Category Archives: Advocacy

Not waiting for Congress: Graduate student employees fight for paid leave

Let’s give student-parents the opportunity to care for their children without fear of reprisal or financial instability.

In response to an increasing reliance on graduate student labor to teach undergraduates and provide research assistance, graduate teachers and researchers are organizing graduate employee unions in growing numbers across the country to ensure that their workplace rights are honored and their welfare secured. Because most graduate student employees (GSEs) are in the prime years for child rearing, establishing paid leave for student-parents has been a key concern for GSE unions.

Ian Gutierrez, a member of the APAGS Science Committee and the APAGS Chair-Elect, writes an interesting article about being a part of a union as a graduate student employee. Check out his story in APA’s Public Interest Newsletter.

The International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia (IDAHOT) is May 17th!

Stand with LGBTQI youth

On May 17, 1990, the World Health Organization declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder, and since 2005 the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia (IDAHOT) has commemorated that day. It is a global occasion for individuals, groups, and organizations to take action on topics related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals and to advocate for more accepting public policies. Each year a global focus for IDAHOT is chosen and this year’s is LGBT youth.

How can you get involved to raise awareness and support for LGBT youth? Here are five quick ways:

1. Inform yourself. Check out the official website for IDAHOT, where you can learn about what different groups worldwide are doing to raise support and awareness for LGBT youth and you can also follow IDAHOT on Twitter (@May17IDAHOT) and Facebook.

2. Take social media by storm. Join the IDAHOT Thunderclap campaign. Thunderclap is a service that you give permission to post a preset message on your social media pages on May 17 in honor of IDAHOT. When multiple people post on Facebook and Twitter at the same time, it creates a bigger buzz.

3. Be an advocate for LGBT youth. You can do this on your campus and in your community. Work with LGBT groups on your campus and in your community to help generate interest in IDAHOT and raise awareness of the unique challenges and experiences faced by LGBT students. Although there are plenty of resources out there, here are a few to get you started…

4. Support fellow LGBT graduate students. Tell your peers what is out there and specifically for them. The APAGS Committee on Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity has long been advocating on behalf of this community. It currently offers a set of free training webisodes on special topics (e.g., coming out to your clients), a climate guide (PDF) and a survival/resource guide, an academic-year mentoring program, two grants (one for training and the other for dissertation research), the APAGSLGBT listserv, and much more.

5. Support other youth around the world. Consider donating to the IDAHOT movement and help fund one of several activities worldwide planned, including public marches and demonstrations, publications in national newspapers, festivals, education and public awareness raising, flash mobs, and the support of LGBT rights organizations internationally.

Last year's IDAHOT celebrations at CQ University in Sydney Australia brings the message, "Being straight is no excuse for homophobia." (Source: Acon Online for Flickr. Some rights reserved.)

Last year’s IDAHOT at CQ University in Sydney, Australia brings the message, “Being straight is no excuse for homophobia.” (Source: Acon Online for Flickr. Some rights reserved.)

APA wants every day to be an IDAHOT day. For more information about how we support LGBT communities and a list of resources for becoming engaged in action, check this page out.

Remember, every action counts in the fight for LGBT youth around the world!

Editor’s Note: Mary T. Guerrant, MS, is a doctoral student at North Carolina State University and a member of APAGS-CSOGD.

Gary Howell

His Love of Advocacy Made Him a Guardian of Psychology

Gary HowellI am Gary Howell, an early career psychologist licensed in Florida and Illinois. I am truly honored to receive the inaugural “Guardian of Psychology” Award from the APAGS Advocacy Coordinating Team.  While I have so many varied interests in our field, I have found my niche working with the LGBT community.

As an openly gay psychologist and professor, I have committed to making the world a better place for students, psychologists, community leaders, as well as clients who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.

My love of advocacy began as a college student in a very rural town north of Dallas.  I attended an honor society convention and saw Jeanne White deliver a touching keynote address highlighting her pain and loss of her young son, Ryan White, who died while battling HIV/AIDS following a blood transfusion.  Her story hooked me in and led me to volunteer at a local AIDS Service Organization that served 7,000 square miles in Texas.  I served as president of a student HIV/AIDS advocacy group on the Austin College campus around the time Matthew Shepard was beaten to death.  The anger and pain we all felt as we huddled around the television in the Student Union building to hear if he survived or not ignited my passion for social justice.

