going to talk through the slides we're going to sort of bring out key points with each slide and
try to move it along. All right so we're going to start by talking about some tg one-on-one basics
which is usually terminology and stuff like that but before we get into it
caution warning these terms are you need to take them with a grain of salt they have people fight
about what they mean they mean different things to different people and you really need to
grab that in mind and ultimately it's going to be important to figure out what these terms mean to
the actual individual people with whom you're interacting and so we're just going to walk
through a little bit of terminology which is sort of a rough and ready um um it's intended to give
you a handle on how they tend to be used but but not to give you sort of an absolute definition of
them. All right so we're going to talk about the transgender umbrella one of the ways in which the
word transgender is used as a tool to group together different groups of individuals. As far as
coming from social services perspective I don't think this is very useful but it's so much a part
of sort of the vernacular that we thought we'd throw it in here and covered a little bit um
we just want folks to be aware that many people who are commonly referred to as being under the
transgender umbrella um may not identify that way at all and may not see themselves as part of any
sort of transgender phenomena at all. All right so trans-sexual probably many people are familiar
with that word it has its roots in medical language it's often used to refer to individuals who
access medical technologies of various different sorts to transform their bodies in ways in accord
with their own gender identity. It can also refer to individuals who self-identify as the gender of
sex different from the one that they were assigned at birth and who don't avail themselves of medical
technologies. Some people who live full time in the role of sex different from the one assigned
to them at birth don't identify as trans-sexual. Very often what we see these days are folks
identifying as simply a trans man or a trans woman or as transgender men or women.
So there's that. The next category, intersex individuals. Intersex generally for us to
individuals who are born with um to put it crudely um both or a mixture of different um
sex characteristics that are that are both male or female or or um features that are
somewhere in between. Whether or not intersex individuals ought to be included under the
transgender umbrella is sort of an important issue because it's going to depend on how the
actual um individual themselves identifies and if you think about the alphabet soup we have
you know we actually separate the i from the t so just be aware as the issue we keep saying
a lot of this really depends on the person's self-identification. Um drag queens and kings
generally refers to people who in the context of performance um it might not be um as relevant
with regard to like providing services to clients or things like that. Queens we're pulling out uh
a little bit because in some cultures in some communities queen is used by people who we might
identify as transgender. In some communities queen is used uh as an as a slur and some people
take it as a slur so really um listen for the language that the person with whom you're speaking
is using and and find out what they mean by that and use that language but in general um queen
might be a word that's contested. All right so gender queer gender queer sort of an extension of
the word queer and so it has a um combat of a resistant character to it where individuals
who identify this way may be saying we don't want to fit into any category we want to
resist uh the attempts to to sort of normalize us um and so you may see a lot of like you know um
attempts to mess with people's traditional sense of of how gender ought to be. Um the next the next
one if I if I had a chance to redo this slide I would just say some some butch individuals because
some butch people don't identify as women um and many butch individuals don't identify as trans
but some do um and so but what we're talking about here are individuals uh who are assigned female
at birth and who identify as butch um um for various different reasons and often this is going
to track uh behavior that some individuals would call masculine. We might we also want to point
out that whether or not a butch person identifies as trans they may or may not use a male masculine
name and may or may not use masculine pronouns and they may or may not identify as trans and they
may or may not actually identify as butch so it's a very sort of permeable category. Yeah um so cross
dresser I guess very crudely replaces the word transvestite which is not considered a derogatory
word um cross dressers generally rethinking of um individuals who identify as male but who present
at least sometimes um as women it's important a couple of misconceptions um often it's assumed that
cross dressers are all heterosexual but there are bisexual cross dressers and they're also gay cross
dressers. Also I think that self identification can be very important in the case of cross dressing
so a cross dresser may identify as having two cells both a masculine self and a female self.
Um next slide uh in this one we're looking at sort of lgb and t and in this one we're
going to look at sort of lesbian and trans um some issues which might come up oh but before
we even get started with that we want to just talk for a second about sexual orientation and gender
identity. There's no slide for this part. Okay so it's traditional people sort of like you know
many people who were a little bit familiar with trans issues already know this but it's worth
underlying before we go on to point to its complexity um when we deal with lgb roughly we're
dealing with issues of sexual affection orientation and when we talk about trans issues um we're
generally dealing with gender identification issues and gender expression issues so there's a
separation between sexual affection orientation and gender identity and gender expression.
