Dismantling CisHet Normativity Module 1: Foundations Proactively Furthering Equity, Justice & Belonging
With great respect and high expectations,
• Inspire trust and confidence.
We take our role seriously. Therefore, we are pleased to present an experience that will take us to the next level with our Cultural Responsiveness and Proactively Furthering Justice, Equity, and Belonging competencies. The Dismantling CisHet Normativity (DCHN) Experience is the next step in Rubicon's journey to advance equity and ensure belonging. Every LGBTQ+ community member is part of someone's family. We are hurt to know that a mother, uncle, or cousin would face discrimination, hatred, or exclusion when they marry who they love, live where they live, or do the work they love. Our path forward requires everyone to demonstrate the behaviors that foster belonging, equity, and justice. Our dedication to transformative actions is inseparable from our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is central to our work that community members have the full opportunity to thrive. As you engage with the DCHN modules, we ask you to keep the imperative – a workplace where all are respected and valued – top of mind. We want you to consider:
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1. What is possible, powerful, and important in understanding another's lived experience?
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You are Rubicon's heart and soul. Your belief that our community deserves human rights, dignity, and access to resources inspires us. Your commitment to coaching people to know their worth and authentically contribute and pursue their highest and best differentiates you and Rubicon from others. Thank you. As your senior leadership team, we believe you deserve and are worthy of the same. You deserve and are worthy of a workplace where everyone feels safe and knows they belong. You should insist on and hold us accountable to a workplace that is in integrity with its values at all times and on all issues. As Senior Leaders, our primary role is to:
• Coach you to your next level.
A message from your Senior Leadership Team
• Advocate for and secure resources needed for you to do your best work.
2. How accountable, communicative, and courageous are you willing to be to ensure your team members feel safe and valued?
3. What awkward silence and temporary discomfort are you willing to sit with to learn and grow? To ensure your team members feel seen, heard, and valued? We know you agree that inclusion is key to thriving individuals, teams, and communities. We are grateful to be in a community with like-minded and values-aligned people
Table of Contents Content Page A message from your senior leadership team 3 Our Community Values 6 Our Community Agreements 7 DCHN Module 1 – Agenda 8 Meet Rick Oculto, Module Facilitator 9 Non-Binary Gender Identities: A Global History 13 Micro-Learning Resources 16 Allu Guiding Principals 17 Glossary 18 A message from the DCHN Co-Design Team 24
Community Values Community values are the set of belief systems that we consciously or subconsciously hold. They ideally determine our daily actions and influence our decision-making process. Aligning our values in the community with our actions is the key to living with integrity. yAccountabilit Authenticity Accountability Compassion Respect Trust ON JUNE 3, 2022 WE SELECTED THESE COMMUNITY VALUES Click to watch this video –What Are Community Values?
Community Agreements Community agreements are a powerful strategy for uniting a group. Agreements come from a consensus-driven process to identify what every person in the group needs from each other and commits to each other to feel safe, supported, open and trusting. As such, they provide a common approach for how people will work and be together as they take transformational action. ON JULY 8, 2022 WE SELECTED THESE COMMUNITY AGREEMENTS For many of us, home is our first community. What community agreements (written or just KNOWN) do you recall from your first community? Grace for all Take space, make space Show LookIntentConfidentialityUpvs.Impactforcommon ground Turn up curiosity, turn down judgment Listen to understand, not to react Embrace discomfort as opportunity to learn & grow Speak from your experience, and offer others space to do the same Give credit where credit is due Set and honor boundaries
● To increase participants’ awareness of intersectionality (and how identities intersect with gender and sexuality), and deepen understanding around how all forms of oppression are connected.
● To increase participants’ understanding of gender and sexuality as social constructs, used as tools of the oppressor designed to maintain power structures/status quo.
● To deepen participants’ understanding about how definitions of gender and sexuality change and evolve over time.
