Yesterday

I was on a panel at a local law school about transgender youth and legal issues last night. We watched Laverne Cox’s latest film project, “The T Word” which was presented on MTV and afterward we had a Q&A session. On the panel was a trans man who is a research assistant at Yale, a lawyer from a big law firm that specializes in discrimination cases (for the employers) and the moderator was a professor from the law school who specializes in Mental Health Law, LGBT and Gender Issues and Family Law

After the movie we started off with a list of questions from the moderator,

1. What is your reaction to this documentary?
2. How does this documentary relate to the work that you do?
3. What do you see as the biggest issues, legal or otherwise, facing transgender youth?
4. What are the signs that progress is being made in regards to transgender rights?
5. How can everyone help increase awareness about issues affecting transgender individuals?
6. Is there anything else that you think is important to share with this group here today?

And the audience asked a lot of great questions two of them stood out, the first was about microagressions and the other one was about implicit and explicit discrimination. They created a lot of discussion both on the panel and in the audience and what I liked was one law student said that they had a classroom discussion on implicit and explicit discrimination. I used as an example of implicit discrimination what a person at the senior center photo club meeting said last summer while I was showing my photographs of my trip to Fire Island. A member uttered "I would never go there!" I don't think that he had any idea that what he was saying was a microagression, what he implied in saying that was that "Gay" people go there and I would never go anyplace where there are gay people.

Overall it was a very good session.

Here is the video that we watched…