“It harms the wellbeing of everyone,” said Laura Wernick, one of the study’s lead authors and an associate professor of social service at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service, located in Manhattan, New York.

The study found that youths exposed to higher levels of such language were less likely to reap the benefits of youth sports environments, particularly self-esteem. The decrease in self-esteem was significantly greater among straight white cisgender boys than any other subgroup, Wernick said.

“The irony of policing masculinity,” they said, “… is that it’s actually having the opposite effect. It’s bringing these kids down.”

It’s not that LGBTQ youth aren’t harmed by such language in youth sports environments. But the effects on those and other marginalized youth are less pronounced, the researchers say, because previous life experience has equipped them with coping mechanisms.

“They may be more adept at dealing with stressors, because they’ve had that experience,” said Derek Tice-Brown, an assistant professor of social service at Fordham and the study’s co-lead author. “It gives them skills to address those issues as they come up. Whereas cisgender straight boys may not have had that experience to develop those skills.”

Such use of anti-LGBTQ language doesn’t hurt just queer and trans youth, Wernick said. “It hurts our community. It hurts all of us.”

But what happens when exclusion arises within those very groups?

A panel of Graduate School of Social Service professors grappled with that and other questions during a virtual event, Exclusion in Queer Spaces, that showed just how multilayered and complex it can be to create a more just and inclusive society.

Hosted by the Office of Alumni Relations, the Aug. 13 event grew out of concerns “that some members of the alumni community may have felt excluded from particular spaces, or alternatively, very included,” said Assistant Professor Sameena Azhar, Ph.D., one of five panelists who offered their views and took questions. Approximately 60 people attended, most of whom were alumni.

Layers of Exclusion

Panelists noted that exclusion can happen on many levels because queer people can have other intersecting identities—based on race, disability, or other traits and life experiences.

“Creating queer spaces [implies] this leaning towards inclusivity, but oftentimes people are still put in boxes within those boxes that they find themselves in,” said Assistant Professor Christopher Curtis, Ph.D. “And because things like privilege are so invisible, and we don’t see how we’re weaponizing that against people who check the same oppressed boxes we do, it is allowed to spread and grow and thrive.”

Another panelist, Associate Professor Laura Wernick, Ph.D., gave an example. One of her research projects, conducted at predominantly white universities in the Midwest, found that group activism helped white LGBTQ students cope with the depression brought on by discrimination.

The story was different, however, for LGBTQ students of color in these groups: Their depression grew worse. “Among students of color in these predominantly white organizations … the marginalization becomes strengthened,” Wernick said in a follow-up interview. Implicit and explicit racial bias exists within many LGBTQ organizations “culturally and politically grounded in [w]hiteness,” notes the 2016 study co-authored by Wernick and published in the Journal of Homosexuality.

The study raises interesting questions about what it means to be a queer organization and the conditions under which it becomes exclusionary, Wernick said.

One solution is having groups on campus for students with multiple identities. “Queer and trans folks of color don’t even have to be participating in it to benefit from it. Knowing it’s there is huge,” she said in the follow-up interview, noting the possibilities for collaboration among such groups on campus to foster greater understanding.

Wernick added that new faculty member Derek Tice-Brown, Ph.D., has taken the lead in forming affinity groups around race, and possibly gender and sexuality, at the Graduate School of Social Service for the coming year.

Queer Spaces and Social Constructs

The talk moved beyond groups and organizations to larger concepts of queer space. Panelist Tina Maschi, Ph.D., an associate professor, defined it as “not just a simple physical type of place, but this field of possibilities”—including genderqueer, gender fluid, and other identities—that allows for a certain amount of artistry.

“I consider myself all of the above plus more,” said Maschi, who uses the pronoun shea+ to indicate that identity. “All of these multiple realities coexist. And that’s queer space for me, and I’m happy to be sharing it with everybody.”

Maschi also noted another form of exclusion. In her own work with LGBTQ elders coming out of prison, shea+ said, “What concerned me the most was they were excluded from the dialogue about [queer] people.” There was also little research on it, which shea+ and her colleagues worked to rectify, Maschi said.

Wernick added that ableism, or discrimination in favor of the able-bodied, “is pervasive in more mainstream queer spaces,” just as it is in many spaces, although other queer communities have taken the lead in emphasizing accessibility, she said.

