Emily Bailey leads a mental health-centric workshop at the second Pride Culture Conference event of the year
The Pride Culture Conference continues with its second event in late October. Held on Tuesday, Oct. 27, this event differed from the previous event drastically. Instead of being a keynote speech with a following Q&A, this event was held as a workshop. Emily Bailey from YouthCO led participants in a workshop discussing the intersection between queer and trans identities and mental health.
YouthCO, a youth-lead organization dedicated to destigmatizing HIV and Hep C, has a number of resources for LGBTQ+ young people, including the Do You Mind program. Do You Mind was developed in collaboration with the Community-Based Research Centre (CBRC) this past summer. It is a community mental health leadership program for young queer and trans folk interested in being mental health-savvy knowledge holders and advocates.
During the workshop, Bailey led the group through discussions of leadership, including what qualities were most often associated with it. Bailey explained the concept of kitchen table organization, which is a type of organization that has historically been utilized frequently in the LGBTQ+ community. Kitchen table organizing involves sitting together and talking at kitchen tables or in other private spaces when it is dangerous or difficult to do so in public, as a way to organize protests.
The discussion also encompassed the new concept of sexual orientation gender identity change efforts, a newly coined way of identifying the continued experience of queer and trans people. Conversion therapy dictated by religious beliefs is the practice most emblematic of the concept of change efforts, but these efforts can show up in smaller, everyday occurrences — everything from the legal and bureaucratic barriers that make it difficult for trans people to get the health and social care that they need, to the consistent use of language that is cis- or heteronormative in nature. This shift in language comes from the recognition of systemic efforts and issues still inherent in our everyday lives.
Bailey also touched on the complexity of the LGBTQ+ experience and how it interacts with individuals’ mental health and well-being.
“As queer and trans people, we have a particular experience around mental health,” said Bailey. “It gets smothering after a while. The constant decision-making as queer and trans young people where we are in situations to advocate for ourselves and navigate harmful and violent spaces.”
During the workshop, Bailey and other workshop members recommended a number of books for continued reading into the topics discussed as well as a number of other related topics. These books were Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead, and She/He/They/Me: For the Sisters, Misters, and Binary Resisters by Robyn Ryle.
The Pride Culture Conference is a series of virtual events held thanks to the collaboration of UFV Student Life and the Peer Resource and Leadership Centre exploring the complexities and intersectionalities of life through an LGBTQ+ lens. Events continue weekly until April 2021.