Okay so the two things that we want to pull out of this slide to really highlight um as things that
might come up as issues um around um lgbt centers or lgbt programs incorporating trans is that um
some trans guys some trans men um may identify as straight as heterosexual um
they may continue to hang out in the lesbian community they may continue to date in the
lesbian community and they may not and there may be issues around that there may be issues around
being included or excluded from lesbian community and that's some some tensions may arise in in
in those two communities coming together. And so then another point is that um there are cases
in which you may have a chance of a new trans who transitions later on in life and what this means is
that uh prior to a transition she may have been in a relationship that was you know viewed as
as a heterosexual relationship and then after uh transitioning this relationship becomes sort of a
de facto lesbian relationship. There may be issues around access to um a connection to and support
from lesbian communities and culture because um the this relationship these folks may feel
isolated from that and how they identify with regard to this relationship um this new found you
know lesbian identity identities may be um maybe tricky maybe maybe negotiated idiosyncratically
by the couple. Okay next slide um we're gonna look at gay and transgender um I think that the main
things that we want to point out on this one is that um some gay men um may identify trans women
as drag queens or as really men or um some people in the gay community in particular sort of like
the the assimilationist sort of gay community like capital G capital C community um may see trans
women as giving the movement a bad public image right like as opposed to like they were just like
you sort of movement versus like those crazy trannies who are you know wearing nothing when
they go in gay pride like so there may be those sort of issues as well. Um and so um but you may
have there's going to be tensions in the other direction I think that you know there's a lot of
you know trans women who may feel very cautious about being in uh gay male environments particularly
worried about being taken for you know being really really a gay man um pretending to be a woman um
so to resist that uh transphobic representation may really be entrusted in avoiding that kind of
environment. Next slide and this just has to do with bisexual and transgender and we didn't have a
whole lot that we wanted to say about this uh except to consider this um if if you're doing in
particular health related work um if you or your staff are looking at sexual interactions between
trans women and their non-trans male partners to be gay msm men who have sex with men bisexual
behaviorally bisexual anything like that um that may go against that woman's identity uh self identity
self identity then you may not be able to actually provide good services to that woman or to her
partner so it's something to really consider um when when working with this population especially
with regard to health stuff. Next slide. So just quickly two two points on this um and sort of just
to sort of reiterate even though we separate um lgb as referring to sexual affectional orientations
and t and t is referring to as involving gender identity and expression it's important to obviously
bear in mind that trans folk have sexual affectional orientations and what are sexual affectional
orientations might become in all the different variations that you would find among non-trans
people similarly um lgb folk have genders they have gender identities and gender expressions
and you know it's you're going to find obviously that not all lgb folk express their genders in
ways that um follow um prevalence of societal norms. Okay and so the next slide uh trans folks
don't live their lives alone so what we want to say to that is that you know in the context of uh
again lesbian programming you know we have our client you know we have the people we're targeting
and their social milieu they have their lovers their friends their partners who also oftentimes
identify also as gay or lesbian right for trans people um that may not be the case trans people
have friends families and lovers um just like non-trans people but those people um may not
identify as trans as lesbian gay or bisexual and there may be real tensions there there may be
real homophobia or transphobia there so when we're looking at whether lgbt fits together
that's something that that may have to be considered and the converse you know um lgb
non-trans people may not want to see heterosexual people at their gay agency and so there may be
tensions that develop when we're trying to serve you know the whole person and a whole community
if this could be called one community um lgbt so we'll go to the next slide
so just a couple of quick points about health programming one of the things that happens of
course is that um the trans women often disappear into the category um MSM or men who have sex with
men um because of sort of transphobic representations of of trans women
um and i threw in health programming because i think most of us um who work with the trans
population um are funded in that way so i wanted to make a couple of points one transgender men
who have sex with men trans or non uh are never there's never any information directed toward
that category um with regard to like hiv prevention is to deprevention you know anything like that um
also transgender women who have sex with trans and non-trans women uh are also overlooked or sort
of assumed into larger msm msm w and i hope everybody uses this as acronyms men who have
sex with men men who have sex with men and women um so we just wanted to point out you know
what about the partners of trans people how do we actually include the actual lived realities
of trans folk and their partners in our health programming which leads us to the next question
on the next slide can there be an lgbt and our our answer to that is maybe and um then we're
going to sort of look at some of the ways in which there could be a really good alliance
um well one of the things that you can do um when having some tea with your lgb is make sure
that you bring on trans folk not just as chinese chinese for hire uh trans folk can do um lots of
different things and if you're just giving trans folk the task of um trans specific programming
