Amplifying the Voices of the Transgender Community.
Julia Weston Lanham
Breakfast: A chai latte from City Feed in JP (every day), yogurt and cereal.
Hometown: Philly suburbs and Red Bank, NJ.
Extracurriculars: Coach youth softball, read YA novels with my daughters, and advocate for racial justice and equity with the YW Boston, Brookline for Racial Justice and Equity (BRJE) and Hope Central Church in JP.
What is your role at BUSPH?
My official title is Assistant Director of Advising and Relationship Management in the Career and Practicum Office. I also have the privilege of serving as the Advisor to the students’ SPH Queer Alliance.
Can you talk more about the Queer Alliance and what they do here at BUSPH?
It is a student-formed, student-run, SPH-supported, volunteer organization that is sanctioned by the Office of Graduate Student Life. The SPH Queer Alliance was created to provide a queer space within the school of public health for LGBTQIA+ students, faculty, staff, and allies to gather and collectively engage in dialogues, events, and activities relevant to LGBTQIA+ communities. The goals of the Queer Alliance are to 1. Increase the visibility of LGBTQIA+ on campus and to promote awareness, 2. Provide education on issues relevant to LGBTQIA+ communities, 3. Engage in activism through community engagement and campaigns on and off campus, and 4. Provide a safe space for LGBTQIA+ members and allies within the school of public health and on the medical campus.
You also do pronoun trainings around the BUSPH campus. Can you talk more about those?
As part of being a cis-gender ally who holds a lot of privilege as a white, queer-identified woman and as a staff person at the school, I have offered to support faculty, staff, and students in understanding how to be more inclusive of the trans community by amplifying the voices of members of the trans community. The trainings are built off of best practices and data from organizational leaders like Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, as well as other universities who have been doing this work for a while. In addition, I have incorporated the lived experience and requests for specific things that allies’ can do to improve inclusion in our community from our own BUSPH students who identify as transgender and non-binary.
Several years ago, Dean Galea asked Professor Ulrike Boehmer and me to give a brief talk about gender identity and the use of pronouns as an inclusion intervention in a School Assembly. This was a great start that sparked many conversations within the school. And I will be giving version 2.0 of this talk at the School Assembly on October 23, 2018.
Since then, I have provided information and resources to a variety of faculty and staff at SPH. Recently, the Activist Lab invited me to train their staff and faculty on the use of pronouns as an inclusion intervention as well. In addition, I incorporate a brief version of this training into every Career PREP course that I teach, both to introduce this to students who may not know about it, to set the tone of a culture of inclusion in my class and to inform students that this is a best practice in public health practice in the workforce.
In addition, I offer a workshop on “Being Out in the Workforce” every semester for queer-identified folks because much of the common career advice for cisgender and heterosexual people is either not applicable or highly nuanced – from what to wear to interviews, to when to share your pronouns with an employer, to talking about what you did over the weekend at the water cooler. The stakes can be higher in the process of finding work and then being successful in a work environment that has good intentions of being inclusive of everyone, but in practice falls short.
Why are these trainings important?
My role as Career Advisor at BUSPH affords me the privilege and honor of hearing students’ experiences every day as I advise them on their careers. In that role, I hear regularly that students’ experiences – both inside and outside of the classrooms – have left them feeling that the school has not been as inclusive as they had hoped it would be. They are mis-gendered by faculty, by staff, by their peers, and even when they have gently corrected the people involved, future interactions have not always changed or gotten better.
Why should everyone be educated on this? Our students are telling us that getting their pronouns right and not mis-gendering them is critical for their humanity. It is essential for them to be seen as a respected human being. That is the reason we need to do this work.
What is your hope for BUSPH in terms of diversity and inclusion, especially as it relates to LGBT+ students, faculty, and staff?
Recently at the All School Retreat, 3 recent graduates who are cisgender, women of color spoke to the school about how their experiences in the classroom were different from students with other identities. They shared that many of the data used in courses reflects people’s lived experiences that are in that classroom, and we heard then and continue to hear from students that there is a missed opportunity to connect how hearing that data might impact a student in that classroom. I’ve heard this feedback from our queer- and trans-identified students as well. So, with our diverse student body, we have to know and recognize what the impact of this is when we talk about public health data and how our minority populations, underserved populations, queer folks, trans folks, how they are suffering huge health disparities and what that means to hear that in a classroom taught and surrounded by folks in the dominant culture.
Interestingly, I am hearing from many employers who are public health practitioners that it is an essential public health practice to understand one’s role in oppression. We all have a role in structural oppression, so understanding our own role and how we can combat that oppression, as well as being able to talk about it, is very important. I am seeing this play out as interview questions for people who are graduating and looking to get into the public health workforce. They are having to talk about their role in racism, their impact as a white person, their privilege. I also see this in queer communities, talking about being cisgender and being an ally of a queer community. Knowing your role in this privilege is an issue that cuts across all certificates, all learning, all degrees. This is about being a good public health practitioner and a good human in the world.
What do you think needs to happen for us, whether it be the BUSPH community or LGBT+ allies, to make these hopes a reality?
We are making progress. More awareness-raising in the community at large, more behavior change among allies, more amplifying the voices of people who are oppressed. In the last two years, there have been some pretty vocal intersectional movements growing (#TransIsBeautiful, #BlackLivesMatter, #StartNow, #MeToo, #TimesUp, #BelieveSurvivors) and I think those larger efforts are reflected in the activism of our students and community.
I love the BUSPH community, and I think our students are incredible advocates and we learn as much from them as they learn from our faculty and staff. I think this is a wonderful place to do anti-oppression work because it is a learning environment for all. I feel very energized by it right now.