Your Student Officer Blog

Hi everyone! It’s Rachel Powell here, your Student Officer Equality & Diversity.

All of our summer events have come to an end and Freshers is upon us, so I thought I’d update you all on what I got up to over the summer months…

Pro-choice Activism

I started my new term with a bang and jumped straight in to the issues that matter most to me. Following the first meeting of the USI Students for Choice Taskforce with Jessica Elder (Student Officer Welfare), I was certainly feeling repealin’ and buzzing all about that bodily autonomy.

USI Nationwide Students for Choice Taskforce 2017-18

Here’s a wee snap of my wonderful Student Officer team with our repeal jumpers on during the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar’s, visit to Queen’s University to talk about the future of North South Relations.

The image that went viral. Someone described our faces as full of hundreds of years of women’s scorn which I quite liked.

I was privileged to get to ask the Taoiseach to confirm the Repeal Referendum would be held outside of the summer months to ensure students have full access to voting. It is fair to say that this question, along with our choice of clothing, made an impression as we reached over 80 million views from news articles alone and not counting social media.

Being pro-choice is of huge significance to me and it is something I made very clear during my campaign. We have a policy in support of the full decriminalisation of abortion at Queen’s Students’ Union and I am very keen to make the most of that this year. There are a few activities and events coming up soon, so watch this space, but in the meantime, try to attend these events:

• Rally against the 2 Child Cap and Rape Clause: 21 September 2017, 1pm, Causeway Exchange, 1-7 Bedford Street, Belfast. Being Pro-choice also means you should have the right to have as many children as you want, and this policy is abhorrent, classist and disgusting. Event details can be found here.
• 6^th Annual March for Choice: 30 September, 2pm-7pm, Garden of Remembrance on Parnell Square, Dublin. It is crucial we show solidarity with the Republic of Ireland in their upcoming Referendum to get the 8^th Amendment repealed! Event details can be found here.
• Rally for Choice presents GIRL, Beauty Sleep & Hiva Oa: 5 October 2017, 8pm-1am. Event details can be found here.
• Rally for Choice: 14 October, 2pm-3.30pm, Buoy Park, Academy St., BT15 1 Belfast. Let’s rally to get abortion decriminalised! Event details can be found here.

LGBT+ Rights

So on my first day of office on 1 July, we had the March for Marriage Equality which was incredibly inspiring and motivating.

Photo Credit: Will Hancock Evans (stolen from Stephen McCrystall) 

The day after our meeting with the Taoiseach, we had Belfast Pride – and what an amazing turnout we had!

With the wonderful LGBT+ Society President – Will Hancock-Evans

I ordered lots of merchandise for all Queen’s students attending and got flags outside of the front of the Students’ Union building for Asexuality, Bisexuality, Pansexuality, LGBT+, Gender Queer, Gender Fluid and Intersex.

QUBSU Sabbatical Team at Pride 2017 – Photo Credit Stephen McCrystall

We teamed up with Queen’s University and marched alongside them and the biggest student bloc of all time, which included students from all across Ireland and the UK. This was a fantastic day with the sun shining throughout. Remember – PRIDE IS A PROTEST!

Student Bloc at Belfast Pride – Photo credit: Síona Ní Chatháil

Since then, I’ve been trying to organise the first a Trans Awareness Campaign at QUBSU. I’ve connected with Ellen Murray from the Trans Resource Centre/GenderJam and Sail along with Queen’s LGBT+ society and we are currently planning all of the fun and more serious logistics of this campaign. So not to sound repetitive – but watch this space!

I also attended Top-up Training in Dublin with USI and particularly loved the training on Trans Inclusivity delivered by TENI. Here’s an image of some of the officers that attended:

Top-up Training 2017

And below here are some of the Queen’s Students and Staff that marched together at Belfast Pride 2017.

Photo credit: Queen’s University Belfast

International Students – International Buddy Scheme 

Here is a photo of an incredibly tired me on the first night of the international buddy scheme.

