The Art of Effective Facilitation

Chapter 4: Developing Gender Inclusive-Facilitation

This chapter aims at ensuring that a facilitation space makes everyone's identities feel addressed properly in discussion and education. This chapter specifically focuses on "transgender or gender variant" identities. Though these identities do play an important role with binary gender identities, there is an emphasis on making sure that non-binary gender issues are addressed.

The main concept that I learned from this chapter really just put a face on a familiar evil that I have been learning about for a while. Like the author, I too have been grouping transgender and gender variant issues under the umbrella of sexism or cissexism. This chapter used a new term that I don't think that I have ever encountered before which is genderism. Gendersism by definition is the belief or assumption that are only two and can only be two genders. I think that this is a vital distinction from sexism and cissexism because I believe that both of those terms continue to reinforce the belief that there are only two genders. Even for gender queer or non-gender conforming folks we tend to describe their characteristics based on the masculinity to femininity scale. This scale has been helpful for some and has been helpful for the education on people's gender expressions. But, I think in social justice education we neglect to acknowledge that this scale is limiting to the possibility of gender expression and gender identities. The exact thing that I am angered by, Lisa Landerman highlights as the "forced social labeling process." In order to continue making RAPP a more inclusive space I need to keep in mind and remind others to continue to be cognizant of how other's identify and to not necessarily use the skewed systems that have already been constructed to shape their perspectives.