In fact, groups organized around ability and groups organized around gender and sexuality have common experiences, like “being seen socially or structurally as sick, or as needing to be fixed,” said Assistant Professor Kimberly Hudson, Ph.D.

An answer to that view is the social model of disability or ability, in which disability is viewed as a societal construct rather than a medical condition. This model can be applied to gender and sexuality as well, Hudson said.

“That really counters these deficit-based models of thinking about these experiences,” Hudson said. “It shifts the focus away from people’s bodies or people’s behaviors or identities and really focuses on systems and structures as being what is sick, and what is needing to be fixed.”

Azhar noted the perversity of a diagnosis being required before people can receive services related to gender identity.

“By giving this diagnosis, I can create a pathway for people to be able to access hormones or gender reassignment surgery or other kinds of benefits that they may otherwise not be able to receive,” she said. “It’s a real Catch-22 for clinical social workers, where you know that in order to give folks a pathway to access, you may be reifying a construct that you don’t believe in.”

Toward Greater Inclusion

In response to a question about how best to limit exclusionary behavior, Curtis replied, “Conversations like this. That’s how we start.”

“We have to keep this conversation open. We have to keep the conversation moving,” and accept that our own experiences and perceptions are not universal, he said.

“We don’t even see ourselves as being wrong or judgmental or discriminatory, because we assume that everybody functions the way that we do and thinks about things the way that we do,” he said. “So we have to be willing to unlearn many of the bad habits that we’ve picked up in personal and professional spaces.”

“There has to be a willingness to be uncomfortable,” he said. “We have to be ready to have those uncomfortable conversations and be wrong and not know and be confused. That’s how we learn.”

Read more about the panelists, their research, and their projects at Fordham and in the community.

Leonard Cassuto, Ph.D., professor of English and American Studies and author of The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard, 2015)

“At the top of my summer book stack is Laura Kipnis’ new book,  Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (Harper, 2017). Kipnis’ investigation of the Title IX excesses on many American campuses has a personal side: When she wrote an article about a Title IX investigation at her own university, she found herself the subject of an investigation, too–and that inquiry helped to inspire this book. This is a book about current events, indeed.”

Bill Baker, Ph.D., director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy, and Education

“My summer reading gets a double dip as I read sitting in the lantern room of a lighthouse we care for in Nova Scotia (Henry Island). This year I’ll be reading Enough Said (St. Martin’s Press, 2016) by Mark Thompson, the New York Times Company president and former BBC Director General. He has written a powerful book about what’s gone wrong with the language of politics. I’ll also be reading The Naked Now (The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009) by Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar who writes some of the most powerful meditative philosophy I’ve ever read. A lighthouse is a good place to read about God and the spiritual light.”

James McCartin, Ph.D., associate professor of theology

“As a father of three young kids, I’ve grown to appreciate books that offer a window into how children see the world–maybe in an effort to figure out my own kids. Therefore, my summer reading season begins with two childhood memoirs. The first is Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years a-Growing (J.S. Sanders Books, 1998), set on a remote island in the southwest of Ireland a century ago, and the second will be Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana (Free Press, 2004) which narrates his story as an immigrant growing up between Cuba and the United States in the 1960s. Then, I’ll pick up a book I started last summer but put down as the school year began, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. As to Dostoyevsky, I’ve long been embarrassed to say that I’ve never read him, so now’s my chance to put the embarrassment behind me.”

Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., John D. Boyd, S.J. Chair in Poetic Imagination and the director of Poets Out Loud

“A growing pile of books in my field has been staring at me balefully from my night table for some time, and before they topple over I hope particularly to read more  sections of two of them that I have dipped into only briefly before: Brian Cummings’ The Literary Culture of the Reformation (Oxford, 2002) and Reuben Brower’s Fields of Light (Greenwood Press, 1980). I am in the middle of an extraordinary magical realist novel, George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, 2017), as well as some volumes of poetry, such as Alicia Ostriker’s latest, Waiting for the Light (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).