um then it's something i think that the agency ought to look at yeah so if we're if we're saying
lgbt we're an lgbt agency you know make sure that there's some tea there make sure that you have um
trans people represented in your in um your literature in your flyers and brochures uh
in your staffing you know stuff like that uh next slide and here's some ways in which you
can actually do that um the thing that we want to point out the most on this one is um all levels
of training if you're gonna if you're gonna make sure that folks are culturally competent
you need to make sure everyone is culturally competent at your agency that includes security
folk genitorial folk reception because you can do you can do sort of like you know the um the
trait the competency training for the the service providers themselves but if a trans person comes
in and they're treated poorly by you know someone at the the front desk or you know person in the
phones or you know security or something like that who you know gets the pronouns wrong just gives
them some some hassle you know that's going to be it that person's going to leave um and all of
the efforts to you know really put on a good good trans program and to train the staff has
has been in vain yeah and there's such a need for trans friendly services that if your agency is
truly sensitive to trans issues clients will come they will because they need they need services
all right this is my favorite slide um because i think that it sort of underlies sort of sort of
this deep sort of political issue that if you're wondering how we can include them um
um then there are a lot of issues that uh need to be thought about namely it if the goal is to
sort of bring them in so long as so long as they remain them and they don't become we um things
aren't going to change there needs to be sort of a whole reformulation of what's going on um
where where where them become we and we're going to talk a little bit about how that kind of
transformation might look in a couple of slides from now okay um so what we want to say on this
slide how to include the t is that uh and and i want to just preface this if i say that we do come
from a los angeles perspective los angeles has a a um a vocal trans community and um and also we
come from a social services perspective so i'm prefacing with that but i want to say this
some agencies just don't want to deal with trans issues and they make no effort so what happens
is that maybe you know a trans person comes and gets turned away or is treated poorly word gets
around in the community and people stop trying to access services at that program those providers
who didn't want to make an effort to begin with can then fall back on sort of like well no trans
people ever try to come here so we don't have to do anything and um and we want to say that that's
not okay um if trans people aren't accessing your services the reason isn't that they don't need them
there's been enough needs assessments across the country to realize that any social services that
are available trans people need just like non trans people need them and if trans people aren't
coming to a particular agency chances are it's because that agency is um not welcoming or accepting
and word has gotten around and next slide um so i just want to say um and Susan will talk a bit
about this but i think that this is a classic example of um how you move away from the we them
model and i think that the sort of to put it in the sort of funny way it's not about bringing them
into the we but it's often about the we um joining them yeah i think it's really important way before
we decide to start transgender programming or to apply for a grant to to help trans people
anything like that that we that we become involved with the community as allies and as advocates
even if we have no trans people on our staff um these are things that we still need to do whether
we go out and get ourselves trained whether we go out and participate in community events
whether even if there are no community transgender community events in your area
advocate for them in that case you know um really be out there as a really visible and vocal voice
on behalf of the trans and with the trans community uh on the next slide so this is just a slide um
if the only person at your agency when those trans stuff is trans and they're the only trans
person there and their only job is trans related this is tokenism and um it's not going to help
although we'll help the one person who needed the job um just say just say um
the only other thing we want to say about this is that you can if you're not trans you can speak
out on behalf of trans people um what you want to make sure that you're doing is to speak with
the community and make sure that you're not appropriating uh the community voice and make
sure that you're not monopolizing the megaphone right so we won't we want to use our privilege
to make space so that people who don't necessarily have access to to uh media or to other people's
ears that we as non-trans people have that we can get them there so they can speak for themselves
right that's a way that we can be in solidarity with folks um the last point really quick is
even if you have no trans staff clients or programs you can be a community ally and you
could be a very strong ally but think about why you have no trans staff clients or programs
and then we'll move on to the next slide and this is about agency issues right all right so the
bathroom issue um if if an agency is requiring trans women to use the men's bathroom and trans
men to use the women's bathroom is obviously a problem that should not be happening um
trans women should use the women's bathroom generally trans men should use the men's
room but i will also say that because trans folk um are sometimes you know being read by society
in different ways and you know sometimes our presentations are in between you know um ideally
a gender neutral single-stall bathroom um uh it would be great if that could also um be available
um to take care of those cases but that said um if you if there is if there are multiple choices
for someone and a transgender person is being forced to use a separate bathroom that outs them
and stigmatizes them and it's not appropriate and if you can see the slides the little logo on the
bottom people in search of safe restrooms go to that website because it gives a list of gender
neutral bathrooms um all throughout the country so it's it's an interesting uh the next slide
