Meeting highlights the T in LGBT+
Diversity club held a conference in the little theater with Principal, Mrs. Tiffany Hummel afterschool. Members spoke with her, conveying their main issues and concerns. During the meeting she said, “What we have to do is continue this progress. I want to say, I’m on your side. I want you guys to come up with solutions for the bathroom’s. You can make your message heard by raising awareness; Conveying why something matters is something you can do as well as coming up with ideas.” Courtesy of Diversity Club.
May I ask your pronouns? These are the simple words that you can ask to make a trans person feel comfortable. When acknowledging this issue, you realize this is one many issues for the trans community. Unfortunately, there are some who choose to discriminate against transgender people or devalue them as human beings.
To combat these issues the diversity club along with Mrs. Maria Malek set up a meeting with Mrs. Tiffany Hummel. They highlighted some of the issues transgender students face and came up with ideas for the future. They sat to discuss some things such as, bathroom policies, harassment from peers and expelling dead names from Skyward. To ’deadname’ is to call a transgender person by their birth name/ former names, while they have changed their name as a part of their gender transition.
Mrs. Tiffany Hummel said, “I was grateful for the opportunity to speak with several members of the Diversity Club. Communication is vital to understanding others’ points of view. We are blessed to have faculty members like Mrs. Malek who not only volunteer their time, but are true allies for all of our students. It is so important for us to appreciate our differences and to be kind to one another. That’s what makes our school a community.”
With gender identity comes gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria refers to feelings of psychological distress due to the feeling of their assigned gender not aligning with their gender identity. Those who experience dysphoria experience, significant distress with a strong desire to for primary/secondary sex characteristics of the other gender or to be the treated as that other gender.
“I think it’s impolite to assume someone’s gender because you don’t know how someone feels about their birth gender. They could be quite dysphoric and you’d never know. I do know what gender dysphoria is and people struggle and it’s not always easy to deal with. I say if you know a loved one or friend is struggling, help out as much as you can.” Sophomore Madison Aumen said.
Junior Felix Blasser shares his experiences and emphasises the adversity he has faced as a student, “I definitely have a good share of bad and good experiences as a trans person. I’ve made lots of other trans friends and I’m lucky to have support from home. I think negative experiences generally are more common like, people deadnaming me, using the wrong pronouns, harassment in public (school, parks), Slurs, things being thrown at me. I got deadnamed freshman-sophomore year by teachers because of the attendance sheet not being correct but this year my name is changed and I don’t worry about it. I also had a teacher who never respected my pronouns.”