This week in GSA, we continued with our questions from last week, and managed to knock three more out in the twenty minutes we have each week. Before we get to the questions, though, we’re proud to announce that after working through six very good applications, the co-presidents have made a decision about club officers! Our financial officer is Irene Li, and our secretary is Alex Fellows! Congrats to them both! We’re excited to have them on board and see how they can contribute to the club from their new positions. And now, onto the questions!
Is it a reasonable aim to eventually eliminate derogatory phrases from my vocabulary and eventually [for] others to do so?
First we identified what phrases we still hear commonly on campus. These phrases and words included “That’s so gay”, “faggot” and “no homo”.
Mr. Davies mentioned that he had noticed that athletes in interviews, understanding that there would be backlash if they used the phrase “no homo”, now say “pause” instead, as in “I thought you looked really good out there today, pause.”
Many members at the meeting expressed that they thought it was pretty impossible to delete derogatory phrases from vocabulary entirely, but others said they think it is entirely possible to delete derogatory phrases from one’s personal vocabulary, and that the next step then is to try to make others aware of how their word and phrase choices might affect those around them. It’s not necessarily easy to make these changes, even within your own personal vocabulary, but we feel it’s very important to try.
When you’re talking to really super intolerant people, how do you stop from being horrible back?
We discussed several strategies for dealing with people who are unwilling to discuss issues in an open-minded or even respectful manner. Obviously, above all, your safety in such discussions is of the utmost importance, and we at GSA encourage you to remove yourself from such a discussion if you feel unsafe at any time. We also stress the point that by allying yourself with GSA, everything you say instantly comes under scrutiny--if you are an ally in GSA, you must be an ally in all areas of your life. This isn’t a universal truth, and it can weigh pretty heavily on a person, but it’s something to keep in mind when you’re having such a discussion; as unfair as it is, you are a representative of the club.
It was suggested in the meeting that having conversations with incredibly intolerant people is in fact a sort of waste of one’s time--that if they are truly not going to listen to you, you should save your energies for people you can convince. This led to an idea of “tolerance of intolerance”. We also talked about dealing with incredibly intolerant strangers in places like restaurants and on airplanes. In many of these cases, removing oneself from the situation might be of the best interest to all parties, particularly if you can get away.
But in the WRA community, Mr. Ong pointed out, we have a responsibility to better each other, and so having these discussions and calling others out on their behavior and language is absolutely something we should do--not just should do, but must do. This is why we do things like calling out workshops--to arm you all with the skills to go out into our community and make a difference. Yes, calling people out is very hard, but if we all step up to the plate more often, we’ll find not only that our peers have curbed their language, but we have other people around us who can step up too.
Can you explain the correct terms that people generally don’t understand or use correctly?
A lot of basic terms can be found at the Terms 101 post including ones like transgender and crossdresser/drag queen, etc. One specific set of terms we were asked to explain further that wasn’t on that list was the difference between the terms “sex” and “gender”.
In the case that’s being talked about here, “sex” refers primarily to physical body parts, both primary and secondary sex characteristics. In GSA, we’ll often use “gender assigned at birth” rather than talking about someone’s “sex”, because it implies that assigned gender is natural, and that to transition from one’s assigned gender is therefore unnatural. Sex, in this case, is often described as being “biological”.
Gender, on the other hand, is far more complicated and complex. A definition for gender that Ai has come up with is “a categorization denoting a performance of traits, often split up as “masculine” or “feminine”; gender is constructed by culture and then performed by people in that culture”. Long story short, gender is many things: self-identification, attribution, cultural roles. Digging through that mess can be very complicated and complex, so complicated that we ran out of time to properly discuss it, though we plan to have an entire meeting dedicated to sex/gender issues at a later date.
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Do you have any questions? Suggestions for meetings? Comments? Critiques? Email us at gsa.wra@gmail.com! Get ready for next week’s meeting as we dive into the history of the LGBTQ rights movement and discover why the first Pride was a riot!
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