Hopkins hosted the annual B’more Proud LGBTQIA Leadership Summit this past Saturday in the Glass Pavilion. Several hundred people attended the conference, which was themed “Breaking Boundaries: The Intersection of our Identities.” Those who came for the event included both students and visitors from the surrounding area. The event featured two keynote speakers, Julia Serano and Zach Wahls, who spoke about their personal experiences combating prejudice.
Conference Chairs Rodolfo Finocchi and Anastasia Pierron opened the summit by welcoming opening speaker Joanne Rosen to the stage. Rosen, a discrimination attorney and the wife of Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels, gave an anecdote that chronichled the opening her eyes to the identity issues marginalized groups continue to struggle with today.
“A few years ago, I met a student named Joel,” Rosen said. “He was a neuroscience major and played the viola beautifully, and during Thanksgiving break his sophomore year, he came out as gay to his family.”
Joel, she said, was worried about coming out because he did not want to be known as “Joel the Gay Guy,” and lose all his other faces, such as “Joel the Neuroscientist, Joel the Violist and Joel the Fraternity Brother.” Rosen argued that her example highlights a problem in society, where marginalized groups of people are automatically grouped together as a single entity.
“On a personal level, I see the power of a broadened perspective of identity,” she said. “Who is a wife, who is a husband, who is a spouse ... what intimate relationships are considered legitimate?”
Leaving that question unanswered, Rosen introduced the conference’s first keynote speaker, Julia Serano. A self described “bisexual fem tomboy transsexual woman,” Serano holds doctorate degrees in biochemistry and molecular biophysics from Columbia University, and is now a trans-bi activist, biologist and author of “Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity”. Born male, she began medically transitioning and identifying as a transwoman in 2001.
“I call myself a fem tomboy to refer to my own gender expression,” Serano said. “People used to assume I was gay when I was still male. Now I get referred to as a dyke, so it’s cool because I guess I’m queer no matter what gender I am.”
Serano spoke to the audience at length on the conference’s theme of breaking boundaries and specifically focused on dispelling the notion of a gender binary.
“Sometimes people take these really liberating ideas and use them to box people in,” she said. “Underlying assumptions are used against groups that are already marked and accuses that group of being oppressive. It assumes that we can change our gender and sexual expressions in order to accommodate politics.”
Throughout her speech, she stressed that one of the main problems faced by the LGBT community is the general lack of awareness about marginalized groups of people that the majority of the population has. Cisgendered, she made clear to the audience, does not mean transgendered. The majority of people, she noted, are uninformed about facts such as this difference.
In her conclusion, she gave what she called “A Day in the Life of Julia,” cataloging all the assumptions people made about her based upon her outward appearance.
After Serano finished, the conference broke into three rounds of breakout sessions, each approximately an hour long. During the sessions, attendees formed into small groups to identify and attempt to solve issues that lesbian, gay, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual groups of people face today.
After the sessions and a catered lunch, the group reunited in the Glass Pavilion to hear from Zach Wahls, the day’s final speaker. Wahls is an LGBTQIA activist and the son of two lesbian mothers. He is also the author of “My Two Moms,” a memoir that earned him critical acclaim. He has also appeared as a guest on the “Daily Show” with Jon Stewart as well as “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
Wahls rose to fame in 2011 at the age of 19 when he addressed the Iowa House Judiciary Committee in a public hearing on proposed constitutional amendments banning gay marriage in the state. Recorded in a video that later went viral, Wahls spoke passionately against the ban and segregation between gay and straight people.
“The sexual orientation of my parents has had zero effect on my character,” Wahls said at the time. ..
With the stated mission of raising awareness about and the visibility of marginalized groups in the Baltimore metro area, B’more Proud seeks to serve the city by providing support to those marginalized by cultural and social biases. On its website, the group says that it wishes to encourage student involvement on their respective campuses, cultivate leadership skills and knowledge of effective organizing philosophies and provide an opportunity for socializing and networking amongst LGBTQIA student leaders, organizations and institutions in the Baltimore area.
“The B’More Proud LGBTQIA Leadership Summit will create a competent and empowered population of LGBTQIA student leaders, engaged in a formal city-wide LGBTQIA student leadership alliance that creates a welcoming and supportive environment for LGBTQIA college students and promotes service within the larger Baltimore community, someday expanding to include all colleges and universities in the Mid-Atlantic region,” the website states.