The path to graduate school

Prior to entering graduate school, I spent two years teaching at a therapeutic day school. I was settled in and comfortable with my job, but I felt as though a significant part of me was fading away. I was informally looking at graduate schools and was scheduled to interview at one in NYC around the time of the 9/11 tragedy. As I sat helplessly in Dallas trying to help my young students make sense of the tragedy, I knew it was time to make a change in my life and find a way to reconnect with advocacy.  I interviewed at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago and knew it was a perfect fit for me.

I was settled in and comfortable, but I felt a significant part of me  fading away.

By the time I left graduate school, Adler began to infuse diversity and social justice throughout the program. I found my footing again and quickly got as involved as I could in all things related to advocacy, social change, and public policy – a course I later taught at Adler. My mentor Dr. Gregory Sarlo urged me to get involved with the Illinois Psychological Association, so I did. It changed my life, gave me a new platform, and truly catapulted my career in ways I had not imagined for an early career psychologist. I served two elected terms as the chair of IPA’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity section. I was able to advocate and secure support of IPA to publicly endorse the removal of Gender Identity Disorder and Gender Incongruence from the DSM-5 in its early stages of development. I am very grateful that Drs. Armand Cerbone and Randy Georgemiller also noticed my passion for advocacy. Their mentoring was and continues to play an integral role in my pursuit of leadership within Division 44 and other divisions.

Organizing for psychology and LGBTQ youth

While serving this role, the entire country began to see the ugly face of homophobia, bullying and suicide surface with the September Kids in 2010. I could not sit by and watch our community wait for others to take the lead again. I organized an emergency call to action and town hall discussion for psychologists, graduate students, religious leaders, and community organizers. I took the talking points from the evening and organized a full-day symposium on anti-gay bullying, homophobia, and suicide among the gay youth population, and created the LGBTQ Youth Taskforce to begin a grassroots initiative to make the journey from the schoolyard to home safer for gay youth.

Teaching and leading by example

I moved to Tampa, Florida in 2011 to begin teaching as a core faculty member at the Florida School of Professional Psychology at Argosy University.  I am proud of our accredited program because we keep it relatively small, with great student-faculty ratios for all courses.  I am able to mentor students, get involved with extracurricular research projects with my students, and share my passion for advocacy. My students and colleagues know that I will do all I can to recruit others in supporting advocacy. I convinced a group of students to do the Smart Ride from Miami to Key West last November, and we are doing it again this year.  I ride for those I have lost to HIV/AIDS, for those who are still very much living the reality of HIV/AIDS, and to prevent some from having to live with HIV/AIDS. I aim to lead by example and wholeheartedly believe all psychologists should.

We can do so much more than just provide psychotherapy and assessment services. Graduate students have the world ahead of them to create their own path in our field. There is a look I see in my students’ eyes, one that truly warms my heart, when they connect the importance of advocacy and the opportunities it affords us as clinicians.  I see in them a sudden desire to ‘do’ or be a catalyst for social and systemic change.

Graduate students have the world ahead of them to create their own path. There is a look I see in my students’ eyes when they connect the importance of advocacy and the opportunities it affords us as clinicians.

I am terrified when I occasionally encounter ignorance and intolerance among psychologists — especially their lack of awareness regarding diversity and its pervasive impact on clients they see in practice. Sometimes we have to make easy choices, but many times we have to make difficult choices in our profession.  For me, sitting silently by and watching opportunities to affect broken systems disappear is not an option.

Editor’s note: This is an invited blog post. Before Dr. Howell knew he had received the Guardian of Psychology award from the APAGS Advocacy Coordinating Team, he appointed his advisee Krista Kovatch to a leadership role in the Bay Chapter of the Florida Psychological Association, where she will serve as the Social Responsibility Chair. Dr. Howell noted, “This same talented clinician and student nominated me for this amazing award.”