● To deepen participants’ awareness of gender and sexuality based microaggressions, and how these microaggressions, if unchecked, can lead to bigger harms and even violence against LGBTQ+ people.
Dismantling CisHet Normativity Training Series Overall Training Learning Objectives ● Increased awareness around CisHet normativity ● Increased access to personal feelings, attitudes and values connected to inclusion, justice and collective safety ● Increased knowledge about expected values aligned behavior ● Increased skill and comfort intervening when misaligned behavior occurs Date Module 1: Foundations: Gender Bent Presenter: Rick Oculto, MA, Education Manager, Our Family Coalition August 18, 2022 Module LearningspecificObjectives:
Registration Link - (for Thursday's meeting) Manage "Dismantling CisHet Normativty Experience Aug 18th 1pmhttps://rubiconprograms.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwsf-ygpz0oHNWKn5tHJt8LPfTGynEXdqj85pm" HighContentLevel Detailed Content Description Overall IntroductionTraining ● Why we are here (the cost of inclusion and values misalignment) ● Reflection on Rubicon’s identity as an Antiracist/Anti Oppression Org ● Expectations & Invitations learning & practice space, invitation to grow ● Reminder and reference to values, community agreements, parking lot/bike rack jamboards ● Request to complete the demographic data form from Our Family Coalition Opening ● Introductions ● Land + labor acknowledgement ● Framing of the space specific to Rubicon’s mission ● Collective reminders: grace, fostering openness to learning + cultural humility ● Community Agreements reminder Gender terminologylanguage,identity,and ● Activity: “Let’s Talk” ● What is gender? ● Situating gender expansiveness in a global context ● A history of words (evolution of language) Pronouns ● The importance of names: history and theory of genderless pronouns ● Activity: “Someone You Love” ● Pronouns and gender equity: what to do when we don’t get it right LGBTQ+BREAK history: the historic construction of gender in the United States ● Formation of colonized traditions ● Racialization of gender in the US ○ The legacy of chattel slavery ■ Sexual agency and kinship structures during enslavement ○ The legacy of settler colonialism ■ Indigenous gender expansive traditions + US policies of elimination ● Gender as constructed in a specific historical moment
In 2002, Laxmi went on to become one of the founding members of the Dai Welfare Society, an organisation that works for the transgender community and represented Asia Pacific in the UN in 2008, where she spoke of the plight of sexual minorities in the society.
Fascinated by Bharatanatyam and its costumes, Laxmi took an arts degree at Mumbai’s Mithibai College and a post-graduate degree in Bharatnatyam, with support from her family. She has also starred in many television shows including the reality show Bigg Boss, and three documentary films.
Breaking all conventional notions surrounding beauty pageants pertaining to gender, she launched the Indian Super Queen beauty pageant in 2010, which is going strong!
Laxmi Narayan Tripathi
Photo by Claudiu Maxim
Source: Wikimedia A transgender rights activist, Hindi film actress and a Bharatanatyam dancer based in Mumbai, Laxmi recognizes herself as a part of the hijra community. The eldest one amidst a family of seven from Uttar Pradesh, Laxmi suffered from poor health all her childhood. For being effeminate, she was taunted at school and was sexually abused by a relative.
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Patrick A. Burns/New York Times Co./Getty Images
2nd February 1964: American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin (19121987), spokesman for the Citywide Committee for Integration, at the organization's headquarters at Silcam Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, New York City. (Photo by Patrick A. Burns/New York Times Co./Getty
the March on Washington, Rustin also pioneered the earliest Freedom Rides; he refused to give up his seat on a segregated bus more than a decade before Rosa Parks. But as a gay man, Rustin, an early supporter of King, was often sidelined by the very movement he helped found: After a 1953 arrest for solicitation, he wrote "Sex must be sublimated if I am to live in this world longer." In an attempt to stop the March on Washington, Sen. Strom Thurmond read Rustin's arrest report into the congressional record in 1963. In his later years, Rustin directed his energy into the nascent gay rights movement, declaring, "the new n*ggers are gays." A year before he died, he declared "we cannot fight for the rights of gays unless we are ready to fight for a new mood in the United States. Unless we are ready to fight for a radicalization of this society." In 2013 President Obama awarded Bayard Rustin a posthumous Medal Of Freedom. Logo honored his legacy in 2015 by announcing the Bayard Rustin Trailblazer Award, honoring unsung heroes of LGBTQ equality.
