Download Otter for your meeting notes

S11 E17 Jeannie Gainsburg Discusses LGBTQ+ Inclusion and Allyship in Education | Otter.ai

S11 E17 Jeannie Gainsburg Discusses LGBTQ+ Inclusion and Allyship in Education

Tim Villegas1h 14min

Tim Villegas

00:02

Hi friends, it's Tim Villegas from the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education and you've hit play on thinking cluesive. Our podcast that brings you conversations about inclusive education and what inclusion looks like in the real world. What do you think it means to be an ally? I know that sometimes, I have not been the best ally to disability communities, and LGBTQIA plus communities, there is still so much for me to learn, which is why the conversation with our guests this week, I think will be very helpful to us. Jeanne Gainsbourg is an advocate, author, educational trainer, and consultant in the field of LGBTQ plus inclusion and effective allyship. She is the founder of savvy ally action, a small business that offers fun, accessible and encouraging workshops, and videos on how to be an ally to the LGBTQ plus communities. Before forming the company. She spent 15 years working for the out Alliance, the LGBTQ plus Center in Rochester, New York. Jeanne and I discuss our personal journeys to becoming allies, and the importance of disability and LGBTQ plus inclusion. Jeanne shares her experiences and insights on how to be an effective ally, including tips for respectful conversations and using gender neutral language. We also discussed the evolving nature of LGBTQ plus initialisms and the significance of pronouns and creating inclusive spaces. Before we get to our interview today, I wanted to connect the dots between disability and LGBTQ plus communities. For some of you, it totally will be obvious but for others, you may be wondering, why are we covering the topic of LGBTQ plus inclusion at all? So I want to share something with you from the Human Rights Campaign. LGBTQ plus people are more likely to be disabled than non LGBTQ plus people. The duality of their identities as LGBTQ plus and disabled increases the amount of discrimination and bias they face in their daily lives, at school, at the doctor's, or at work. The barriers disabled LGBTQ plus people face start early in life. Disabled, LGBTQ plus youth are bullied in school at elevated rates, which can lead to adverse outcomes such as dropping out of school, and in healthcare settings disabled LGBTQ plus people face higher risk of discrimination than both their cisgender and heterosexual peers with disabilities and their LGBTQ plus peers without disabilities, which can cause them to avoid care and lead to unmet health needs and greater health risks. Disabled LGBTQ plus people are also more likely to face adverse economic outcomes such as poverty, due to earning less for equal work, facing higher unemployment or lacking access to inclusive workplace benefits. Taking together these troubling trends that serve as a call to action for educators, service providers, health care professionals and employers to create more inclusive environments for disabled, LGBTQ plus people throughout life in all spaces of daily living. After the break my interview with Jeanne Gainsbourg and for free time this week, I have a bonus conversation with Taslan Magnussen from Penn America, who chats with me about the troubling trend of book banning in the United States were overwhelmingly the book bans target books on race, or racism, or featuring characters of color as well as books with LGBTQ plus characters.

Tim Villegas

04:26

Jeanne Gainsbourg Welcome to the thinking cluesive podcast.

Unknown Speaker

04:29

Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

Tim Villegas

04:31

A lot of people asked me, Tim, why is disability and inclusion advocacy important to you? And what I say is I don't feel like I have a very good answer for you because I went to private school. I wasn't exposed to anything like special education or even the concept of inclusive education until college until I started training as a teacher. And my parents aren't educators. I have a cousin with a developmental disability does civility and inclusion. And also, as we're going to talk about LGBTQIA, inclusion, it's just something that was maybe present but wasn't emphasized. And the biggest reason why I do this work and why I'm so glad to talk with people like you is that once I got into schools, and I realized, wow, there there are people right now, because they are different from the mainstream and quote unquote, normal. They're being discriminated against. They're being separated, they're being treated differently, and not in a good way. And that just seems so like an injustice. Right? And so when I read the preface of your book, almost like, wow, Gina, you didn't have a connection to this community, it was the same sort of thing. You came to it a different way. So help us understand that

Speaker 1

05:58

there are so many similarities in our stories. You're correct about that, Tim? So let me just start by saying, Hi, everyone. My name is Jeannie, my pronouns are she her and hers. My story is very similar to yours in that I grew up in a pretty straight cisgender world. I mean, of course, I didn't, but I mean, as far as people being out, you know, like I graduated from high school in 1981. And there wasn't a single out LGBTQ plus person graduating alongside of me now later in life, I found out that I had tons of friends who were part of the communities but just didn't know it. In college was the first time that I met out folks who were part of the communities. And despite that, I always just felt like LGBTQ plus inclusion was a no brainer. I grew up in a very liberal household in New Jersey, where the word gay wasn't considered a naughty word. For example, like my parents would just talk about gay as as they would any other word. So there was no shame or secrecy around it. And I just never could really understand why people got their panties in such a bunch over people being LGBTQ plus, I didn't do anything about that, however, and part of that was what you're talking about Tim's I didn't have any connection into the community. There was no one in my family who identified as part of the LGBTQ plus communities, I had no close friends, and I wasn't even sure I'd be welcome in the movement. As an ally. I didn't even know the word ally, to be honest, back then, when I was younger, not in that context, in the social justice context, that that may seem strange for people now, because it's so such a common word. And we all understand what it means. But at the time, there really wasn't a that word was I wasn't aware of that word. I wasn't sure there'd be a role for me to play. So it took me a long time to become actively involved as an LGBTQ plus ally.

Tim Villegas

07:45

But you said that you didn't have a connection. So what was the thing that that really propelled you into this work?

Processing audio...