Blog Post 1

    Recently, one of my teachers misgendered my transgender classmate, despite knowing that he is trans. We were with one other student, who identifies as a girl, and my teacher said “all right girls” when referring to the three of us. My classmate and I looked at each other with skeptical expressions on our faces and when my teacher referred to us as girls for a second time, he corrected her. Regardless of whether it was intentional or unintentional, it was just so appalling because my classmate has made it clear that he is trans and the teacher has had him as a student for a while now. In fact, the day before this happened, my classmate had to speak out on his instagram account because of similar misgendering incidents and people using the wrong pronouns for him. I started to realize this happens at Uni more than I thought it would, and it honestly surprised me that people in the Uni community are still so ignorant.           After this all happened, I thought about the impact it would have if we implemented mandatory gender studies education in earlier curriculums for students in all schools. This could prevent incidents like the one I mentioned and help everyone feel at least somewhat safer and respected by making sure people develop an understanding for each other and are aware of their own implicit biases (and other ways not limited to just these). As we talked about it in class, changing education curriculums is difficult, because that would mean convincing higher ups and politicians to take action on this issue. That in itself is a part of a larger problem because of the commonly shared characteristics and beliefs of those in and have been in power within our society. Therefore, we can start at our local/community level to make changes, like normalizing introducing your pronouns to your classmates or teachers at Uni (as a few, not all, teachers have initiated at the start of the school year), or other changes similar to that.