Micro-Learning Videos
Did you know? The original LGBTQ pride flag was designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978.
1. Stop saying “that’s so gay” as an insult: This is probably my most heard phrase of all time. This sentence is typically used after someone does something that fits into the typical stereotype of what a gay person is “supposed” to do. Calling it offensive is an
2.understatement!Makeeveryeffort to not misgender someone: If someone is out and proud, address them how they want to be addressed because for them, their gender is something they fought hard to accept. Misgendering someone makes them feel a little less valid. You don’t need to stand beside them for every battle they fight; all you need to do is show them that you recognize them for who they are. While cis-gender people may see using the right pronouns as a burden, keep in mind that nobody’s gender is evident from the way they look. Most importantly, being straight isn’t the default choice :)
Members of the LGBTQ+ community wake up to people hating on them every day because of their identity. Just because they don’t fall in the traditional CisHet norms, doesn’t mean they should be easy targets for discrimination.
Here are a few things to STOP saying, to behave more inclusively.
Appreciating someone for who they are without taking a piece of their identity away from them is a basic necessity for every human being to learn. The LGBTQ+ community already goes through a repetitive cycle of self-doubt and external hostility, which cisgender people (allies or not) have the privilege of never experiencing.
Agree to disagree - respecting the LGBTQ+ community
No one is asking you to immediately change your opinions or beliefs. However, one thing is clear: not supporting a community and blatant disrespect are on two sides of the same coin.
3. NEVER say “f*ggot” to anybody: The f-slur is used as a derogatory term against gay boys or men. Men in our society have always been told “don’t cry” or “stop being so girly.” Why? Our stereotypical idea as to what a man should look, act and dress like is what makes it so hard for a man to come out as gay. When a man finally breaks down the invisible barriers that we’ve built up, subjecting him/them to hate is the last thing they need. Every single day is a chance for you to respect people “understand that you will never understand, but still stand.”
Cisgender Privilege: Referring to the experience of never having one’s natural sexual identity be questioned by society. This leads to the behavior of taking for granted that everyone has the same life experience and a lack of struggle with their gender identity.
Body Dysphoria: Discomfort about the body that is related to gender identity and misalignment with physical characteristics such as anatomy, secondary sex characteristics, reproductive organs, etc.
Ally: Ally is a term to describe anyone who actively and fully supports the LGBTQIA+ community.
Cisgender: A person whose gender identity or subconscious sex aligns with the sex that they were assigned at birth. For example, a person assigned the sex of a male at birth who identifies as male gender would be considered cisgender. Similarly, a person assigned the sex of female at birth and who identifies as female gender would be cisgender.
Androgynous: Referring to a person with a gender identity or presentation that is neutral or has both masculine and feminine parts. Synonyms include null-gender, androgyne, genderless, and neutrosis.
Assigned Sex at Birth: A medical assignment given at birth based on physical characteristics of the body. This can refer to male, female, or also intersex.
AFAB: Acronym with the meaning “assigned female at birth.”
Here is a glossary of terms to help you familiarize yourself with the different words and meanings that you may encounter. Remember that these terms are constantly changing and it's important to stay up-to-date by asking people about their preferred terms.
Cisnormativity: Most people are cisgender and so this is considered the “norm,” which can lead to systemic and unintentional prejudice against trans people in society. However, cisgender individuals can also be gender non-conforming. The Latin prefix “cis” means “on the same side.”
