It’s Time to Move Beyond Simple Acceptance of LGBTQ+ People
Families are key in creating a world where LGBTQ+ and gender-expansive youth are safe, loved and empowered
By Mica Baum-Tuccillo, Serena Yang, and María Elena Torre
The Public Science Project, Graduate Center CUNY
Every June Pride Month passes through providing a small window of opportunity for LGBTQ+ and gender-expansive people to openly express and live their identities. But in the end, the glitter is swept up, the music turned down, and the joy sidelined and pushed to the recesses. Grappling with this reality is an integral part of the history of Pride, which goes beyond celebration, visibility, and acceptance towards true liberation. Pride honors the ongoing fight for social and political transformation that demands LGBTQ+ and gender expansive people have the right to live with joy, safety, and the fullness of their being every day of the year.
Young people are, and always have been, urging us to move beyond rainbow flag waving social acceptance and toward intersectional justice, solidarity, and political transformation. The question of how we can extend the short-lived liberation of Pride into our everyday lives must find its answer in the families, communities, and institutions that surround and support LGBTQ+ youth. Research conducted by our group, the Beyond Acceptance Research Collective (BARC) at the Public Science Project, shows that families, caregivers, communities, and institutional policies must move beyond acceptance and toward social transformation and intersectional justice for all queer people. We must realize that visibility does not directly translate to better living conditions for queer youth. Increasing public acceptance and representation in media is important, but only if it is tied to structural change. Families and communities must play a central role in this transformation.
Concerned about the number of LGBTQ+ and gender expansive young people who are rejected and discriminated against by family and community, the NYC Department of Health and the Unity Project in the Mayor’s office invited the Public Science Project at The Graduate Center, CUNY’s Center for Human Environments to conduct research about what these young people experience with family. We formed BARC, a group of LGBTQ+ and gender expansive youth and adults, to design a participatory action research study (PAR) that would illuminate these experiences.
While much social science research is done about people who are marginalized by our social/political systems, too little of this research is done in solidarity with those who are marginalized. Our PAR methods flip this paradigm, centering those most impacted by the research — LGBTQ+ and gender expansive youth — as co-researchers. These methods can serve as a model, and as a call to include the voices of those most impacted in social science research.
With support from the health department, we built a research project to look at the impact of families on LGBTQ+ youth from a youth perspective. Our diverse intergenerational research team of majority queer youth explored why families and the support structures around young people are so important, and our findings offer guidance for how these community systems can move beyond acceptance and toward a truly liberated existence for queer young people.
While social acceptance of LGBTQ+ people continues to grow in the US, state lawmakers around the country have ushered in a horrific wave of anti-LGBTQ+ policies. There are currently 110 anti-trans bills introduced across 36 states. These bills target trans and gender nonconforming youth, who are already more likely to experience rejection from families and institutions, putting them at additional risk of financial, housing, and psychological precarity.
COVID-19, which has decimated communities and destabilized support systems, has only exacerbated the unique challenges that LGBTQ+ youth face. Before the pandemic, LGBTQ+ youth were already at higher risk for homelessness, financial insecurity, and mental health issues. These struggles are often related to family rejection, particularly for trans and gender nonconforming youth.
Our collective conducted focus groups with 23 religiously, racially, ethnically, and (dis)ability diverse LGBTQ+ and gender expansive youth from across New York City. Half of the young people we interviewed identified as having experienced homelessness or unstable housing. Focus groups activities included family mapping, structured interview, and collective brainstorming. We conducted a thematic analysis and animated the themes that emerged in the interviews to produce data-driven stories and illustrated comics.
Beyond Acceptance not only unearths the critical need for and importance of strong family and community relationships for LGBTQ+ youth, it also prioritizes making science public to shift power, expand dialogue, grow understanding, and instigate action. We offer evidence-based resources to support a range of caregivers, community members, and professionals looking for ways to be allies and accomplices to LGBTQ+ youth. Our data revealed the five major findings outlined below:
LGBTQ+ youth want and need…
Radical recognition and unconditional love. We want to be valued and embraced for who we are, and we want space and support to name and discuss our identities on our own terms. Acceptance may be a starting point, but it is not enough.
Solidarity. Dignity for LGBTQ+ people is an ongoing struggle that requires social, community, and policy change. We want our families to challenge the assumption that everyone is born straight (heteronormativity) or that everyone is born within the gender binary (cisgenderism). We want our families to fight against and end violence and discrimination against all LGBTQ+ people.
Families to educate themselves about gender and sexuality. We want people in our family to take responsibility for learning about gender, sexuality, and queerness on their own. Knowledge is powerful. While it can be fulfilling to help our families learn about gender and/or sexuality, it is also a lot of work! We want families to seek out other sources of information in addition to what they can learn from us.
Family members to reflect on their own gender, sexuality, and intersectional identities. We want families to critically explore gender and sexual identity development, and ideas about how gender and sexuality intersect with their own histories, race, class, religion, nationality, and privilege. The way families handle issues of gender and sexuality often reflect already existing family dynamics.
Celebration. Being LGBTQ+ and gender expansive is a wonderful thing — we get to be a part of an amazing community of fabulous people throughout history who have shown the world how multifaceted, complex, and beautiful gender, sexuality, desire, identity, and humanity really are! We want to see ourselves reflected in the world — in art, books, movies, politics, history, etc. — and share these representations with our families and the people we love.
We leave you with a letter in a collective voice from the data we collected. We address this letter families of LGBTQ+ youth, but it is useful for all caregivers and advocates lucky enough to have LGBTQ+ and gender expansive youth in their lives, including lawyers, doctors, social workers, and educators.
Dear families,
We want you to begin with yourself. It’s OK to not know everything all at once — we don’t either. We are all still learning about ourselves, and so can you begin to reflect on your own experiences with gender and sexuality no matter where you are in life. This way, you can learn about cisnormativity (the assumption that a person’s gender identity matches their biological sex and that the gender binary is the norm) and heteronormativity (the belief that heterosexuality is the norm or default sexual orientation) in a way that makes the most sense to you. As you learn on your own, be wary of myths, essentialist ideas, and simplified statistics.
Queer young people in your life should not be your only source of information about the LGBTQ+ experience! Make sure to dig deeper on your own and diversify your sources so that the young person/people around you who identify as LGBTQ+ and/or gender expansive don’t have to bear the burden of explanation. The queer community contains multitudes, and no one person can represent it all.
As you learn more, you can practice using words and phrases that might be new to you and/or make you uncomfortable to say out loud. For example, make asking for pronoun preferences a regular part of meeting new people or organizing group spaces. If you slip-up or make a mistake (it happens!), simply apologize, correct yourself, and do better next time. The worst thing you can do is turn it into a big deal and go on about how hard you’re trying and how difficult it is. It can make the person you hurt feel like they need to comfort you instead. Your intentions may be good, but you still need to acknowledge the impact of your words and actions when they cause harm.
Be with the LGBTQ+/GE youth in your life. Get to know them in their full uniqueness. Ask them what challenges they face, and how you can help. Ask them what their dreams are. Last but not least (and certainly not all), love your LGBTQ+/GE young person for being exactly who they are!
We wish you all the best on this wonderful journey,
The Beyond Acceptance Research Collective (BARC), of the Public Science Project
Visit the BARC website archive for free, data-rich, youth co-produced resources including a digital zine, three original illustrated comics that tell stories based on our interviews, recommendations for youth and families, and videos about the project.
