The Fort Lewis College campus is diverse - from race and ethnicity to gender and sexuality. Students, faculty and staff work to educate the community on gender to help create a safe and welcoming environment for all students.
Miseducation can lead to acts of discrimination, such as when the removal of transgender-bathroom rights posters made some students uncomfortable. To put an end to incidents like these, the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center and other regional resource centers open the discussion to the public.
Gender
Xander Hughes, president of PRISM, believed that gender was determined by the self but later began to factor in the idea that gender is a social construct, they said.
Hughes said that everyone experiences gender uniquely, and by that standard, gender is determined by the self. But gender expectations differ from culture to culture, so gender is what we make it, they said.
Biological sex, on the other hand, has to do with your anatomy and nothing to do with your sense of self, they said.
Hughes interned at the Rainbow Youth Center during the 2019 summer, where they trained others in Durango, Telluride and Montrose using the gender unicorn.
The gender unicorn is an infographic used to help define the differences between gender identity, gender expression, biological sex and attraction, they said. Within attraction, there is both physical attraction and emotional attraction.
There are distinctions among all five of these traits, and these traits are not related, they said.
For example, Hughes identifies as non-binary transmasculine. So, Hughes uses they/them gender pronouns and uses masculine gender expression. Their gender identity does not determine who they are attracted to, they said.
Pronouns
Gender pronouns are words used to refer to someone, like they, he or she. These words correlate with gender identity.
Hughes said that gender pronouns are important for both transgender people and everyone else whose gender identity does not align with their biological sex. When someone who is transgender is misgendered, it can feel as though their validity is at stake, they said.
Even cisgender people feel hurt when someone misgenders them, they said.
“I don’t define gender pronouns,” Molly Wieser, the Title IX coordinator, said. “I wait for other people to define them for me.”
Students who do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth sometimes struggle with their identity, Wieser said. So it’s best to use their preferred gender pronouns - no questions asked - to validate them, she said.
The best way to ask someone about their gender pronouns is to offer your own gender pronouns, said Nancy Stoffer, the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center director. This way it isn’t explicitly asked, but an avenue is created for others to offer their own, she said.
Hughes agreed with Stoffer and added that it is better to offer your own gender pronouns to everyone rather than only ask those who appear to identify as something other than cisgender.
To do this, someone may state their gender pronouns when they introduce themselves to someone, they said.
Hughes learned this after they attended a lecture for faculty and staff calledTrans 201 with Adrien Lawyer, the co-director and co-founder of the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico.
Education
Lawyer visits places like FLC to teach transgender cultural competency. This means that Lawyer trains people to be able to provide service, or access to service, for transgender people.
In New Mexico, the center trains at places including hospitals, police departments and prisons, he said. They hold trainings in Durango because it’s in the Four Corners area and offers resources for people who are in cities such as Farmington and Aztec, he said.
In Sept. 2019, the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center on campus hosted a lecture for students and others, Trans 101 with Lawyer.
At this lecture, Lawyer hoped to educate people on the basics of what it means to be transgender, he said. He has worked with people who hated transgender people, but he has found that most of these people are more fearful than they are hateful, he said.
Education will help these people be confident in their interactions with transgender people, rather than fearful of saying the wrong thing, he said.
“Our goal is to get to the point where it is no more of a big deal to be trans than it is to be left handed,” Lawyer said. “It’s just an attribute that some people have and some people don’t.”
As for gender in general, the U.S. is misogynistic and transgender women and transgender women of color tend to experience more discrimination and violence than transgender men or white transgender people, he said.
For that reason, he said that he highlights how unfair treatment of women holds people back and pointed to how the U.S. women’s national soccer team has to fight for equal pay.
“There is no reason we should live in 2019, in one of the most resourced countries in the world, and still have women be unequal to men and have pay inequality, have violence and sexual violence disproportionately affecting women,” Lawyer said. “That speaks very poorly of us.”