Transgender Awareness Week 2017 started on Monday and the NC State GLBT Center has plans for events throughout the week for all students who are interested in exploring the topic of gender, starting Tuesday night. Andy DeRoin, programs coordinator for the GLBT Center, sat down with Technician to discuss how the center plans to engage with students through workshops, guest speakers and a reflection on violence against transgender people on Transgender Day of Remembrance on Nov. 20. For a full list of events and times, check the event schedule.

Could you take us through the theme of this year’s Transgender Awareness Week, “Dismantling Gender Roles,” and why it was chosen?

This year has been about looking at people’s relationship with their own gender, looking at the impact of gender on people’s lived experiences and multiple iterations of the impact of people’s lived experiences. All of that culminated into this theme of dismantling gender roles just because it seemed a little more accessible to folks. We are looking to have conversations about what gender means to people.

Sometimes jumping in and talking about gender is really abstract, so looking at it in terms of ‘what roles are we socialized to perform,’ is a better starting, potentially.

Could you take us through each of the events planned throughout the week?

Today is Queer Memoir. We’re going to be having a virtual workshop with Kelli Dunham from New York City. She’ll be Skyping in and conducting the workshop on a series of reflective poems [and writing prompts]. I’ve seen her at different conferences and it’s a really great experience for everyone in the room to sit and reflect about their relationship with whatever the topic is. Our topic is gender, clearly [laughs]. She’ll walk folks through the first part of what Queer Memoir is supposed to be with walking folks through prompts.

[Wednesday] is Navigating Barriers While a Target: North Carolina Results of the U.S. Trans Survey. In 2015, the U.S. Trans Survey results were published and that looked at a group of folks all across the country who identified as trans in some way — 26,000 people, which is a historic number — and they’ve just started releasing state data. They’ve also released different reports on people of color. We will be looking at different lived experiences of trans folks, different issues folks face and then looking at what are folks facing in North Carolina.

Thursday is a busy day. We have a workshop on the impacts of sexism, heterosexism and trans oppression. Normally, when people talk about systems of oppression, they are talking about them all individually, but sexism, heterosexism and trans oppression kind of culminate in different ways for different people. It’s important to look at them together.

We also have an open Social Justice Cohort discussion. That is a new program that the GLBT Center has started this semester. Basically, we have gathered a dedicated group of people to come together and talk about different social justice issues. In the past, we’ve talked about colonialism and whitewashing in Hollywood and different issues. This cohort meetup will be open to anybody and will be looking at trans oppression and the different tropes around the trans experience.

Friday, we’re going to be looking at a new research book by Monique Morris and the book is called “Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools.” It is a very comprehensive research-based overview of all the ways that black girls are marginalized in K-12. It also looks at the school-to-confinement pipeline and the different ways that black girls are pushed into different levels of confinement. The book is looking at cis and trans girls and the different issues faced by them. It is part of expanding the narrative that we don’t need to be looking only at trans people and that trans people have different experiences across different identities and intersections. This book is a prime example of that.

Monday we are going to have another workshop about cultural values and violence against the transgender community. That will be lead by our director [Renee Wells] and she’ll take folks through the different cultural assumptions that we have that are used to justify violence against the trans community. That is a good primer for the vigil that we will have.

Transgender Awareness Week is centered around Transgender Day of Remembrance, which happens every year on Nov. 20. This year it falls on a Monday. We’ll have a vigil where we read the names of all of the people that we know of who have been killed in the past year who are trans. The U.S. numbers are in the 20s right now, but we make an effort to try and find as many people globally as we can because this is not just a U.S. impact. That will happen Monday night and wraps up the week.

Do you have a favorite event you’re hopeful students will attend?

Queer Memoir. I think it has the most potential of all of them to really have a personal impact on students. They are going to get to reflect, write and potentially share their own stories, but also hear from other people, and that has a lot of power. I’m hoping that one works.

The other thing that I think is good for folks to attend is the vigil, just because that puts trans violence in way more of a perspective, I think. Unless [trans violence] is something that people either experience directly or follow pretty closely, it can kind of feel like something that you are disconnected from. [The vigil] is a really good way to understand the impact the transgender violence.

Who are the hosts for this week’s different events?

All three of our staff are involved. Me, Preston Keith, our assistant director, and Renee Wells, our director. We’re also working with the Women’s Center and the College of Education to partner on the book “Pushout.”

What does the GLBT Center hope to accomplish with Transgender Awareness Week?

As the name implies, “awareness,” but also helping students understand the different ways that gender impacts their lives. It’s not necessarily just about trans people. Everybody has their relationship with their own gender and everyone gets that relationship in different ways. Helping people understand the way that gender impacts their lives is an overarching goal.

For people who don’t know, what is Transgender Day of Remembrance?

It’s an act of honoring. I know we call it a vigil, but it feels a little more like a ritualistic way of remembering people. We have the names and the ages of everyone that we know of. We tend to have a number of items that corresponds to the number of people. One year it was flowers. This year it is keytags. There is always a blank one [tag] for everybody that we don’t know of. That one is always at the end. We are able to take five seconds for each person who is no longer with us and that is a powerful experience.

What are some resources for transgender and GLBTQ students provided by the school year round?

We have a variety of student organizations. The one most related to Transgender Awareness Week is T-Files, which is our transgender support group. It is closed in the sense that you need to either be questioning your gender or identify under the transgender umbrella in some way in order to attend. It is not necessarily an education space. If you are looking for an education space, run Trans 101 workshops and other advocate workshops that we offer are really good education spaces.

In addition to the other student organizations that are either identity specific or umbrella-type organizations like the GLBT CommUNITY Alliance, we’ve also got drop in counseling that we partner with the Counseling Center for. We offer individual consultation conversations with us as staff for nonclinical issues and a variety of other events. We often partner with the Women’s Center, Multicultural Student Affairs and the African American Cultural Center to hold up other aspects of someone’s identity as well.