Christina M. Greer, Ph.D., associate professor and associate chair of the political science department

“Since I am preparing to write a lot this summer, I tend to read fiction to help me ‘hear’ language better. Right now I am finishing a series of short stories by Mia Alvar, In the Country (Oneworld Publications, 2016) about Filipino migrations and relationships. I plan on finishing Luther Campbell’s’ memoir The Book of Luke: My Fight for Truth, Justice, and Liberty City (HarperCollins, 2015) about Liberty City, Miami, Florida. He’s a controversial figure, but his analysis of residential racism and segregation in Miami is fascinating. I am also going to read Underground Airlines (Random House, 2016) by Ben Winters, an alternative history of life in the U.S. had the Civil War never happened. [And] since I am teaching Congress in the fall, I’ll likely begin rereading Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate (Vintage Books, 2003), about my favorite president and brilliant congressman, LBJ.”  

Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history

“My summer reading list is heavy with books on cities, a topic I’ve written a lot about. At the top is Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (Simon & Schuster, 2017), a novel set in New York in the 1940s, and I’m getting ready to devour it as soon as I get through my end-of-year reports. David Lida is a Mexico-City-based writer; I can dip into his book of short essays, Las llaves de la ciudad (Sexto Piso, 2008) [Keys to the City], whenever I need to be transported to one of my favorite cities in the world. And then there’s Small Spaces, Beautiful Kitchens (Rockport Publishers, 2003) by Tara McLellan; I’m downsizing to an apartment and trying to figure out how to cram all my cooking gear (fermentation is much on my mind) into a smaller space.”

Robert Grimes, S.J., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center

“The number one book on my summer reading list is Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty (Scriber, 2017), by Dorothy Day’s granddaughter Kate Hennessy.  When I was a high school student at Xavier, we sometimes went to the Catholic Worker House on the Lower East Side, and I had the honor to meet Dorothy Day a couple of times.  When Kate Hennessy spoke at the Fordham Rose Hill campus this year, I was unable to attend, so I’ll make up for missing that event with reading her book.”

Laura Wernick, Ph.D., professor of social work in the Graduate School of Social Service

“Given our political climate and the rise of the alt-right, coupled with ongoing investigations and hearings surrounding Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign, my reading list is focused upon understanding this context and history. Having just read Dark Money and Trump Revealed (Doubleday, 2016), my summer reading list has included All the President’s Men (Pocket Books, 2005) and The Final Days (Simon & Schuster, 2005), along with Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face (Riverhead Books, 2012), a critical read to understand the rise and power of Putin. I plan on following this with a series of edited volumes about hope and moving forward from the resistance movement.”  

Mary Beth Werdel, Ph.D., associate professor of pastoral counseling and director of the Pastoral Care and Counseling program at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education

“I will be reading The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015) by Bessel van der Kolk. The book examines holistic approaches to trauma work. I’m interested in the way that spirituality relates to stress related growth, which is the examination of positive psychological consequences of moving through stress. I have a book contract related to the topic. This book touches on related themes of trauma and whole body healing.”

–Veronika Kero

“It seems obvious, but when you control for the safety, the students actually performed better,” said Laura Wernick, Ph.D., the study’s principal investigator and an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS). “And ‘safe’ is the keyword here, because no matter where you are in the political spectrum you wouldn’t want kids beating each other up.”

The study, “Gender Identity Disparities in Bathroom Safety and Wellbeing Among High School Students,” employed a “climate survey” conducted in 2014 of five public high schools in southeast Michigan to examine the relationship between students’ gender identity, how safe they felt using bathroom facilities, and their schoolwork. The article was co-authored with her research assistant Alex Kulick, Ph.D., and Matthew Chin, Ph.D, assistant professor of social work at GSS.

“The experience that trans youth have with bathrooms has an impact on their grades and their self esteem,” she said. “This is such an important bodily function, that it’s going to have an effect when you place a student in a situation where they have to hold it in because they’re afraid.”

Very few empirical studies have focused on this issue within the context of high schools, said Wernick.

The study’s questionnaire was generated by the students themselves in a process known as community-based participatory action research. The teens had participated in a study before, but Wernick said they felt the questions hadn’t addressed all their concerns. Working with Wernick, the teens created an organizing model that would ultimately cross multiple identities—race, class, gender, and religion, to name a few.

“It’s an interesting model because we have young people from the schools, and they can word the questions to that particular school,” she said. “It speaks to the power of youth taking leadership.”

Through a coalition of several queer/straight alliance clubs in and around Detroit, the investigators were able to survey two rural, two suburban, and one urban high school.

