Societies: WE I YOU HE SHE
In April of this year, AltSU entered the TOP-100 of universities in the world of the prestigious British ranking agency Times Higher Education "University Impact Rankings 2020", taking 95th place in it. It includes universities that contribute to the implementation of the UN sustainable development goals. One of them is gender equality.
November 16 is celebrated around the world as the World Day of Tolerance, or International Day for Tolerance, proclaimed by the "Declaration of Tolerance" by UNESCO. According to the definition of the Declaration, tolerance means “respect, acceptance and correct understanding of the rich diversity of cultures of our world, our forms of self-expression and ways of manifesting human individuality”.
Acceptance and understanding of the LGBT community is one of the controversial and complex issues of modern society. The LGBT equal rights movement began in the late 1960s, but homosexual, bisexual and transgender people still face stereotypes, discrimination, and harassment, often ending in physical violence. For Science decided to learn more about this topic and find out how comfortable life is for LGBT people at our university.
LGBT - What do these letters mean?
The acronym LGBT is an umbrella term for a wide range of gender and sexual identities. By the way, the main symbol of the community - the rainbow - came from the hippie, as a symbol of unification and equality of different people.
From the scientific point of view
Now medicine does not define homosexuality as a deviation from the "norm": in 1990, the World Health Organization excluded it from the International Classification of Diseases. Recently, transgenderness was also removed from there - now this feature is not officially considered a mental disorder.
In addition, in the study of LGBT people, two difficult definitions for the average person are “sex” and “gender”. Sex is a biological identity of a person, a set of certain anatomical, genetic, and other signs by which a person is determined.
Gender, if opposed to sex, can be defined as a social trait - it is a range of characteristics related to masculinity and femininity. The difference between sex and gender creates a kind of "conflict" and a break in the standard, so it is difficult for many to understand the logic of another, different from his or her own, sexual orientation.
From the leagal point of view
It would seem that the problem of non-acceptance of LGBT people by society does not exist, but this is not so. In many countries, including Russia, the position of this community remains difficult. So only heterosexual marriages are considered legal in our country and there is a law on “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors” (Article 6.21 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation). Therefore, LGBT people often organize parades and actions to attract attention and protect their rights.
This state of affairs is also dangerous for LGBT people because they have to suppress and hide their nature from the very first moment of realizing themselves; many receive rejection in their families, but are afraid to seek help, developing, like representatives of traditional sexual orientations, many complexes and problems.
Scientist's opinion
Ekaterina Prisendorf, postgraduate student at the Institute of Psychology at AltSU, has been studying the characteristics of adolescent gender identity since 2016. Ekaterina was motivated to tackle this topic ... by her students, who often asked for help with issues of gender self-determination. She also works in the investigative committee for cases against the sexual inviolability of children. At work, a graduate student observes a tendency of an increase in cases of pedophilia, violence, and depraved actions specifically towards children, which also prompted her to study this issue more carefully.
Ekaterina began her research with her master's work, in which she studied the factors that, in principle, affect gender identity. Work with adolescents has shown that the development of a child is primarily influenced by internal, personal factors: features of intra-family upbringing, features of interaction with the opposite sex, self-esteem.
However, one should distinguish between general self-acceptance and sexual orientation. For example, a girl feels more confident dressing up like a boy, and vice versa - this is the only way she feels real, becomes more confident, accepts herself in general. Factors influencing sexual orientation may be similar to factors of general formation, but sometimes experienced psychological or physiological abuse falls on this list. Then, in a change of orientation, people try to find a solution to their problems: for example, a wife was beaten by her husband all her life, therefore, in order to no longer face violence from men, she becomes sexually oriented towards women. The reverse can also happen.
University
There are representatives of the LGBT community among the students of our university. They willingly told their stories.
One of them, M, is openly positioning his gender identity.
" I am gay, I realized and accepted it at the age of 15. I do not hide anything, but I also don’t tell everyone - and this is normal. First of all, I do not want those with whom I communicated to feel some kind of understatement. My group also knows about my orientation, and, I believe, most of the teachers”, says M.
Another student, B, even in the elementary grades of school began to understand that "something is not right."
"Then I did not yet know that there are people like me. I tried to understand myself why I was different from others, I thought that maybe I was sick”, recalls B. “I was considering becoming religious or undergoing treatment in a psychiatric hospital. Now everything is fine - having entered the university, I returned to singing and music, which I always loved. And my friends accept me for who I am, and even if they don't support LGBT people in general, they still support me”.
"By the way, recently there was an interesting case with LGBT people related to the university. During the exam, which was held via video link, I accidentally lit the LGBT flag hanging on the wall. But the teacher absolutely did not react to this, and I was calm, because I knew for sure that she was very tolerant of LGBT people (once this topic was discussed in lessons)".
“We LGBT people are sometimes demonized. We are different and unknown to everyone, and the unknown always scares people. Once I opened up to my classmate, with whom we talked for a long time. He was shocked, he did not speak to me for a day. But later we restored communication, and he admitted that I helped him understand LGBT people, that we are good, adequate, talented and not dangerous. It seems to me that people are becoming more progressive, and the old harsh stereotypes are leaving. I would like to believe that over time our society will free itself from them completely and will see that absolutely all people are cool and unique!”
Out of 111 interviewed people - subscribers of the For Science group on VKontakte, 67 people accept and approve of the LGBT community, but not all of them openly express their position. Representatives of this community believe that the main approval and acceptance of the LGBT society is simply to provide an opportunity for people belonging to this community to calmly go about their business and their lives. This can become the basis for the disappearance of many irrelevant stereotypes and, possibly, will reduce social tensions and the number of crimes, and the new generation will be truly educated and tolerant of all people.
BTW
In difficult situations, LGBT + representatives can contact the Russian LGBT Network. It is an interregional social movement created in 2016 and the largest human rights organization in Russia. In 2010, the Russian LGBT Network opened a Hotline to support people of the LGBT + community and their loved ones. The project team includes professional psychologists from different parts of the world who provide free consultations and assistance to people in solving their problems.
Hotline phone: 8-800-555-73-74, project website:https://lgbtnet.org/.
Yulia Abramova