Bit about me, I'm a college student whose in a Multicultural Health course. We need to interview folks from a specific ethntic or nonethnic minority group for a class project, and since I'm immunocompromised and it's still COVID o'clock, my options to meet people are fairly limited.
Working from my experience as a non-ethnic minority (trans/ gay) I can certainly point out a lot of places for improvement in the curriculum's understanding of my own groups. (In case you are curious, we got allotted 6 pages in my book. There were also some outdated suggest on being 'culturally competent' around LGBT folks like "do not use labels" rather than "use the labels the patient uses for themselves, ie gay vs queer vs LGBT".) There's also just the straight up fact that while these "tips" might work for most people in that group, there's often significant discourse in our community, with majority and minority opinions on each topic. "Pronoun circles" come to mind as a great example.
Our book allotted, if one is generous, a page towards people who are deaf or hard of hearing so the tips they offered were fairly generic (people first language, make eye contact, etc.) I also know it's a real stretch considering the populations are rather small, but if there's anyone who wanted to talk about the specific challenges of being both a person who is deaf/ hard of hearing and LGBT I would love to hear about that intersection. There's a lot of overlap in the two groups (as we are majority born to parents who don't share this trait with us, we are both heavily community oriented folks and pride in who we are is good and warranted). One of my big personal question is how to do you feel about trying to get people to shift between simple, inaccurate language ("blind people" and "the transgenders") to often more verbious but correct language ("people who are blind or hard of hearing" and "transgender women, men and non-binary people")? Drawing that line between "eh close enough" and "I am going to sound like a walking Wiki article" can be tough.
Cheers,
Remi
Working from my experience as a non-ethnic minority (trans/ gay) I can certainly point out a lot of places for improvement in the curriculum's understanding of my own groups. (In case you are curious, we got allotted 6 pages in my book. There were also some outdated suggest on being 'culturally competent' around LGBT folks like "do not use labels" rather than "use the labels the patient uses for themselves, ie gay vs queer vs LGBT".) There's also just the straight up fact that while these "tips" might work for most people in that group, there's often significant discourse in our community, with majority and minority opinions on each topic. "Pronoun circles" come to mind as a great example.
Our book allotted, if one is generous, a page towards people who are deaf or hard of hearing so the tips they offered were fairly generic (people first language, make eye contact, etc.) I also know it's a real stretch considering the populations are rather small, but if there's anyone who wanted to talk about the specific challenges of being both a person who is deaf/ hard of hearing and LGBT I would love to hear about that intersection. There's a lot of overlap in the two groups (as we are majority born to parents who don't share this trait with us, we are both heavily community oriented folks and pride in who we are is good and warranted). One of my big personal question is how to do you feel about trying to get people to shift between simple, inaccurate language ("blind people" and "the transgenders") to often more verbious but correct language ("people who are blind or hard of hearing" and "transgender women, men and non-binary people")? Drawing that line between "eh close enough" and "I am going to sound like a walking Wiki article" can be tough.
Cheers,
Remi
