The
ADVANCE-TITAN
November 1, 2018 INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN OSHKOSH VOL. 124, NO. 8
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TOP: UWO students and community protest President Trump. BOTTOM: Student Aaron Wojciechowski shares his thoughts.
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ABOVE: Student displays homemade sign and joins in the protest for transgender rights.
Conversion therapy for minors ban fails
by Christina Basken baskec94@uwosh.edu The Winnebago County Board of Supervisors failed to pass a proposal to ban conversion therapy for minors. UW Oshkosh student and Winnebago County Board Supervisor for District 16 Aaron Wojciechowski submitted the resolution to the board in 2016. On Oct. 16, the board voted 19 in favor, six no and nine absentee votes, which were counted as no. The resolution needed a three-fourths vote in favor in order to pass. According to Wojciechowski’s proposal, conversion therapy is considered any practice that seeks to change an individual’s gender expression, gender identity or sexual orientation, including efforts to change behaviors or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic feelings toward individuals of the same sex. The proposal stated that conversion therapy does not include counseling or therapy that provides acceptance, support and understanding of the in-
dividual or the facilitation of an individual’s coping, social support and identity exploration and development. This includes sexual orientation-neutral interventions to prevent or address unlawful conduct, unsafe sexual practices or counseling for an individual seeking to transition from one gender to another. The goal of the proposal called for Winnebago County supervisors to advocate against conversion therapy practices with an individual who is under 18 years of age in Winnebago County. Wojciechowski said his goal was to let people know that the Oshkosh area is an inclusive place for people of diverse backgrounds to visit and live. “I thought bringing attention to it at a local level would encourage more counties or city councils and it would send a message to the state legislature to say this is an important topic, and we want it banned,” Wojciechowski said. Board member Bill Wingren said he voted absentee because there was
Trump takes action against trans people by Christina Basken baskec94@uwosh.edu “One, two, three, four Donald Trump, no more! Five, six, seven, eight fight the bigotry! Fight the hate!” These words echoed throughout the UW Oshkosh campus on Monday night in response to the president’s attitude and actions regarding transgender people. On Oct. 21, The New York Times leaked a memo they obtained stating that the Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a “biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth.” According to the memo, the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance. According to The Williams Institute, an estimated 1.4 million Americans identify as transgender. On Oct. 21, hundreds of people gathered at the Washington Square Park in New York to protest against the proposal, using the hashtag #WontBeErased on social media to attract more people
to the protest. The hashtag was also used on the UWO campus to attract people to a protest, which was hosted by the Students for a Democratic Society. SDS President and UWO alumnus Ryan Hamann said he organized the protest because he felt a call to action to “fight back.” “I think it’s disgusting quite frankly,” Hamann said. “Trans people are people just like everyone else.” UWO student and founder of Q+ Unity Xan Hammel said she was at an Appleton protest on Saturday and came to the UWO protest to express solidarity and spread awareness. “Well, I’m trans ... and we’ve only just recently gotten the rights that we have with housing, with jobs, but he [Trump] wants to make sure that we will no longer be protected under Title IX,” Hammel said. In April, the Trump administration also announced plans to roll back a rule issued by former President Barack Obama in 2016 that prevents doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies from discriminating against transgender people. In July, the president announced a ban on transgender people serving in the
not enough research presented in the proposal. “I was in favor of this; I thought conversion therapy was wrong,” Wingren said. “However, I asked the question, ‘How does conversion therapy affect Winnebago County?’ and the sponsor said they didn’t know.” Wojciechowski responded by stating, “If it’s happening to one person, it’s happening to too many.” Wojciechowski said he has seen the negative effects conversion therapy can have. “When I was in high school, one of my friends, I found out his parents sent him to conversion therapy when he came out to them,” Wojciechowski said. “He described it as three months of him trying to pretend that he wasn’t gay. You can definitely tell the emotional drain and the psychological damage that it’s done to him.” According to the Movement Advancement Project, 14 states have banned conversion therapy for minors. Reintegrative therapist David Pickup said he has been practicing what
