Keeping Families Together

The Asian And Pacific Islander Family Pride Blog

October 28, 2011

Is The “T” In LGBT More Difficult To Understand Than The “LGB?”

By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

A Blog For Transgender Persons Written By A Professional Ally

      A friend of ours pointed us to Darlene Tando’s Gender Blog. She writes about transgender persons. Tando is a licensed clinical social worker with a private practice in San Diego. Her blog is full of information that furthers our understanding of the fabulous diverse community of which we are a part.

Our son is gay and it took us awhile to wrap our minds around the reality that he is a man who is attracted to other men, but still, he remains a man. We can only imagine how much more difficult it must be for a parent to come to grips fully with a child whose gender identity is different from what they thought it was from birth. The child does not feel like and does not want to be the gender assigned at birth based on observed genetalia.

Meet and Greet and Read To Learn And Understand

We mentioned this before: to understand the new world that opened up when first we learned that our son is gay is difficult. Totally alien concepts are dressed in totally foreign words. Yet, vocabulary must be mastered first before the layers of meaning subsumed in words can be understood. What does it mean to be gay? What is transgender? Bisexual? Questioning? Sometimes we ask ourselves whether it is necessary to learn all those terms and their layered meanings, after all, our son is just gay. But learning all is necessary if ever we want to see discrimination and prejudice based on sexual diversity disappear.

Tando’s September 10 blog has this wonderful explanation:

[An] expectant couple had the ultrasound technician find out the sex of the baby, write it on a card, and the couple didn’t peek at it. . . They gave the card to a bakery, and a special cake was made based on what the card read. At the “Gender Revealing” party, when they cut it open, a pink or a blue cake was discovered, thereby revealing the “gender” of the baby to be. My response? “I went to a party like that! Except they called it a ‘Sex Party’, which is what it was… they were revealing the sex of the baby, not the gender. The true gender won’t be revealed until the baby is much older.”

To those of us for whom the words sex and gender are interchangeable without loss of meaning, this is revealing and a prompt to learn more.

First Comes The Understanding Then The Sharing

A personal appreciation (we are avoiding the word understanding) only goes so far, it is necessary that everybody begin to recognize and appreciate and accept all the diversity that exists around us. We hear and read about the extra difficulties transgender persons have. For example, health insurance plans have an exclusion list for procedures that are not covered. Transgender persons’ needs are usually on those lists. Or, while transitioning, what bathroom at work will they be allowed to use? What about this case: if a biological male whose gender identification is female commits a crime, what prison does he go to? Or should that be: she goes to? According to our friends at the Transgender Law Center, it is usually not even a question: the person goes to a prison that matches his or hers biological sex and all the consequences that that has for the transgender person.

We need to understand first and then we must make others understand. It is the only way to attain equality.

Belinda and John Dronkers-Laureta are board members of Asian & Pacific Islander Family Pride www.apifamilypride.org

 

Keeping Families Together

The Asian And Pacific Islander Family Pride Blog

October 21, 2011

How Do We Make Non-Traditional Families Part Of Everyday Life?

By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

By Making A Film

The Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP) is making a film about API lesbians raising children, either as couples or single parents. It is going to be called Family Blessings. This is the second film in a projected series of four about families headed by lesbians. The first, The Gift of Family, is complete and making the rounds. It is about black lesbians raising children. The third will feature lesbian Latinas and the fourth Native American lesbians.

The objective of the films is to show that non-traditional families exist in our midst and are as normal as traditional families. They are regular households with familiar problems and worries. When we met with QWOCMAP, a recurring conversation point was that the films were QWOCMAP’s answer to “what we learned from Proposition 8.”

