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stopjhutransphobia · 4 years ago

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UPDATE ON TRANS ISSUES AT JHU

Dear all,

Happy new year! We are writing to inform you about the most recent developments in our campaign against transphobia at Johns Hopkins University, for although you may not have heard from us, the fight has continued unabated! We have had two meetings with a board of university admins in order to discuss change in the four areas mentioned in our petition (click here for a reminder of what that was all about). We envision these meetings to continue on a roughly bi-weekly basis for an indefinite time but at least through the spring semester. Besides us, the board comprise

Kevin Shollenberger (Vice Provost for Student Health & Well-Being, Interim Vice Provost for Student Affairs),

Dr. Katrina Caldwell (Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer),

Meredith Stewart (Interim Vice President for Human Resources, Executive Director of Total Rewards),

Demere Woolway (Director of LGBTQ Life at Hopkins), and

Michelle Schramm (Nurse Practitioner at the Hopkins Student Health and Wellness Center)

The general upshot of these meetings is that the coming six months will be absolutely crucial for the future of trans people at JHU. The administration seems generally willing to move things forward, yet structural obstacles and institutional inertia are looming large. Whether or not the administration’s aspirations will be put in action depends on future conversations and the amount of pressure that students, staff and faculty put onto the administrative officials in charge. At the meetings it is generally understood on all sides that, given past occurrences, there is no reason to trust JHU administration over ameliorating the conditions for trans people. Yet the will to engineer change and to do so collectively persists. However, we see confusion about concrete responsibilities (who is doing what in the administrative edifice of JHU?), unfamiliarity with the issues at hand and hesitation regarding inclusion of trans people into the administrative process, the goal of trans autonomy over trans issues and the hires this ultimately requires in particular. The game is on and we need everybody’s help to turn the hand of time on trans issues at JHU. If you want to help, you can:

- Get in touch with us and say ‘I want to get involved’ (see emails below). Also cheering and all other kinds of support are greatly appreciated.

- Talk to your friends, your colleagues, your cohort, your department about these issues, not one time, all the time. Use your social media accounts, your departmental meetings, your private conversations and whatever other occasion presents itself. Get the word out. Forward this email widely, for example.

- Organize individual and departmental letters of support to be sent to Kevin Shollenberger, Katrina Caldwell, Meredith Stewart, Demere Woolway, and Michelle Schramm so as to signal the broad base that our demands stand on. If you do so: Make it specific (we will happily assist you with that).

- Be creative. Have a meme idea? Go for it. Want to perform your music at our next rally? We’re down. Want to write an article and get it published somewhere? Please do. We’ll assist you with all the knowledge and resources we have on offer. This is a collective struggle and it needs your initiative.

We will now provide the status of each of the four demands listed in our petition and how we expect things to move forward, ending with a call to action on several fronts.

1. Deadnaming (aka Down with SIS!)

a. Our suggestion to reset the whole system and stop using an overly complicated web of apps and cloud management softwares was dismissed.

b. The administration has agreed to prioritize allowing people to change their names in SIS, thereby avoiding the current system which systematically deadnames trans students and faculty.

c. Future updates of JHU data management will supposedly allow for people to input a chosen name and have that be the only thing which will appear to other users.

d. The issue now is holding them to that. The administration claims to have over 50 programmers working on altering the various entangled systems, starting with SIS and moving outward to other platforms. Yet a list of these programmers was allegedly not available.

e. Katrina Caldwell is taking personal responsibility for ensuring implementation of the naming system, and is making inquiries to determine why the problem had not been addressed when brought up years prior.

f. Our admin contact for this effort is Demere Woolway. Demere has been working on this issue for a good seven years at least, yet the results have been piecemeal and overall insufficient. The reasons for these shortcomings do not lay with Demere, but where exactly they lay is as of yet unclear.

g. You can help Katrina, Demere and us by way of expressing your support to them and the other members of the board of administrative admins as well as all administrative officials that you have access to and feel comfortable engaging with - individually or as a part of a collective letter of support.

h. The timeline they gave us for completion of this is vague, but they have indicated that it will start 1/1/22 and be done by the summer. Pushing for concrete dates and requesting reports on the concrete steps undertaken in this direction will be crucial in the process.

i. They have no stopgap measures in the interim and have consulted no one outside of admin for how the new system should look - neither students nor faculty nor extra-institutional sources. This is an example for why there is still reason to hold a healthy amount of mistrust towards the administrative efforts currently undertaken. Effectively, this is still a case of good cis people saving poor trans people from bad cis people.