AMAB: Acronym with the meaning “assigned male at birth.”
Gender Affirmation Surgery: Surgery to affirm an individual’s gender identity that involves changing primary or secondary sex characteristics. This can be necessary to alleviate gender dysphoria.
Gender Conforming: Referring to a person who follows the rules of society about how genders should act, behave, and appear to others.
Feminine-presenting: Referring to a person with an outward gender expression that appears feminine. For example, this could be shown through style, mannerisms, body language, etc.
Gender Dysphoria: A medical diagnosis and term to reflect the distress experienced by individuals who have a misalignment between their sex assigned at birth and the gender that they identify with internally. This means that a person doesn’t feel right about their body parts, physical characteristics, or societal interactions in terms of their internal experience of gender.
Glossary Continued Family of choice: The circle of friends, partners, etc. that people who are LGBTQIA+ choose to associate with because they provide validation, support, and a feeling of belonging that they may be missing in their biological family.
Female-to-male (FTM): Referring to people who were assigned female at birth but who identify as male. This may or may not involve changing the body through medical procedures or surgeries.
Femme: Referring to a person with a gender identity or expression that leans toward being feminine in general. A person who is femme does not necessarily identify as a woman and is not necessarily assigned the female sex at birth by a doctor.
Gender-Inclusive Pronouns: Pronouns that are neutral and can be used by both transgender and cisgender people. For example, the words they, them, and theirs when used to refer to a single person are gender-neutral Gender Nonconforming (gender variant, genderqueer): People whose gender expression does not follow the gender norms or societal expectations for the sex they were given at birth or their perceived sex. This includes people who are androgynous, feminine men, masculine women, etc. This can include trans people but not all people who are gender non-conforming identify as trans. People of any gender can be gender nonconforming (e.g., cis, nonbinary, trans).
Gender Identity: A core sense of the self as being a woman, man, or neither. This does not always align with the sex assigned at birth and can develop and change over time. It also cannot be assumed based on outward physical characteristics.
Gender Norms: The cultural and social norms assigned to women and men regarding clothing, appearance, roles, and behavior. For example, women are expected to behave more passively than men, while men are expected to be more dominant than women. People who do not fit gender norms may be singled out (e.g., an overly feminine man or a dominant woman).
Glossary Continued Gender Expression: The way that a person publicly expresses their gender as masculine, feminine, androgynous, etc. For example, gender can be expressed through their clothing, hair and makeup, body language, chosen name, pronouns, mannerisms, interests, etc. For trans people, they may also physically alter their body through medical interventions to match their internal gender identity such as hormone therapy or surgery. Also known as gender presentation.
Genderfluid: Referring to a person who shifts between genders or who feels as though their gender changes over time either rapidly or gradually.
LGBT: An acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender.
LGBTQIA+: An acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual/ally, etc.
Glossary continued Intersex: A person born with characteristics that are not easily categorized as male or female (e.g., reproductive organs, chromosomes, hormones). For example, a man could be born with ovaries instead of testes or a woman could be born with XY chromosomes. Intersex occurs at a rate of about one in 1500 births but most people are assigned either male or female sex at birth regardless of being intersex. Intersex people may identify with their assigned sex, identify with the opposite sex, or identify as intersex. They do not usually identify as trans (transgender or transsexual).
LGBTQ+: An acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, etc. This acronym is internationally LGBTQ2:recognized.An acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and two-spirit
LGBTI: An acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex.
LGBTTTIQ: An acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, two-spirit, intersex, and queer.
continued
Masculine-presenting:
Nonbinary: Nonbinary (sometimes called enby or nb) is an umbrella term for anyone who falls outside the gender binary of male or female. Some people simply identify as non-binary and some identify as a specific type of nonbinary identity. Examples include genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, bigender, etc..
Queer: Previously used as a derogatory term for transgender and transsexual individuals, which has since been reclaimed by the community to display their identities with pride.
