On January 19th, my group had a really great oppertunity. We got to go to an assembly being held at the high school called The Transgender and Non-Gender Conforming Assembly. We knew there would be high schoolers who fit in that category speaking, but we didn’t know much else to expect other than that. When we got there, we got to sit in some of the front seats because the high school staff had kindly saved us seats. There ended up being two LREI High School students there, and four high school and middle school students from various school from the city. The panel was lead by Joel, a fourth grade teacher at LREI. He asked questions to them, and the first questions was who they were, and he asked for their pronouns. Through our studies through the year, we learned that pronouns play a big part, especially in the LGBTQ community. You never want to assume someone’s pronoun, becasue they could get offended. Some of the kids were fine with any pronoun, some identified as they, and some as she, or he. We then did an activity to get used to asking for pronouns. It should not embarrass you asking for pronouns, because you would just embarrass yourself more if you used the wrong pronoun. We turned and talked to someone next to us, and asked for their pronoun. I thought that this was a really good exercise that we could bring back to school. They reviewed some key terms used in the LGBTQ community that needed to be clarified. Like some different sexualities such as bisexual, pansexual, and many more.
More questions were asked such as who they were out to. It was interesting to see who was out to their whole families, some family members, friends, or anyone else. Some people said that they weren’t out to their grandparents because they would take it easy, but all of them were out to their parents.
Something all kids said was that at school, LGBTQ issues were not brought up in class much. I found this interesting because I feel almost the same was at the middle school. Other than social justice, the topic as a whole is not brought up in general curriculum, but only really in pride month, and GSA.
Something else some kids mentioned was that teachers need to get better with asking about pronouns. They said almost all their teachers were too nervous or embarrassed to ask for pronouns. They all agreed that there should be some sort of training program for teachers on how to make LGBTQ kids and teens to feel more comfortable at school. I think this is a great idea became I feel like in a lot of schools, the topic of LGBTQ is not broght up a lot, or it is avoided because it can be touchy, and they don’t want to offend anyone. I understand this but we talk about different races and ethnicities all the time, so sexuality or gender identity shouldn’t be much different.
I learned a lot from the whole assembly, and it left a great impact on our group because we hear kids our age and just a few years older talking about how kids can make a difference.