2. Healthcare inequity

a. Three groups have been formed to ameliorate the situation of trans people at JHU: the gender affirming care team (GACT), the PATH working group and the transgender working group. Yet although we believe them to be geared towards trans health issues, their exact connections and functions are still unclear to us (see also point 4).

b. Hopkins admin, led by Meredith Stewart and in consultancy with the Johns Hopkins Center for Transgender Health, has begun the long process of negotiating with the various health care companies for the various Hopkins health insurance plans: 1) The East Baltimore plan (Medicine, Nursing, Public Health) which includes all post-docs; 2) The plan for Homewood and other schools (KSAS, SAIS, Carey, Whiting, Education); 3) The faculty and employee plan with the ultimate goal of getting all to conform to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) standards of care.

c. Inclusive insurance policies should be implemented by August 15th, 2022 at the latest, but the goal is to have things switched by July 1st, 2022. Just as regarding ‘Down With SIS’, everything will depend on holding them to their aspiration and making sure they keep a tight timeline. You can assist with this by inquiring with them over their progress, joining our organizing group and taking initiative yourself (see above).

d. An important pressure point in the upcoming negotiations will be the exact scaffolding that the new trans health framework will be based on. Options are WPATH 7 (better than what we have now, but non-ideal, click here to see the document) or the new WPATH 8 (more inclusive, especially for non-binary people, click here for the document and click here for the ongoing review process, click here for more on the current development of WPATH 8) or the gold standard “no restrictions for treatment that is determined by an individual’s care team” (which is what we actually want). Events in the upcoming semester will partially focus on this question, as it marks the watershed between benevolent cis-centrism and trans autonomy in the medical sector.

e. This is being done in consultation with an outside medical consulting firm called Mercer. We have no indication that Mercer was especially versed in trans issues, if or how many trans people are involved in the process from their side or what their stance on these issues is. Our admin contact is Meredith Stewart. See 1.g) on how to assist us with this.

f. Michelle Schramm (Women's Health Nurse Practitioner at Student Health and Wellness center) is spearheading an effort to provide more trans affirming care through student health and will be seeking students to join a newly formed PATH working group for determining which services should be offered and how they should be rolled out. JHU has begun working on ensuring more UHS primary care providers are offering HRT and that there are providers capable of providing surgery letters to East Baltimore students, a population that was not able to access transition-related surgery letters through UHS in the past.

g. Kevin Schollenberger has checked in with higher university administration (unclear if this means President, Provost, Board of Trustees, or some other body) to ensure they will sign off on the changes in the insurance policy, which apparently they will.

3. Hopkins honoring transphobes

a. Kristina Caldwell has expressed interest in using a seminar series to address Hopkins’ historic support of transphobic academics, as well as its legacy of experimenting on, denying care to, and dehumanizing trans people as an institution.

b. While we are unsure of how this will look, some goals would include a seminar series, funding for trans post-docs and faculty to make Hopkins a center of trans studies and trans medicine, accompanied by public facing education on this history.

c. To start with, Jo Giardini has put in a formal request to remove Paul McHugh’s name from the ‘Program for Human Flourishing’ in the medical school.

d. An inquiry regarding whom exactly to contact over Angela Merkel’s honorary degree, sent 11/22, has as of yet not been answered.

4. More trans representation

a. The three committees mentioned under 2.a) have been meeting without student/faculty representation and - with one noted exception - without trans people in their ranks. The committees were formed on the initiative of JHU administration but without any consultation of anyone outside their circles.

b. Reactions to our suggestions about hiring more trans people into administration and staff were generally hesitant. We see no initiative on tackling the logic of good cis people save poor trans people from bad cis people on a structural, institutional level. That is unfortunate and will be conducive to the replication of past mistakes in the long run. However, we were assured that committees will soon open for student and faculty participation and comment.

c. More specifically, the three groups formed are:

- The Gender Affirming Care Team: This is a group of admins that are currently working on providing greater access to trans health care. Significant trans representation on this team is crucial so as to prevent the kind of oversight out of unfamiliarity with the issues at hand we have seen in past years at JHU. (See 4.b)

