Mateo Marquez, theater student, says his K-12 experience was exhausting. In high school he encountered more than name-calling, just for being a transgender student.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Freshman year I was threatened,” Marquez said. “I was harassed [by one specific classmate.]”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Marquez\u2019s classmate told others at school that transgender people needed to die. Despite this harassment, Marquez says the school did not seek disciplinary action against the boy. This type of discrimination causes many transgender students to drop out of school. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Trevor Project is the country\u2019s biggest LGBT+ youth crisis phone line, focused on supporting suicide prevention efforts for those under the age of 25. Phone calls<\/a> drastically increase when when trans-phobic rhetoric circulates and bills are proposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Missi Patterson an ALLY <\/a>at ACC said, \u201cI hear so many people in the lawmaking community say, \u2018You\u2019re either a man or a woman. It\u2019s just science.\u2019 I want them to understand that that\u2019s not even true.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Texas and Florida are the two top states with the most instances of Fatal Anti-Trans violence, according to the Human Rights Campaign.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s scary because your life is at risk here \u2013 they\u2019re making fun of you solely because you\u2019re trans.” Marquez said. “You don\u2019t want to be hate-crimed for it, but you also want to stick up for yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ari Thomas, a health science student who is also gay and non binary. Although they believe their sexuality hasn’t received negative responses at ACC, they have not come out as non-binary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019ve never had anybody say anything to me just because I\u2019m gay,” said Thomas. “People don\u2019t know I\u2019m non binary at ACC but that\u2019s mostly because I\u2019m doing online classes and haven\u2019t gone to in-person classes yet.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thomas expressed that if they did encounter discrimination they wouldn\u2019t know how to handle it due to lack of face-to-face interactions with instructors in remote classes and online information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything LGBT related on the website,\u201d said Thomas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neither Marquez nor Thomas knew about ACC\u2019s LGBT+ Equity Committee<\/a>, whose aim is to provide education to faculty, staff, and students at ACC about LGBT+ issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A primary component of the committee is their advocacy for long-term systemic change that can be achieved by policy revisions and support networks through their ALLY program and events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite one of the committee\u2019s goals of providing support, the committee is not often easily accessible. A Google search brings you to their Facebook where little information is provided on the committee \u2013 only their email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou have to know how to search for us,\u201d Matthew Campbell, co-chair of ACC\u2019s LGBT+ Equity Committee, said. Campbell said the secrecy is due to bigoted language they have received in response to trying to reach students through ACC\u2019s email contact lists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s usually on the lines of homophobic or religiously motivated,\u201d Campbell said. \u201cWe don\u2019t do that anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Campbell also shared the committee is working with ACC to require students to participate in sensitivity training to mitigate the issue after they expand their ALLY program. So, for the moment, the committee is building their own email lists and operating by word of mouth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll organizations have to go through a chain to be able to access those email addresses,\u201d Campbell said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Interested students must opt into receiving their newsletters and emails<\/a>. Campbell shared that the committee has been receiving more engagement recently, but the pandemic has made connecting to students difficult, being that information isn’t as easily found on posters on campus or other ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In her psychology class, Patters creates space for her LGBT+ students by asking them to put their pronouns in their zoom names. Additionally, she asks them to provide their preferred name at the beginning of class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Ally Program trains ACC employees to create space and support for LGBT+ students. Employees of ACC can become an ally by filling out an interest form<\/a>. Interested parties will be notified when a training is available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c[The training] wasn\u2019t difficult at all,\u201d Patterson said. \u201cWe had an incredible guest speaker from UT and it was really enjoyable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to the ALLY training, Patterson recommends training on how to be an advocate through organizations like the Texas Freedom Network<\/a>, Texas Rising<\/a>, and Equality Texas.<\/a> Many LGBT+ youth and adults are not accepting of these bills filled with trans-phobic rhetoric being proposed into the Texas legislature. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe don\u2019t need people checking our genitals. End of story. We are who we are. We are just like everyone else,\u201d Marquez said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By: Kyrios LoNigro This year is seemingly the worst on record for LGBT+ equality. More than 250 anti-LGBT+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the U.S. Texas is the leading state with 12 bills being proposed this legislative session, targeting transgender youth. One banning a type of school sports participation and, another, health […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4103,"featured_media":7027,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[981,1130,12],"tags":[1139,1167,1104,1142,1094],"class_list":["post-6981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-college-collaborations","category-community-support","category-news","tag-lgbtqia2s","tag-statelegislature","tag-studentnews","tag-studentsupport","tag-accent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4103"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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