the other students in the hallway. Within a few pages we learn that Derek commutes from a halfway house at a psychiatric institution, Creedmoor Hospital. A backstory flashback shows how he hitched to New York to pursue his dreams of being a gender activist, became homeless, and persevered to get into college. Derek engages in lively discussions with his classmates and professors and is off to a good start. Life in the halfway-house facility is pretty awful though. Along with his shelter colleages Cowboy and Mary, he joins homeless and psychiatric-rights activists to fight coercive policies and depersonalizing attitudes but ultimately decides to move into the dorms. PART TWO: RESIDENT STUDENT (seven chapters) Derek edits the student newspaper because no one else wants to and he wants to write an opinion column to create an activist reputation on campus. He makes friends with another new resident student and gets introduced to the student's two concurrent girlfriends, becoming emotionally involved with one of them, Jenna, with whom he finds a strong rapport. In the classroom, as Derek gets more immersed in his coursework, he finds himself choosing sides in a schism between different types of feminism. In the spring Jenna retreats, not being ready for a relationship, and Derek is heartbroken. His advisor encourages him to atttend graduate school and delve more deeply into the gender politics he wants to pursue. During the summer, with the dorms closed, he does an internship in Washington DC. PART THREE: GRADUATE STUDENT (five chapters) Still stunned by the breakup with Jenna, Derek streamlines his bachelor's degree by getting academic credits for a book he's written, and graduates a year early. Donna, a classmate, invites him to dinner and then home to her apartment and they begin a relationship. One of his women's studies professors helps him get into a sociology PhD program. The graduate school requires a research methods course designed to weed out the weakest students, but Derek does as well as any of the other first-year PhD sociology students. There's also a male professor, Dr. Aaronsen, who made his own mark as a male feminist, and Derek begins working with him. Derek begins writing theory papers and doing research projects and for awhile everything looks successful, but the research methods course is so poorly taught that no one is learning anything despite getting passing grades; Dr. Aaronsen doesn't agree with Derek's feminist perspective, and turns out to be intolerant of dissenting opinions. There is stress and discontent in Derek's new relationship with Donna, and with his housemates, three other grad students with whom he shares a house and splits the rent. And now that he's at the grad school level, his status as a male person opting to participate in producing feminist thought becomes politically problematic, something he's going to have to reconcile.