- The PATH working group: Based on our meetings, we are not exactly sure what this group is based on or what it does. However, this group apparently had students (who may or may not have been trans) be involved in the past, but it is unclear to us who these students were. Some of them may have graduated. This is a group that will be seeking student participation in rolling out more trans friendly policies for the student health system and an opportunity for you to get involved. (See 4.b)

- The Transgender Working Group: This group was mentioned in the Roadmap to Diversity statement, and seems to not yet exist. They might have been referring to us, we thought, but the question could not be clarified. When this group begins we envision it as a body which will keep administration accountable to their promises they have made throughout this process. Yet, as it stands, this is an imaginary group without function, members or meetings. We voiced our concern that it is currently purely a device to pink wash JHU, meaning that it makes JHU look more queer and trans friendly on paper than it actually is so as to make undergraduate education more marketable to a wider audience of customers.

d. If you are confused about the number and the composition of these groups: everybody is, including the administrative board we are working with. The multiplicity of boards and the people involved is partially a result of the sprawling structure of JHU’s administrative system, which we take to be a symptom of mismanagement that is not specific to trans people. However, the effect of this structure is to build a smoke screen that makes it very hard to understand responsibilities, liabilities and the right addressees for specific concerns. In fact, much of our work while drafting this report was to gather the composition, the names and the responsibilities of these groups and the people involved in them. That everybody is overwhelmed by the completely artificial complexity of these issues is not an accident. It is a device that smothers critique and self-determination.

5. To repeat our general stance:

Violence against trans people consists partially in the denial of self determination. This denial can occur as the denial to change one’s name (see 1) or as denial of medical treatment and bodily representation (see 2) or as denial of the power to make decisions about oneself, as in 4, or in other ways (3). Cis people have decided what is good for trans people for hundreds of years and as Prof. Jules Gill-Peterson pointed out during her speech at our rally in November, Johns Hopkins University has a long and shameful history that entails all kinds of violence against trans people – a history that is not only indicative for the treatment of trans people in the US and globally but is constitutive of this history. This history is well documented. However, our suggestion is not to form another committee consisting of a majority of cis people and on a generous time line, making suggestions to other such committees, some of which do not exist. What we need is swift action towards self determination and overall transparency so as to maximize collaboration on these vital issues.

6. In addition to our original goals, we have also put pressure on the university’s lack of inclusive facilities. Initially we have focused on the state of the Ralph S. O’Connor Recreation Center, which only has a single gender neutral stall. This stall is notorious for not having proper ventilation, for having no seating, storage, or a laundry bin, and for not meeting ADA accessibility standards despite being labelled as an accessible facility. Demere Woolway and Kevin Schollenberger have now been in contact with the Rec Center administration, and we have been assured that a laundry bin, bench, and some storage options are being installed in the space, and that ventilation issues are due to be addressed. There are now plans to construct a second gender neutral space which will also meet ADA requirements, as according to Demere the current space is not possible to retrofit. Jo Giardini will be doing a walk through with some of the Rec Center administration in the new year to discuss other ways to make the Rec Center more accessible for trans, queer, and gender non-conforming students–anyone who has ideas is encouraged to be in touch. We hope we can use momentum on this to address the lack of accessible spaces throughout the JHU system.

One thing that we can certainly do to move admin forward on all of these issues is inundate them with complaints, advice, and vocal calls to action. We also need to stack the committees (see 4.) wherever possible and ensure that no policy is made without the trans community of Hopkins learning about it and having input on it. We encourage you to be ready to push for these policies and join these committees. It seems that the admin knows that they are in the wrong, but we worry that without vociferous opposition, they will return to business as usual, trying to adjust as little as possible so as to incapacitate future outrage and leave it at that. That is why we have to act now and not wait to see what the administration will propose to us and then react and adjust to it. We have listed some things you can do in the beginning of this message. If you have any questions or want to be involved with our meetings, please contact one of us. With that, until next time.

Ryan

[email protected]

Luce

[email protected]

P.S.: Let it be noted that partaking in these meetings, preparing and debriefing them and writing this report took us many hours of unpaid labor. Furthermore, there is a fair chance that none of us will see the fruits of this labor.