In determining each school’s climate, the study gauged the extent to which the young people experienced microaggressions or outright slurs, physical harassment, or both. An earlier version of the study was conducted in 2007, but this 2014 survey was revised to incorporate more more questions on gender identity, bathrooms, and self-esteem issues. 

In the three years that have passed from the initial survey to its publication this month, the nation has seen a sea change in politics, not all of it favorable to transgender students, noted Wernick.

“What I’m hearing from the young people is that the current climate is raising a lot more concerns, there’s a bit of a backlash,” said Wernick. However, some schools are moving forward to protect the teens, she said.

Wernick said it was a “negotiated process” getting the study, which was conducted during class time, in through the school administrations. “Some schools were excited, some were a little wary, and some clearly didn’t want to go with it.”

Although the survey was limited to 1,000 students in southeast Michigan, Wernick said the rural-suburban-urban context makes it a microcosm.

“It’s an interesting snapshot of the United States.”

And she has studied and written about an organizational model that helps wealthy, young activists get involved in causes they care about without wielding their considerable power. (The resulting research was published in Social Work Research this year.)

“I look at how people with power and privilege can get involved in social justice movement without replicating existing power structures, such as coming in and taking over, and thinking that they need to be the leader,” she said.

In Wernick’s work, everything from the initial questions to the presentation of the study’s findings to the use of the data to effect change is done in very close consultation with those being studied. The process is called community-based participatory action research.

“It places the power of research and knowledge in the hands of communities most impacted,” she said. “It’s a way to use research to bring people together to assess what they’ve collected and then use that knowledge as an organizing tool.”

Wernick’s research began to gel when she moved from New York City to Ann Arbor in 1998 to work on her doctoral degree at the University of Michigan. Once there, people who knew of her activist work contacted her to help a group of LGBTQ teens who were experiencing bullying in school. The teens had been part of a study before, but Wernick said that they had found the questions from the previous study irrelevant to their day-to-day lives.

This time, with Wernick, they would develop the questions.

The students were interested in creating a survey that addressed bullying, issues of heterosexual and cisgender normativity, and how the school’s emotional climate might affect homophobia and transphobia. They also wanted the survey to be about race and physical appearance.

Wernick obliged by working with the youth to create a questionnaire and organizing model that would ultimately cross multiple identities—race, class, gender, and religion to name a few.

To date, Wernick and the youth have co-authored and published eight papers on their project. The initial survey produced an article that was published in the Children and Youth Services Review in 2012.

Besides their activist interests, the teens became interested in the research process as well. “They wanted to understand what statistical significance meant, what bell curves were,” she said. “They learned how to use Stata, a statistical software, how to do T tests, and they understood what a regression model is. This is stuff that these kids became interested in!”

One student-participant became her research assistant; he is now earning his doctoral degree in sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Another is working his law degree at Harvard.

But while there were clear educational benefits to the student-participants, it wasn’t the primary purpose of the study, she said.

After the first survey was completed, the students opted for an unconventional approach to distributing its findings. They used theater to spread the results. Wernick compared their effort to the Theater of the Oppressed—using theater as storytelling in order to promote social and political change.

Students wanted to present the play to their peers at the high school and middle school levels. But given the sensitive subject matter, Wernick said that they had to present it first to the school board, then the school district principals, and then teachers and social workers before finally getting to present it to their classmates. The process offered yet another opportunity to collect data, as each audience completed a survey about their attitudes towards the subject matter before and after the performance.

In one scene a student would act out walking down a hallway and hearing someone say, “That’s so gay.” The actor would then portray his inner feelings while another actor would deliver the cold hard data: 76 percent of gay students experience bullying and harassment.

Wernick said the process provided several points of data collection, furthering opportunities for the youth to reflect upon their actions and use the data in their ongoing work. The initial “climate survey” assessed the bullying, harassment, and microaggressions that LGBTQ youth were experiencing. A qualitative survey before and after the show assessed the impact that the study and the show had on the adult and student audiences, as well as the youth participants. Finally, another study LINK looked at the how the community action affected the students own sense of well- being (That paper, was published in Journal of Community Psychology, 2014).

Needless to say, attitudes shifted from before and after the performance. The results found their way into “Theater and Dialogue to Increase Youth’s Intentions to Advocate for LGBTQQ People,” published this year in Research on Social Work Practice.

“It was institutional change, organizational change, and personal change,” said Wernick, barely containing her excitement. “It was all these things!”