and this has to do more with um once you have a client who once you have a trans person who is a
client um so it's important to balance um everyone's safety um i guess the point we're
going to bring out here though is that um being uncomfortable with a trans person um doesn't count
as a safety issue and so if staff or clients are feeling uncomfortable with the presence of a trans
person um that's not that's that's not a problem or fault or responsibility of the trans person
right and likewise if if clients or staff are unfamiliar with trans issues that's also not
the responsibility of the trans person seeking services um to educate them at all um so that's
that's um okay so this slide i just want to start this with the story it's a story that
happened a couple of years ago to me and talia and i've never gotten over it so i'll just share it
quickly because it's it it leads into this very nicely so we were asked to speak at a human
sexuality class at a university in southern california and talia goes to her host feel about
which is going to tell you about you know how inappropriate it is to ask about people's genitalia
either euphemistically or in any other kind of way and it's sexual abuse blah blah blah
and after our talk we asked for questions and a boy in the audience raised his hand
in front of hundreds of people and asked if i would please describe my vagina compared to talia's
and i mean the whole room got completely silent i didn't know what to say i still get i can't
even explain the feeling that i get when i think about it because i was so like shocked and mortified
and angry all at once and it made me realize that you know every time i probably ask a trans person
euphemistically or in any sort of way if they've had the surgery that's the way they feel and i
was able to really sort of put myself into somebody else's shoes and in a what i think is a really
real way um and so i i ask that you try to do that especially for this because sometimes for
non-transfolk these questions seem like nothing but i don't think they necessarily are i mean so
you see this a lot i mean you see um people you know asking trans folk um have you had the surgery
or are you you know anatomically male or female or are you really a man or are you really a woman
and these are very often used as coded ways of asking about um what's between the person's legs
and the fact is for some reason there's this kind of current curiosity um about the genitalia of
trans folk and the point is it's um it's certainly not professional it's certainly not going to be
helpful in terms of providing services and in in my view it's actually um abusive is actually
it's actually sexual harassment regardless of how you ask it i mean certainly if you ask someone
you know um sort of boldly you know do you have a penis or a vagina that's that you wouldn't do that
under normal unless of course the person is trans in which apparently it's acceptable
but people often ask this through these coded ways like how do you have the surgery and so forth
um and and and and it's just wrong and and and i think that it's important also to bear in mind
that this is on a continuum of transphobia i mean at its most extreme you have in fact
trans people being subject to forced genital verification um this has happened to um trans
folk who were who were ultimately killed um um this happened to guenoraho for example in bandantina
where they where they were um um they were forced to expose their genitals so um this is not acceptable
okay and this we pulled these out into separate bullet points um because we just want to make
sure that though they build on each other they're not all the same thing when you have a client in
front of you or a person in front of you regardless of what's on their identification card ask them
what name they go by and the name that they tell you is the name that you and everybody at your
agency uses at all times when you're talking to the client whether you're talking about the client
whether the client's there or not so now you know what name to use you also find out what
pronouns they prefer and you ask the person um i'm sorry and you ensure that everybody at the
agency uses those pronouns at all times when they're talking to the person or whether they're
talking about that person whether that person is there or not um so and so now you know their name
and what pronouns they prefer that doesn't go too far in many cases with asking them to self identify
their gender this has to be an open-ended question because for many trans people and i think for many
people in general there's way more than just two answers to that question i don't sort of want to
underline through the important point because you know i've seen it where as social service providers
will be you know they'll they'll they'll respect the self identification of a trans person to their face
so they'll try their best to get the pronouns right but behind the back of a trans person they'll
be using different pronouns or different names um and and and why you might ask is that problematic
well it's symptomatic of sort of a deeper a deeper problem i think that it's important for
service providers to internalize how deeply important it is to respect the trans person's
identity and if you happen to internalize that then chances are this is going to show up in the
kind of services you're providing right so now you have three answers and this has given you
a clue that there's been some sort of transition going on but what does that transition actually mean
often people think that um transition concerns um surgeries um and there's lots of different
kinds of surgeries there's not these surgery but um there's actually more relevant questions
that we're going to talk about yeah first of all transition may not include any medical
interventions you may have a person who considers who's considers himself to be a different gender
than the one assigned at birth who's had no interest or desire in surgery who has no interest or
desire in hormones or for some other reason just isn't accessing those interventions right now
there are other questions related to transition that could be a lot more useful uh and fruitful in
providing good services um which are listed on the slide and then we'll move on to um the next
intake issue okay do you want me to take this okay so um we also as you know when it's appropriate
