Global Medicine Hunter News

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(San Francisco) -- A general state of alarm went through the LGBQT and gender-questioning communities after the Trump administration reversed President Obama's executive order supporting transgender rights, including transgender rest rooms in schools. According to faculty teaching at the doctoral program in Human Sexuality at California Institute of Integral Studies, the reversal had the potential for creating further injustice, bullying and discriminatory acts of violence against questioning and gender non-conforming youth.  

"Children who grow up seeing transgender rest rooms and other supportive measures for trans and questioning youth begin to have an acceptance or at least compassionate tolerance for what they may not fully understand.  "Yeah, there are girls and boys and some people are sort of in the middle," as one 9-year-old explained in Chicago." 

However, when adults rush in and tear down the transgender signs that were installed only for a short time in bathrooms in schools and other public institutions, there is a danger of resorting to old fears and prejudices that were rampant in some areas of the country.  When a 7th-grader sees that, the overriding effect is troubling. "They are at an age of high susceptibility to social pressure, and the covert message is that, 'No, there really is something wrong with 'these people,' and the potential for shunning and bullying rises exponentially," according to Dr Meg Jordan, PhD, RN, medical anthropologist and administrative chair of the Department of Integrative Health and Human Sexuality at CIIS.

These views expressed by scholars and experts in LGBQT advocacy and social justice initiatives are reflected in statistical analysis and qualitative research.  Suicides and depression among LGB and questioning youth are six to eight time higher than ciis-gender or heterosexual and gender-conforming populations. When there is acceptance and a sense of belonging, instilled by parents, school teachers, and local leaders, those grim statistics have a chance of declining. In the Trump era, many leaders are watching higher levels of anxiety and general fear that hard-earned rights such as marriage equality could be chiseled away state by state.

One of the most effective means for understanding the plight of kids today who struggle with gender acceptance is to explore blogs, Facebook and Instagram videos, and e-zines in which young people feel free to tell their stories, either anonymously or with coded identities.  A new book that offers a heart-wrenching tale is Journey of a Cotton Blossom by J.C. Villegas, a young person who published last year a tale of two generations that offers a rare gift of insight and inspires the deepest kind of advocacy and social justice for the full spectrum of intersectionality –race, gender, sexual preference, age, ability/disability, religion, class, and ethnicity.  The book is available at Amazon.

For a society to make intelligent, compassionate decisions and offer regulatory statutes that serve to protect all people requires a level of emotional intelligence among its leaders.  The defining work of this Trump era may rest in the hands of those who have a deep commitment to oppose this rising tide of injustice, and join together with the artists, poets, authors, and yes, community organizers, in a resilient and fierce advocacy for a kinder and more just society.

For more information about the Human Sexuality PhD at CIIS, contact:

http://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/human-sexuality

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