This week in our social justice class we talked
about Heterosexism, Transgender, and Oppression. We live in a society that
defines the way we view gender roles and how we perceive men and women. The
gender roles in society today have flipped and there are a lot of people who don’t
identify with society’s gender roles, yet heterosexism still dominates our
society. We had a wonderful guest speaker named Shane Whalley who works for the
Gender and Sexuality Center on campus talk to us about the LBGTQ community. I really
enjoyed hearing Shane speak and I gained a lot of information that will be
valuable to me and my career. During this week I realize that there was a lot
of information I did not know about this community besides the stigmas that
they fight for. I realized that I did not understand all the language that this
community uses. I know that language is really is important to individuals and
the way that they use their language to identify themselves is also important. Not
knowing their language and what language that this community feels is offensive,
is the one thing that I did not know about. Learning more about this community
of people has opened my eyes more. As
social workers we have to know the context of a community to help clients and
need to have a knowledge and information of every population (if that is
possible) because there are still going to be things that we do not know and things
that we have to continue to learn, if we want to advocate for the people in our
society.
Observation
While watching the news this week, I came across
the story of a 14 year old boy who killed his teacher in Danvers, Massachusetts.
On the other hand I looked on the GSC website to see what events they had
coming up and they will be celebrating their 3rd annual Cabaret
tomorrow.
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ReplyDeleteComment 11: I really enjoyed Shane's talk as well! It was very educational and also made me realize all the things I did not know about the LBGTQ communtiy. I completley agree with you and think it is very important for us as social workers to know the context of the community and to do that we need to be educated on all populations.
ReplyDeleteI too really enjoyed Shanes talk! Although I knew some things about the transgender community, I quickly realized that there was a lot more that I didn't know than the little that I did. I had never heard of gender neutral pronouns!! I think that part of the problem we face in getting equal rights for the LGBTQ community is that although most people have some knowledge about the gays and lesbians, as they have been better represented in the media, they don't know much about what the rest of the acronym stands for.
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