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stopjhutransphobia · 4 years ago

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SIGN OUR LETTER HERE: https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/edit/4eUda9P-Tv0kU49WohCK03Pj/

We are opposed to transphobic policies at Johns Hopkins University. We demand the following:

A) Allow instructors and students to display whichever name they want in SIS.

B) Revoke Angela Merkel’s honorary degree and expose her transphobic policies.

C) Extend grads’ insurance coverage to such allegedly 'cosmetic' procedures as facial feminization surgery and facial hair epilation.

D) Guarantee equal numbers of cis and trans people on every committee that decides on trans matters.

A) JHU uses a trans-oppressive, unnecessary policy for dead names. A dead name is the birth name of someone who has changed their name---most commonly attributed to trans people. If a trans instructor or student is unable to legally change their dead name, then SIS forces them to list that name in its system. This practice humiliates trans people, and it increases the risk of dead naming. We urge sweeping, swift action to remedy this situation.

JHU’s name policy especially affects international students. In many countries, transition-related name changes are still a legally, financially, and mentally oppressive process. Since a name change in SIS requires a legal name change, JHU is complicit with these trans-oppressive countries.

We demand an end to this humiliating situation. Every JHU member should be able to choose whichever name they prefer for SIS---without having to first change their legal name.

B) JHU has recently awarded an honorary degree to Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel. President Ron Daniels described her as a “vocal defender of human rights”. JHU’s trans students and their allies beg to differ.

For over ten years, Merkel's CDU has ignored constitutional court rulings that demand alterations to Germany’s discriminating gender- and name-change laws. As a result of this inaction and of overall racist sentiment in Germany, an Iranian trans refugee recently set herself on fire in Berlin. Less dramatically, here at JHU, university officials have denied a German trans student from changing her dead name in SIS.

In brief, trans rights are human rights, and Merkel’s policy is and has been an attack on these rights. JHU should revoke Merkel's honorary degree and expose her anti-humanitarian policies.

C) Another vital area is trans healthcare. JHU often provides health insurance for its grad students. This insurance boasts an “unlimited" budget for trans health. Yet it classifies as ‘cosmetic’ certain essential gender-affirming procedures, such as facial feminization surgery. This classification leaves students to pay thousands of dollars out-of-pocket. Thus, JHU’s "unlimited" budget is mostly limited to covering procedures on primary and secondary sexual organs. In classic trans-exclusionary fashion, trans lives are defined by what's between their legs.

For years, trans grads have requested that JHU expand their medical autonomy. These requests seem to have been largely ignored.

We demand an end to this humiliating situation. JHU should financially support the health of its trans students, whatever their needs may be.

D) Except for B), these issues have been brought to the relevant JHU authorities. But their responses remain elusive.

In general, communication on trans issues follows a pernicious pattern: Good cis people save helpless trans people from bad cis people. This pattern must stop. Trans people must partake in every decision that affects their lives. It is not enough that trans people’s concerns are heard by clueless 'experts'.

We demand an end to this humiliating situation. Trans people must have parity at every table that decides on trans matters.

As A) -- D) show, JHU repeatedly promises solutions without following through. JHU often fails to take concrete action until it is publicly embarrassed.

We thus write to demand that A) -- D) be immediately rectified, and that trans students receive greater governing input over their own lives. In other words, we demand that JHU:

A) Allow instructors and students to display whichever name they want in SIS.

B) Revoke Angela Merkel’s honorary degree and expose her transphobic policies.

C) Extend grads’ insurance coverage to such allegedly 'cosmetic' procedures as facial feminization surgery and facial hair epilation.

D) Guarantee equal numbers of cis and trans people on every committee that decides on trans matters.

To support us, please copy-paste the above text into an email and send it to the email addresses listed below (JHU Administration and Baltimore City Council). If should not agree with all points, please consider sending the parts the you do agree with. You can also sign a collective letter at the following link:

https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/edit/4eUda9P-Tv0kU49WohCK03Pj/

Please share as widely as possible. Thanks!

Copy-paste and send the above text to---

JHU Administration:

Ronald Daniels <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>

Mary Favret <[email protected]>

Demere Woolway <[email protected]>

Renee Eastwood <[email protected]>

Joseph Colon <[email protected]>

Queer Section of Baltimore City Council:

Daphney Williams <[email protected]>

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