Working Definitions

I have spent this semester barely alive beneath a pile of, amongst other things, dense books and heavy course packets. While there were many nights when I thought I was going to literally have to splash water beneath my eyes to read just one more page, the majority of the reading has turned out to be incredibly important. I’m on a journey, dear reader, and a lot of the words I’ve been reading have really helped me. I have to say that the first day of class is always pretty intense – mainly because I receive a pile of syllabuses and, immediately, my four-month panic attack begins.

I’m ending my third year, and particularly this semester, at UT, as a new person. I have never before had the kind of happiness that I have now. It’s funny because I have been endlessly busy this semester. I thought there was absolutely no possibility I could digest anything anymore and would just have to somehow slide by in these last few days of school.

Well, I was wrong. Last week I read an essay by bell hooks entitled, “Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory.” While gulping down a ridiculously large URN of espresso, I must say my entire perspective changed. I have identified as a feminist since my first semester at this school, and everything following has been a journey toward wrapping that identity tighter and tighter around my heart. Never before this had I really understood the extent of my privilege and the amount of work ahead of me in my life. I am a radical feminist. Radical feminism is not just about equal pay or sneakily inserting women in higher government positions. It is about changing the entire way the world has been built. There is an intersectionality so much larger than I had ever thought. Now it is impossible to ignore. I imagine a summer reading more bell hooks, re-reading Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, finally taking the suggestion from my friend, Ambalika, to read Angela Davis. I once defined feminism just as equality among all gender identities. What I should have said was that it is a full circle understanding of the way each person connects to the next, never doubting the validity of someone’s experience and never claiming it as my own, working to break apart all of the things that have been build to push out other people or take advantage of them.

Sigh. It’s a working definition. It gets bigger every damn second.

I began this blog planning on defining feminism and explaining that is larger than I ever thought it was, but instead I’ve just decided to let whatever comes to me flow out. Big dramatic words? I know. Trust me, I feel that way, too. But isn’t it beautiful? How much there is to still learn and talk about? I remember the time in my life where thinking about having to do more work to understand myself sounded exhausting and impossible. I remember an emptiness I always thought would be permanent. Looks like it’s been filled up – at least a little bit more than before. That feeling of dread is no longer there. I have never been as excited as I am about the journey ahead of me.

Journeys like this need full support. And I must say that while I have had support for this entire journey, the past year has presented a new type of support. Once a week, for three hours, I am surrounded by people I love. We are somehow all able to hold one another up. The last class day of Peers for Pride is only a few days away. Yes, there will be tears. Way too many tears… I will try my hardest to keep myself under control, but I will be partially unsuccessful. You know, a big slobbering mess. But the thing is, any idea or fear I had that my spirit would end once Peers for Pride ended, is gone. I have so much ahead of me. All I want to do is learn and grow. One big part of my life recently has been learning how far support systems can stretch. I can say whole-heartedly that I am one of luckiest people in the world. My support system has stretched further than I had ever predicted and will never break.

There is a wave of love always rolling over me.

Science has our backs.

In the past two years, there have been new studies published that focused on examining discrimination against LGBTQ individuals. It is evident today that prejudice, discrimination, and the fear of both these things have a direct impact on our actions and attitudes in day-to-day life. Here at UT, our students, staff, and faculty put forth a lot of effort to eliminate the need for these fears by creating safe spaces and educating allies.

While discrimination is classified as an action, we know that it stems from prejudiced attitudes. In 1978, M. D. Storms published an article in the third volume of the Journal of Homosexuality in which he studied college students’ attitudes toward feminine and masculine gay and straight men. While his experiment showed that heterosexual men were liked more than homosexual men in general, students also liked feminine gay men better than masculine ones. This leads us to believe that in 1978, gay men were accepted more if they fit the effeminate stereotype. In January of 2009, T. R. Cohen and colleagues published a study that reexamined these attitudes. They found that thirty years has changed these attitudes. Masculine gay men were preferred over feminine ones by straight men (the straight women had no preference). The study was expanded to include lesbians, and it was found that straight men and women both preferred feminine lesbians to masculine ones. So it seems that now it is more important in the eyes of society to adhere to gender roles than to fit the stereotypes of gay men and lesbians.

If a lesbian or a gay man is stereotypical, they are by the nature of those stereotypes usually also gender-nonconforming. Stereotypical gay men and lesbians are then subject to prejudice and discrimination due to general homophobia as well as gender nonconformity. Gordon and Meyer published a study in 2007 that examined just this concept. They interviewed 396 lesbian, gay, and bisexual people of different ethnicities in New York City, and found that 19% of them experienced discrimination due to their gender presentation alone, as distinguished from general homophobia. Gordon and Meyer suggest that gender-nonconformity prejudice is intertwined with antigay prejudice, and it is important that both constructs be used when investigating hate crimes.

The fear of discrimination can have serious affects on the mental and physical health of LGBTQI individuals. In their 2007 article, Burgess and colleagues found that compared to heterosexuals, LGBT people are more likely to report a major incident of discrimination each year. They are also more likely to report that their health needs are unmet, and they are shown to have much poorer mental health on average. The mental health is broken down into a number of different measures. LGBT people have higher levels of psychological distress, a greater likelihood of experiencing depression and anxiety, and greater use of mental health services. They also tend to have significantly higher likelihoods of binge drinking, smoking, and they smoke more cigarettes per day on average. The most interesting part of this study was that even if they took out all of the responses from people who reported experiencing discrimination in the past year, these disparities were not eliminated. Even those LGBT people who didn’t experience discrimination had poorer mental health. Just the past experience of discrimination, or perhaps even the fear of it, can negatively affect the mental health of LGBTQI individuals.

There is hope, however. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in February of 2009 by Chae and Walters may provide a method to combat these negative consequences of discrimination and the fear of it. The degree to which racial group identity and self-identity integrate positively is called actualization. In LGBT individuals, high actualization would mean that one’s family and community accept their identity and do not exclude them for expressing it. The data from this study show that if an LGBT person has high actualization (i.e. a supportive community), his/her/hir self-rated health level is higher than someone with low actualization. They also have lower rates of physical pain and impairment. This suggests that community integration and support may provide a buffer against the negative effects of discrimination.

I know that sometimes science tends to tell us things that we really already knew. It seems obvious that a supportive community would better the mental health of those of us who feel like outsiders. Of course homophobic discrimination can be due to gender-nonconformity, just as it can be caused by ignorance, fear, and unjustified hatred. Some of us already knew these things, but the problem is that many people won’t believe any of this unless science and statistics show that it is true. Sometimes a tragic story will affect someone with the power to change things, but numbers are much harder to ignore. Without data that show percentages, it could be argued that these instances are too rare to be of concern. Data that show just how much this discrimination affects the mental and physical health of LGBTQI individuals may be what convinces legislators that something must be done to eliminate it.