An official website of the United States government
On June 12, 2016, a shooter entered the Pulse club in Orlando, Florida, and fatally shot 49 people. Pulse was a barwhere lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise queer identifying (LGBTQ+) people regularly gathered, and the shooting occurred on Latin night, disproportionally impacting people at the intersection of being LGBTQ+, Black, and Latinx. Afterthe shooting, organizations focusing on LGBTQ+ people of color, including undocumented queer people, emerged and mobilized for improved political protections, economic rights, criminal justice reform, and representation of LGBTQ+ people of color insocial justice organizations. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork that began in 2016, this presentation summarizes findings from an ongoing study examining the impacts of social justice mobilizing after gun violencethat targeted queer people of color. It reports findings from participant observation experiences with LGBTQ+ Latinx organizations and interviews with social justice organization members (n=52), local legislators (n=8), health providers (n=3), law enforcement officers (n=3), and national organization leaders (n=3). Findings highlight how the Pulse shooting sparked an intersectional social justice movement workingto dismantle structural racism, xenophobia,and homophobia from within multiple settings. Using theories of biopolitics and frameworks of legal, political, and queer mobilization, I argue that the movement forged out of the Pulse shooting works to advance what I call “an assertive politics of belonging” that pervades multiple social spaces, including within local and state government, law enforcement agencies, and social justice organizations. Situating this movement in a broader US context of deep political polarization and persistent white supremacy, findings from this study underscore the tensions that emerge in challenging structural racism by asserting claims of belonging for people at the intersection of multiple minoritized identities.
more »
« less
Misgendering, Academic Freedom, the First Amendment, and Trans Students
This Article explores the intersection of First Amendment claims (religious and speech) and the social science research about the harms of misgendering transgender people in the classroom and beyond. Using medical and social science data about the harms of misgendering transgender and non-binary people, we show that misgendering dramatically and negatively impacts transgender students in the classroom and in society. We show that the harms are not individualized but are collective; they derive from being part of a stigmatized minority population. After demonstrating the harms of misgendering, we consider the First Amendment claims that seek to offer constitutional protection to misgendering. We argue that on balance, the First Amendment claims of free speech, academic freedom, and freedom of religion provide no basis on which professors should be allowed to misgender trans students in the classroom. As we show, debates about the First Amendment, when analyzed through a lens that considers social hierarchy, fail to provide a constitutional mandate for speakers or religious practitioners to engage in misgendering. Rather, we point out that the law does not provide a consistent principle to determine what is protected speech, but instead privileges the claims of already privileged groups, in this case white evangelical Christians. Given the troubled history of First Amendment law that purports to be “neutral” but protects privileged social statuses, it is disingenuous and constitutionally suspect to allow a First Amendment claim to cover misgendering students in the classroom. We argue that transgender students should be protected by their institutions from faculty members who prefer to stubbornly misgender students in the classroom. Even assuming for the sake of argument that misgendering is “protected” speech, professors who choose to misgender are intentionally harming their students, a breach of professional norms and most schools’ policies.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1946671
- PAR ID:
- 10509810
- Publisher / Repository:
- Case Western Reserve Law Review
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Case Western Reserve law review
- Volume:
- 73
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 0008-7262
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)The student body in university science classrooms is increasingly diverse demographically and this change brings with it an increased chance of mismatch between professor’s expectations and students’ behaviors. Being aware of how cultural expectations influence teaching and learning is the first step in understanding and overcoming these mismatches in order to help all students succeed. This involves making expectations clear, particularly about homework requirements (Ludwig et al., 2011), and defining the line between collaboration and cheating (Craig et al., 2010). When possible, professors should be flexible regarding different cultures’ ideas of time (Hall, 1983), family obligations (Hoover, 2017), and the social power structure (Hofstede, 1986; Yoo, 2014). At the same time, professors should maintain high expectations of all students regardless of ethnic background (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). Drawing from published research as well as interview and survey data, we highlight ways for both professors and students to create an atmosphere of belonging (Walton & Cohen, 2011) and an appreciation of people from all cultures (Museus et al., 2017).more » « less