Misgender: Calling someone by the wrong pronoun or using language that is not inclusive to their gender identity.
Neutrois: People who have a gender that is neither male nor female. This includes nonbinary, genderless, genderfluid, and agender identities.
Glossary
Male-to-female (MTF): Referring to people who were assigned male at birth but who identify as female. This may or may not involve changing the body through medical procedures.
Masculine-of-Center:
People who identify as masculine. These individuals may or may not identify as a man. Being masculine-of-center does not indicate a person’s assigned sex at birth.
Maverique: A person who experiences their gender identity to be separate from current categories and descriptions.
Multi-gender: People who identify with more than one gender. This includes people who identify as bigender, trigender, pangender, polygender, and in some cases, genderfluid.
People with a gender expression that they consider to be masculine. This includes outward expression through such things as body language, mannerisms, physical characteristics, and style. This term does not indicate anything about assigned sex at birth.
Sex is generally classified at birth as male, female, or intersex based on the appearance of the external genitalia. If these are ambiguous, sex is assigned based on internal genitalia, hormones, and chromosomes.
Two-Spirit: Two-Spirit is an important term in many indigenous cultures. It has no set definition but is mainly
Transgender/Trans: Transgender is as an umbrella term for anyone who identifies as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth. This includes trans men or women and non-binary identities such as genderfluid, genderqueer, and agender.
Glossary continued Glossary continued Sex: A classification system assigned at birth based on a person’s physical characteristics, reproductive systems, chromosomes, hormones, and secondary sex characteristics.
Transpositive: This term refers to the opposite of transphobia. This type of attitude is validating and accepting of transsexual and transgender individuals and celebrates their rights. Transphobia: Intolerance, fear, aversion, prejudice, harassment, discrimination, violence, or hatred aimed at trans individuals and trans communities based on stereotypes and misconceptions.
Sex Assigned at Birth: The sex assigned to a person at birth based on the existing classification system.
Transitioning: Activities engaged in by trans individuals to affirm their gender identity such as changing their name, clothing, pronouns, sex designation, etc. This can include medical treatments such as hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery, etc. This process is different for every person and the time it takes and activities that are engaged in are not universal.
Trans Man/Trans Woman: A trans man is someone who was assigned the sex of “female” at birth but who identifies as a man (also known as female-to-male or FTM). A trans woman is someone who was assigned the sex of “male” at birth but who identifies as a woman (also known as male-tofemale or MTF).
Movies/TV Shows Boy Erased But I’m a Cheerleader Call Me By Your Name We’reSpaTangerineRuPariahParisMoonlightHeartstopperisBurningPaul’sDragRaceNightHere Books “Close To The Knives” by David Wojnarowicz “Dirty River” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides “Over the Top” by Jonathan Van Ness “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong “Sissy: A Coming of Gender Story” by Jacob Tobia “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue” by Samuel R. Delaney “Zami” by Audre Lorde
Dear Colleagues, The difficulty of the past two years has taught us that we can find our path through uncertainty and emerge on the other side stronger together. We invite you to see this as we do - a permanent way of being —an evolution.
The Dismantling CisHet Normativity Experience is a testament to Rubicon’s evolution and your willingness to create cultures of belonging, strong allies, and hold yourself and each other accountable to inclusive behaviors. We meet for over 20 hours to develop an experience that 1.would:Equip you with the language, skills, and ability to create an inclusive, sustainable, and welcoming workplace.
2. Spark joy and connection 3. Resource you to be savvy, empowered allies It was an honor to create this experience for you—our friends, colleagues, and mentors. We appreciate you and recognize that no single person at Rubicon is like you. Your journey – with its moments of wins, growth, and discomfort is unlike anybody else’s. When these individual journeys fill a room, fill a discussion, and become best practices, that framework for change is intersectional. When we are our dynamic, layered selves, WE ARE the Future of Work. Thank you!
