This past fall has been a busy season launching the Positive Space Education Program on campuses in Peterborough, Lindsay, and Haliburton. To date, 128 students and employees have participated in the introductory session, Shifting OUTlook, and we're getting ready to launch Level Two: Being an LGBTQ Ally on January 22nd (6 to 8 pm at the Brealey campus, room 631). RSVP at debharri@flemingc.on.ca.
The first thing we are learning is that we need a vocabulary to even start the conversation. What does gender identity have to do with orientation? What is homonegativity and how does it play out in the halls or in the classroom? And of course what does the "alphabet soup" of LGBTQ (I,TS, A, etc.) mean? Our PARN facilitators are great at unpacking all this language so we are more confident to express ourselves on the topic.
We are hearing from students that for some, labels just make the problem worse and what they want is to have more fluid identities. Just naming themselves "queer" is enough. For others, even that feels like a box.
For many people though, the boxes are still quite simply "this is what it is to be male" or "this is what it is to be female" and any expanded awareness beyond traditional gender roles helps stretch us and challenge our stereotypes.
So as we look at all the new vocabulary that has emerged over the last 20 years to describe our diverse experiences around sex and gender, here is one term that leaps up off the pages at me, as I remember an experience I had in my 20's when I was working in a women's shelter in Toronto. A memorable learning event in my life when my lack of language really let me down.
I was asked to welcome and do the intake for a new client entering that afternoon in the single women's building. My supervisor filled me in on her background. She was single, in her mid-20's, and had been evicted from her apartment. This client's sister was staying in the family house with her children. And she was a "hermaphrodite" waiting for sex reassignment surgery. (Now we no longer use this term, long replaced by the term "intersex", as we have discussed in our training session.)
I prepared to meet "Cassie" and give her my best Omemee farm girl welcome, as we knew some of the clients (and even staff) might have a problem accepting her. She arrived, dressed casually in jeans and a hoodie, long blond hair with no particular style, and a five o'clock shadow appearing on a broad face without make-up. Here's how the welcome went:
"Hi there, welcome to the residence" (shaking her hand warmly) "The family resemblance is unmistakable, you must be Cassie, Rachel's brother ... I mean sister ... I mean ...???" and that was where my preparation left me, flat on my red face with no where to crawl away to. All the country charm and good intentions in the world couldn't undo the fact that I did not know how to have this conversation with Cassie. I was responding to her based on my cultural programming, that anyone with facial hair was male, despite knowing Cassie was in transition. I was acting unconsciously.
Luckily for me she was generous and laughed me through it, but I felt a kind of shame that made me hunger to know more so I would never do this again. Of course, I did make plenty of other mistakes, on a range of diversity issues - this is lifelong learning!
Join us for Level Two: Being an LGBTQ Ally, as we practice what we've learned together, through case studies and small group discussions with student leaders from the Fleming Ass'n of Queer Students.
If you are an employee, register through the PD calendar.
If you are a student, send me an email at debharri@flemingc.on.ca
