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Jan. 13th, 2016 02:43 pm
Ad finitum
Yesterday's get-together was a little sad and awkward. The idea was to spin off an LGBT "affinity group" to discuss...something. But we weren't really sure what. Apparently, whatever faculty/staff group we had on campus has gone dormant and no one seems really interested in restarting it. Right now it's just an orphaned webpage with a few outdated staff contacts.
The elephant in the room, of course, was whether our organisation actually needs such an affinity group. I tried to steer us toward this question by talking about the equivalent group at my last place of employment floundered after domestic partner benefits were made available to all staff and faculty. That just prompted some limp discussion of what other causes we could take up. What about homeless LGBTQ youth? Does anyone know of any bias incidents? What about queer foreign students, is anyone reaching out to them?
I estimate that the average age in the room was 50, which makes me wonder if there hasn't been a paradigm shift and we're on the other side of it. When I drop in on online discussions of sexuality among 20-somethings, I find myself confronted by an entirely new vocabulary. And not just for "new" identities--the entire categorisation system doesn't line up with what I know. Their whole conception of gender seems fundamentally different from the binary I was raised in, and that affects everything else.
So it's frustrating: there are clearly some rewarding conversations to have and plenty of worthwhile work to be done, but I don't see this particular constellation of individuals leading me to it. The one ray of hope was the suggestion that we get together with members of some of the student organisations and have them break down for us how they see things and what we can do to help.
The elephant in the room, of course, was whether our organisation actually needs such an affinity group. I tried to steer us toward this question by talking about the equivalent group at my last place of employment floundered after domestic partner benefits were made available to all staff and faculty. That just prompted some limp discussion of what other causes we could take up. What about homeless LGBTQ youth? Does anyone know of any bias incidents? What about queer foreign students, is anyone reaching out to them?
I estimate that the average age in the room was 50, which makes me wonder if there hasn't been a paradigm shift and we're on the other side of it. When I drop in on online discussions of sexuality among 20-somethings, I find myself confronted by an entirely new vocabulary. And not just for "new" identities--the entire categorisation system doesn't line up with what I know. Their whole conception of gender seems fundamentally different from the binary I was raised in, and that affects everything else.
So it's frustrating: there are clearly some rewarding conversations to have and plenty of worthwhile work to be done, but I don't see this particular constellation of individuals leading me to it. The one ray of hope was the suggestion that we get together with members of some of the student organisations and have them break down for us how they see things and what we can do to help.