Teachable Moments about Policing from Ferguson, Missouri

FergusonBy Tom Tyler, PhD (Professor of Law and Psychology, Yale Law School)

Ferguson represents another step in the escalating failure of the “broken windows” view of crime that has gained ascendancy during the past generation.  Under this approach, the police seek to maintain order by focusing upon arresting those who are committing minor crimes. This justifies the widespread practice of repeatedly stopping, questioning, frisking and often detaining and arresting members of the community, in particular the African-American community, and leads to the same type of hostility toward police officers that has become so visible in New York City in recent years.  Worse yet, it seems the police in cities like Ferguson have moved beyond the original broken windows model which focuses upon arresting people committing life-style crimes and have dropped any pretext of stopping only those who are actually involved in criminal activity.  Instead the police repeatedly stop innocent community residents on the streets to create feelings of fear, which they believe deters criminal behavior.  Why is this bad?

How can the police build trust?  I have conducted a number of studies of popular legitimacy which examine why people do or do not trust the police in their community.  These studies consistently show that the most important issue to public evaluations of the police is whether they believe that the police are exercising their authority fairly.  This means that they are not making decisions about who to stop based upon race; that they are willing to listen to people when they stop them; apply the law consistently and without prejudice and take time to explain the reasons for their actions.  Most importantly, the police need to treat people in the community respectfully and with courtesy.  When the police do these things they build trust.  In other words, we know how the police can build trust in communities, White or minority.  If people see the police acting with justice, they respond with trust.

Of course, there are limits, and even respectful treatment gives way to distrust in the face of repeated police stops of people who are not engaged in wrongdoing.  Two facts emerge from empirical research on the impact of policies involving widespread street stops.  First, such stop, question and frisk policies increase crime by undermining police legitimacy. Jeffrey Fagan and I recently studied young men in New York City and found that those who mistrusted the police were twice as likely to be engaged in criminal activity.  Second they increase hostility and lead to a greater likelihood of conflict when the police deal with community members on the street and when the community reacts to police actions such as the Brown shooting.  Such anger produces precisely the type of unrest so visible in Ferguson.  As so many of the marchers in that community have suggested, if people do not experience justice when they deal with the police, there will be no peace.

This article was re-posted from APA’s Psychology Benefits Society Blog.

A few members of the committee formerly known as CLGBTC strike a pose at APA's 2014 Convention in DC, from left: Natalie Alizaga, Nick Grant, and Julia Benjamin.

What’s in a Name? An Inclusive Name for an Inclusive Committee

A few members of the committee formerly known as CLGBTC strike a pose at APA's 2014 Convention in DC, from left: Natalie Alizaga, Nick Grant, and Julia Benjamin.

A few members of the committee formerly known as CLGBTC strike a pose at APA’s 2014 Convention in DC, from left: Natalie Alizaga, Nick Grant, and Julia Benjamin. (Source: the author).

The APAGS Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Concerns disagrees with Juliet’s assertion in Romeo and Juliet that “a rose by any name would smell as sweet.” Research indicates names do have the power to affect the way we perceive and interact with reality and the way we see ourselves and those around us.

Our committee believes in the importance of names—which is why we changed ours.

  • Our name started as the “Task Force on Sexual Minority Concerns,” which then changed to the “Committee on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Concerns.”
  • In 2001, we became the “Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Concerns.”
  • Over the past few years, the committee has become aware that individuals are increasingly using labels beyond “lesbian,” “gay,” “bisexual” and “transgender” to describe themselves. We contemplated incorporating additional specific identities to our name, but felt the “alphabet soup” created by the acronym used to represent those identities would be increasingly unwieldy and confusing.
  • After much discussion regarding how to shift our committee name to represent the diversity of our student members, we decided to change our name in September 2014 to the “Committee on Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity.”

This mirrors what’s happening outside of APAGS. Some groups have begun shifting away from adding more letters to their acronyms and toward using more inclusive phrases like “Gender and Sexual Diversity.” This can be seen elsewhere in APA; in March 2014, APA Division 44 (Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues) launched a new quarterly peer-reviewed publication titled Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity.

When we introduced the idea of our own name change to the full APAGS committee, it was unanimously and enthusiastically approved. Thus, as the new Chair of this committee, I am very excited to present to you the “Committee on Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity!”

I am very excited to present to you the Committee on Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity!

Since its foundation 22 years ago, this group has worked to support graduate students who identify within the spectrum of sexual orientation and gender diversity by advocating for their concerns and providing educational, personal, and professional development opportunities. That hasn’t changed, but our name has.

Our website will show our new name soon, but we wanted to let you all know even quicker! Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in getting involved with the committee or if there are ways we can support you in your graduate training. We are here for you.