As part of the Social Exclusion & Discrimination Unit, today we were looking at the LGBTQ+ community. This included looking at this community of people from a historical context and a current political context but also looking at what is being said in the media, what we can learn from people’s lived experience and what we can do as social workers, activists and allies.
As part of this session with the Level 4’s (year 1) we had student Tommy Guy come and support the teaching who is a Level 6 (Year 3) student. As part of his social justice project Tommy looked at Transgender Rights… We explored this topic with students and discussed some of their biases, some of society’s biases and how as practitioners we can support people who are Transgender.
See below some feedback from the session:
Student Joscelyn stated that she thought that ‘there was more people than 1% that were transgender. I thought it was more about 10 to 15% of our population. So that was interesting.’
Student Emily stated that she thought is was ‘interesting to see how there’s still a lot of people that have quite old fashioned views in my opinion and there’s a lot of people that still have an issue with transgender people.’
Student (anon) stated that ‘I was really surprised by some of the students Social Work views from the year before. I would not have thought that they were social work students, as if that is what you think why on earth are you doing this course.’
Student Ivor stated that he didn’t know that using the word queer was now allowed to be used as a positive inclusive term.
Student Charlie stated that ‘It was very interesting learning about LGBTQ+ in more depth and detail. I think certain topics will remain controversial for some time, such as LGBTQ+ people in sport. But I believe in equality. And learning more about the LGBTQ+ community helped me deepen my understanding of the topic.’
Tommy stated that ‘I have really enjoyed working with the first years and sharing my social justice project with them on trans human rights. We had some good discussions and a real range of opinions. Hopefully everyone will be able to go away and think about trans rights a bit more and challenge where their opinions have come from and how this may impact their practice in social work.’