By Deeply Learning The Lessons Of Past Campaigns

What we learned from Proposition 8 is that our opposition used the “otherness” of non-traditional families to wage a successful campaign aimed at emotional levers. When Proposition 8 passed, one of our collaborating organizations forwarded a thought provoking Op-Ed by Matt Foreman on why we lost that battle. Foreman, a former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and a program director at the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund when he wrote the piece, writes about the “ick factor.” The “ick factor” is the reality that many people, even those who are pro-equal rights and generally support LGBT issues, remain “deeply uncomfortable with homosexuality and marriage goes right to the heart of their discomfort, given that sex is central to marriage.” The “ick factor” is the reason that there really wasn’t a “movable middle,” those people in the middle of the two extremes who could be persuaded to vote no on proposition 8. Foreman argues that overcoming the “ick factor” cannot be done in the short time span of a campaign, it takes years of

. . . putting our lives, stories, and faces front and center over and over again . . . Most of us [LGBT persons] have seen how taking our lives up close and personal to people around us does, in fact, create change. Moreover, having these direct, real conversations is the only way we’re ever going to squelch the ick and inoculate voters from attacks that exploit it.

By Telling Stories And Showing Pictures

And so we tell stories and QWOCMAP makes films. The four films in the current project all touch on family life, religion, school, community support, Proposition 8 and marriage. The films will be shown around the country in film festivals and become focal points for workshops and panel discussions.

The completed Family Blessings film shows one of the women saying that Proposition 8 and all that that entails is not foremost in her mind. What is foremost in her mind is: Did I put the stuff away in the refrigerator? What did I put in my child’s lunchbox and did she finish it? How terribly mundane and, look at this, they live next door.

Belinda and John Dronkers-Laureta are board members of Asian & Pacific Islander Family Pride www.apifamilypride.org

 

6Keeping Families Together

The Asian And Pacific Islander Family Pride Blog

October 6, 2011

When Coming Out: Know Yourself, Know Your Parents.

By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

An important feature of the workshops we conduct for LGBT people is a question for the participants: “In coming out to your parents what kind of support do you think you need, or, if you are already out, what kind of support did you use?” Over time the answers we collected aren’t all that different from workshop to workshop. But a participant at one workshop surprised us by asking why come out at all? That brought on a lively discussion, and we learned of reasons not to come out. The anticipation of rejection born out by too many actual cases is a real fear. Other reasons were voiced: reluctance to disappoint parents, desire to protect parents from shame, unwillingness to add to parents’ burden providing a future for their children, and “my parents don’t speak English well and I don’t speak [insert an Asian language here].”

Our workshops are based on an LGBT person’s desire to come out. Being closeted is a difficult existence and when a partner enters into the situation, it becomes more difficult still. Testimonies we collected here point toward a desire “to be a whole person and share all of my life.” We began to ask: “If you are out to your parents, why did you decide to come out and what support did you use? If you are not out to your parents, do you think you eventually would want to and what support do you think you’ll need?” Guess what? Over time the answers to either question began to merge. The obstacles for not wanting to come out are by and large the same as the obstacles to coming out. In retrospect, we slapped our foreheads because it should have been obvious, but we learned one important lesson: the decision to come out is personal. We can collect all the testimony we want, distill strategies and variations on those strategies and fill up several forests worth of paper, but in the end the decision to tell parents is personal, intensely so. “My parents are very religious and they are not in good health; I don’t want to lose them now,” is a good reason for a barrier to remain a barrier.

We also conduct workshops for parents of LGBT children. Of course, these are parents who want to understand their new reality; these are not parents who outright reject their LGBT child. One lesson we learned in those workshops is that parents want, and in some cases need, to accept their child. They have a responsibility that they cannot and don’t want to escape. “What happens to my child when I reject him? A child needs his family, otherwise they’d be alone.” The API tenet of the centrality of family in life is an asset. We remember the passionate plea to LGBT children of one parent who had come a ways in the difficult journey: “Give your parents credit for what they can do and are willing to do!” We also learned that parents need time.

When LGBT children want to come out and plan a strategy for doing so, there are many things we can advise and one of them is: know yourself and trust yourself, but equally important, know you parents and give them time.

 

Belinda and John Dronkers-Laureta are board members of Asian & Pacific Islander Family Pride www.apifamilypride.org