was once known as reparative therapy for over 10 years in California. Pickup said he uses a combination of psychodynamic therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy on his clients “who are not gay identified, through their own belief systems, but they know that homosexual feelings for them have risen in childhood for three main reasons: a very severe case of gender identity inferiority or actual dysphoria; severely unmet needs for affirmative approval and affection; and many times, between 50-70 percent of the time, sexual abuse by older same-sex people or pedophiles.” According to Pickup, the bans are doing more harm than good. “Why this is actually abusive is for several basic constitutional reasons,” Pickup said. “It actually bans professional therapy for unwanted homosexual feelings caused by sexual abuse further leading a child into more depression and more anxiety. It robs the client to choose for himself who
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The New York Times leaked a memo stating that the Trump administration wants to define gender. SDS member Landon military. According to a tweet the Klein, who was present at the protest, president sent out said he is on Twitworried Trans people are ter, Ameri- people just like everythat things can military one else. will only get worse forces could for the not afford L G B T Q + the “tremen— Ryan Hamann dous mediSDS President community. “I think cal costs and it basicaldisruption.” ly tells a Healthgood chunk care for transgender people in the of the population that they military would cause about don’t matter,” Klein said. “I a 0.13 percent increase in think this will enable bigots health care spending, ac- to be more brazen with their hatred and bring more harm cording to the Rand study. According to the Military toward trans people and the Times analysis, the military LGBTQ+ community.” spent roughly $41.6 million on Viagra alone in 2016.
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he truly is. It robs parental rights for minors to have no input whatsoever to the developing sexual and gender issues that a child has. This ban only serves one purpose, to further LGBTQ philosophy. It doesn’t care a lit about other children’s lives that are very different than folks who believe they were born gay or transgender. It disrespects a child’s right to get the therapy that leads to their most authentic self because the therapy really does work.” Pickup said he has a high success rate, but the outcome is entirely up to the client. “I have gay clients walk through the door and disagree with my view on sexuality, but we still have a very trusted, compassionate relationship,” Pickup said. “They can be gay; that’s their choice to believe what they believe. I think that trauma is at the bottom of homosexual feelings, but I don’t push that or force that on that, I don’t tell them who they are.” According to Psychology Today,
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COLS announces cuts by Bailey McClellan mccleb49@uwosh.edu Budget cuts could mean changes to tuition pricing, the loss of academic instructors, salary cuts and increased faculty workloads, according to College of Letters and Science Dean Colleen McDermott. The three-year financial recovery plan, which took effect in September, calls for a $6 million reduction to general-purpose revenue spending, of which about $4 million will come from academic affairs. This amounts to about a 10 percent reduction in spending across all colleges over the three-year period. The cuts are distributed unevenly over this period with 30 percent of the cut occurring this year, 50 percent occurring in 2019-20 and 20 percent occurring in 2020-21. The plan also aims to develop and implement revenue-enhancement strategies as soon as possible. McDermott said plans to increase University revenue will likely involve students paying separately for interim courses. “There have been several ideas,” McDermott said. “One of them is removing interim from the tuition plateau for the students. That has gone forward to the System. I think that will be approved, but it’s not likely that it will occur very soon. So we’ve been told that January 2020 interim will be on the plateau.” McDermott said the University is also considering changing the pricing structure of tuition.
“The other idea was to charge students by credit rather than have a plateau at all,” McDermott said. “That was calculated to result in anywhere from $1 million to $4 million in revenue per year. That has not moved forward to the System. We’ve been told that we need to sort of hold back on that one. That requires lots of approval through the legislature and so forth, and this may not be the ideal time for that.” McDermott said with the $937,000-plus cut to COLS spending coming in 2019-20, salary reductions are inevitable. “The number that we’re going by in the checkbooks is the absolute minimum that the department has, and it could go up,” McDermott said. “And I know it’s not a pleasant situation to be in. I have empathy, but there is no alternative to cutting salaries. Because this is the earliest we’ve ever given checkbooks to departments by months and months and months, there’s still going to be that wiggle. We don’t know how much increase we’re going to have.” Reducing instructional academic staff will play a large role in meeting the 2019-20 budget cuts. Many course sections currently taught by IAS will either be eliminated or tacked on to faculty workloads, according to McDermott. “I’ve had people ask me, ‘Well, how can you add all those extra courses?” McDermott
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