Winding Down

The Transgender Day of Visibility is coming up.

The number of trainings that I do is dropping, professors retire or move on to other jobs but I still have a couple of presentations that I do and I have two this week.

The first is this morning, actually it should be ending just about the time this blog post is published and the other is Wednesday night.

I used to do Stonewall Speakers but I dropped out of the program, I didn’t like their format of Q&A. It has it purpose but I don’t think that it covers important topics that professionals need.

What I do is to take over and teach the class for the day, usually the professors sits in the back of the class taking notes on the students. That is the type that I just did.

The other class is a Q&A class but it is different than the speakers classes because this is a graduate class and they ask pertinent questions unlike the questions asked in the high school and undergraduate classes, questions like “How did you pick your name?”

When I was in grad school I developed a series of presentations to “teach” gender dysphoria to professionals.

I start off with deconstructing gender, then talk about the commonalities and differences between sexual orientation and gender dysphoria, everyone says I know about gays therefore I know about trans people… wrong!

I talk about the coming out process, the Standard of Care for children and I talk about senior trans people their fears of going into a long term care facilities. Finally I talk about intersectionality and the discrimination that we face everyday.

Q&A sessions have their place in general education courses but when I come to teaching future therapist and medical staff you need more in-depth training.

I have taken my “road show” to social work conferences, prison staff, judicial staff, hospital staff, and other professionals including colleges.

One of the professors used to send me the students comments…

When it was announced that we would have a guest speaker for our next class I originally thought nothing of it. I’ve had a good experience with guest speakers in the TCPCG [Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates] program so far and I was excited to hear what the guest lecturer would say. When I walked into class on Wednesday I remember seeing the back of a tall woman standing in front of our class, thinking she was our guest, and proceeded to sit down and open up my computer. About 5 minutes later the guest came forward and she said that we were going to start the lecture. Once the guest lecturer starting talking and I began to look at her a bit more in detail, I realized something very interesting - our guest speaker was a transexual [sic].

Now being an educated grad student I was fully aware of was exactly a transsexual was and that the transexual [sic] community is growing every day, however, as far as I know, this was my first time meeting one. The weird thing however was that it didn’t seem like I was meeting a transexual [sic], but rather just another women - a guest lecturer. Once you get past the deep voice and the 6 foot figure, there was nothing weird or different here, just another woman. When the lecture started I was expecting to learn all about life as a transsexual, and while she did touch on this a little, she was focused more on the big picture. The picture being that there are thousands of transexuals [sic] and people dreaming of being a different gender all around us, and often times they either go unnoticed or are looked as weirdly or differently. I think the message she was trying to tell us is that although on the outside we may look a little strange, it is really who they are on the inside that matters.

+++++++++++++++++++

Diana’s presentation on the science behind the term “transgender” as well as the transgender community was thought provoking, informative, and interesting. I have many family members who are also members of the LGBT community, so topics such as gender identity have always captivated my attention. I have watched numerous documentaries on individuals who identity as transgender and the science behind this phenomenon. I have also had the opportunity to expand my knowledge of transgender biology, psychology, and culture through my interactions with a myriad of students at Hall High School… I was also elated to discover that doctors can halt puberty in a transgender person’s body at a young age and help them experience an easier physical transition to their true gender. Such developments make me hopeful for the future. Ideally, treatments such as these will become more widely available to any transgender person who wishes to transition. However, I think the most important takeaway from Diana’s presentation was that people are just people, even if they were born in the wrong body and feel the need to make a change. Everyone should display empathy and compassion for their fellow human beings.

And the comment that says we are making a difference came from the professor of one of the classes,

I did an activity yesterday in my UConn class. It was a simulation in which the 20 students were required to look at 17 resumes and hire seven teachers unanimously. Each brief resume has a loaded statement, such as one person belong to a military militia group, another was a professed segregationist, another had 10 kids, etc. One of the potential people to hire was a transgender teacher FTM. in the past when I did this activity it was usually early on in the course and rarely, if ever do the students choose to hire this person. Often the reason is that there are other candidates better suited. In yesterday's class all four groups unanimously hired the transgender teacher. This was a first. my role is to challenge them on why they hired or did not hire each candidate. The students were uniformly saying that this person is well-qualified.

You are making a difference.

Yes we are!

Q&A has a place in teaching but when I comes to teaching professional a more structured approach is needed to teach cultural competency and the understanding of the needs and wants of the community.