or when it comes up we also ask people to self identify their sexual or affectional orientation
and most importantly we need to find out if a client says i'm gay or a client says i'm heterosexual
through a series of open ended questions with discussion in other words find out
do those words mean the same thing to them as they mean to you are you guys talking about the same
thing um and then make sure that you do wind up talking about the same thing listen closely to
what the client is saying and the language that they're using get clarification when you don't
understand um or you need clarification and use the language that the client is using um that'll
make it much easier to um to continue these discussions all right so the point we wanted one
of the points we want to make here is that i think there's a general thought that you know
helping a person come out in terms of the sexual affectional orientation is a good thing um i think
that this um the mistake is to is to treat coming out as trans as exactly the same thing as coming
out in terms of your sexual affectional orientation and they're different and one example of this is
that there's different kinds of coming out for trans folk i mean there's the first coming out
where maybe you'll come out and you'll let people know that you're going to transition or you haven't
transitioned yet or in the process of transitioning and then there's the coming out where you are
you already transitioned um or you're transitioning um and you let people know that you're trans and
and they're different um and and we want to say that no staff person has the right to insist that
that a client come out to anyone and this has to do with respecting a person's self-identification
for example right i mean what what what i would say to that also is that what what what are they
coming out as if a person who you identify as being trans doesn't identify as trans
maybe maybe they just identify as a guy or just identify as a girl um there's they don't necessarily
feel there's a need to come out if they transitioned many years ago as another example and maybe at
one time they saw themselves during transition as being trans and now have moved beyond that and
don't feel that that's that's relevant information um you may have political um reasons for wanting
them to retain that affiliation and there may be good reasons whatever but it's really up to the
client to determine and the last thing i'll say about coming out as trans is that sometimes it's
impossible sometimes it just can't be done sometimes a trans woman may say i'm a transgender woman
and no matter how she says it or how many times she says it the person to whom she's speaking hears
here's oh he's really a man in the situation like that she can't come out she can't she can never
be understood in which case even the attempt is um putting her is subjecting her to sort of transphobic
uh violence and emotional violence yeah okay um so we just wanted to bring out some trans specific
issues these are the folks sometimes may not think about if they're if they're non-trans um
two quick points one if you're a trans person and you know you've lived in a world that has
invalidated your gender identity and maybe the case that you uptake um gender behaviors to kind of
prove that you're you know really a woman or really a man and sometimes and sometimes these
behaviors these gender behaviors um can be harmful um so for example you know you might be a trans
woman you might end up staying in an abusive relationship with a man because you think that
by doing so you really prove your womanhood um i think also um it's important to recognize that
you know trans people are read um by other people in different ways in different situations and
often how we're read you know changes so you can you know depending upon your presentation you can
go through the day and be read you know one way in one place and one way another place or you can
find that a person reads you one way and then as you interact with them they read you another and
it sort of creates the situation in which you may feel very vulnerable and vigilant um on a kind of
daily basis okay um we can come back to smoking uh i think during the discussion um oops i'm sorry
yeah so um the one thing we will say about smoking is uh with regard to smoking cessation
and the big smoking cessation program that i've seen here in in Los Angeles is the last drag
and the one thing we want to say to that is although it's it's a great play on words it's
very funny and you know the advertising is very slick and everything that might not resonate with
trans people uh because drag the idea of drag may sort of um sorry that's our dog um um it may it
may they may want to disidentify with the use of the term the word drag so considering the last
drag to be an lgbt cessation program may be a little bit fraught um okay so
that's that's our main thing that's our main thing that we want to say right now with regard
to that um if you've come this far and you've done all this stuff then your agency probably is
is trans friendly if you follow our simple steps um our our advice to you is to accept criticism
and suggestions from the community with gratitude and not defensiveness as it says on the slide
if people are criticizing your program if people haven't just walked away that means there's some
community buy in there's some investment in the program be successful and to that end we would
really say you know what um then take the take what they're saying because it's going to improve
your program um so we have a couple of things on the next slide which are just resource suggestions
things that you might want to consider in treatment planning what documents people need in whatever
state you're in to facilitate a name or gender change on their identification um to think about
some medical issues that uh that may be really fraught for trans people especially with regard to
like prostate exams um ovarian cancer screening um and just general medical care because of for
many trans people it's just very um it's very overwhelming and scary uh not to mention difficult
to find a trans friendly physician um our final slide before we open for discussion is just our
contact information and if uh if anybody's interested i heard a lot of people who are
doing a lot of work if anyone's interested in um working on the learning trans project with us
please let us know because we would love to get many more voices