-
Abstract Low levels of social interaction across class lines have generated widespread concern 1–4 and are associated with worse outcomes, such as lower rates of upward income mobility 4–7 . Here we analyse the determinants of cross-class interaction using data from Facebook, building on the analysis in our companion paper 7 . We show that about half of the social disconnection across socioeconomic lines—measured as the difference in the share of high-socioeconomic status (SES) friends between people with low and high SES—is explained by differences in exposure to people with high SES in groups such as schools and religious organizations. The other half is explained by friending bias—the tendency for people with low SES to befriend people with high SES at lower rates even conditional on exposure. Friending bias is shaped by the structure of the groups in which people interact. For example, friending bias is higher in larger and more diverse groups and lower in religious organizations than in schools and workplaces. Distinguishing exposure from friending bias is helpful for identifying interventions to increase cross-SES friendships (economic connectedness). Using fluctuations in the share of students with high SES across high school cohorts, we show that increases in high-SES exposure lead low-SES people to form more friendships with high-SES people in schools that exhibit low levels of friending bias. Thus, socioeconomic integration can increase economic connectedness in communities in which friending bias is low. By contrast, when friending bias is high, increasing cross-SES interactions among existing members may be necessary to increase economic connectedness. To support such efforts, we release privacy-protected statistics on economic connectedness, exposure and friending bias for each ZIP (postal) code, high school and college in the United States at https://www.socialcapital.org .more » « less
-
Previous research often suggests that people who endorse more essentialist beliefs about social groups are also likely to show increased prejudice towards members of these social groups, and there is even some evidence to suggest that essentialism may lead to prejudice and stereotyping. However, there are several notable exceptions to this pattern in that, for certain social groups (e.g., gay men and lesbians), higher essentialism is actually related to lower prejudice. The current studies further explored the relationship between essentialism and prejudice by examining a novel type of essentialism—transgender essentialism (i.e., essentializing transgender identity), and its relationship to prejudice towards transgender people. Study 1 (N = 248) tested the viability of transgender essentialism as a construct and examined the association between transgender essentialism and transprejudice, while Studies 2a (N = 315), 2b (N = 343), 3a (N = 310), and 3b (N = 204) tested two casual pathways to explain this relationship. The results consistently showed that the more that people endorse transgender essentialist beliefs, the warmer their feelings towards trans people (relative to cis people) were, echoing past research showing a similar relationship between essentialism and prejudice towards sexual minorities. However, the manipulations of both essentialism (Studies 2a and 2b) and prejudice (Studies 3a and 3b) were largely unsuccessful at changing the desired construct, meaning we were unable to provide direct causal tests. The one exception was a successful manipulation of the universality of trans experiences, but even here this resulted in no change in prejudice. The primary contribution of this work is in robustly demonstrating that greater transgender essentialism is associated with transprejudice.more » « less
-
Nehm, Ross (Ed.)Although many scientists agree that evolution does not make claims about God/god(s), students might assume that evolution is atheistic, and this may lead to lower evolution acceptance. In study 1, we surveyed 1081 college biology students at one university about their religiosity and evolution acceptance and asked what religious ideas someone would have to reject if that person were to accept evolution. Approximately half of students wrote that a person cannot believe in God/religion and accept evolution, indicating that these students may have atheistic perceptions of evolution. Religiosity was not related to whether a student wrote that evolution is atheistic, but writing that evolution is atheistic was associated with lower evolution acceptance among the more religious students. In study 2, we collected data from 1898 students in eight states in the United States using a closed-ended survey. We found that 56.5% of students perceived that evolution is atheistic even when they were given the option to choose an agnostic perception of evolution. Further, among the most religious students, those who thought evolution is atheistic were less accepting of evolution, less comfortable learning evolution, and perceived greater conflict between their personal religious beliefs and evolution than those who thought evolution is agnostic.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- The DOI is not currently available.