We had approx. 580 students attend this event and hundreds attended the traditional crawl the following evening. This was the biggest buddy scheme yet and I am so thankful to my team for helping me make this happen, to all of the students who volunteered to become a buddy, and to the new found friendships that happened last week. This campaign took weeks to organise and I am so relieved that there was such a huge turnout and so many students seemed to enjoy themselves. I also want to say a big thanks to Hamsa, our International Part Time Officer, for all of her help!

I am also in the process of researching an international student’s guarantor scheme, as I’ve noticed that a lot of landlords have been taking advantage of international students this summer. So I’m currently researching other places that have this programme and trying to make this something that will happen at QUB. It is only fair that international students are treated in the same way – they are already charged more for fees so we have to stop them getting charged more for rent!

Postgraduate Student Issues

Ok, so postgraduate issues are something that has been very close to my heart as I am a part-time, disabled, postgraduate student myself and there are many barriers for students like me. I have had meetings with the Graduate School and the Department for Academic and Student Affairs this summer and hope to engage more postgraduate students than ever before in the SU. One of the most exciting things that has happened this summer was my planning with two PhD Student Parents, Alison and Catherine. We are currently in the process of creating a PhD Student Parents Network, which we hope to roll out this year along with the Student Parent Survey to highlight the needs of student parents and hopefully expand this network to suits the needs of all student parents.

There are many exciting things happening for Postgraduates within the SU and I couldn’t be happier to see such high levels of engagement among this under represented group.

Speaking of postgraduate issues, while working this summer, I completed my MA Thesis and degree in Conflict Transformation and Social Justice. I completed a Historical and Contemporary Analysis of U.S. Right Wing Populism and the Impact on Women’s Rights Movements. This intersectional piece of feminist writing enabled me to meet with amazing activists in the U.S. and I couldn’t feel more motivated to put this degree in Social Justice to good use.

I hope that through my experiences as an undergrad, to part-time, disabled, low-income, woman postgraduate student, I can represent as many people as possible through my time as Student Officer Equality & Diversity. I cannot wait to learn from and work more with others and deliver the campaigns we need on campus. This summer has been hectic and I haven’t had a minute free – but it’s worth it to see the small changes we have made so far.

If you’re interested in getting involved in a pro-choice campaign, Trans Awareness Campaign, Disable the Label campaign, a PhD Student Parents Network, or anything else I’ve mentioned, just give me a shout by emailing: su.vpequality@qub.ac.uk

Cheers!

The final blog post in our series, written by our students to provide visibility to the broad range of disabilities and the issues that students with disabilities face

Writing blogs is not something I’ve really done much of before, but when this amazing #DisabletheLabel campaign was launched, I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of. Through this (brief) blogpost, I’m going to explain a bit about how my understanding of the label ‘disabled’ has developed though my own experiences of living with disabilities.

Bit of a background – my personal experience with disabilities began when I was 13 years old. I was a very active child and loved cross country, football and I played camogie for my school, Keady club and County Armagh. I vividly remember playing a camogie tournament in Crossmaglen one Saturday morning and getting very bad pains in my knees, it was a sharp yet dull pain and one that never left from that day. After my first few trips to the doctors, I was told that these were simply growing pains and that it was normal. I knew myself this pain couldn’t be normal and that is where my battle with invisible illnesses began.

These “growing pains” turned out to be Hypermobile Joints Syndrome and a very nasty Auto Immune Disease; Psoriatic Arthritis. My own body was attacking itself on the inside and from the outside I looked completely healthy. The arthritis spread to all my other joints and began to attack my tendons throughout my time in High School. I tried to keep playing camogie and football for years but after many broken bones, missed school and constant hospital trips (I’m talking about 3 a week to Craigavon or Belfast), it was time to hang up the football boots at the age of 18 and accept my body simply wouldn’t allow me to continue playing the games I had loved and dedicated so much of my life to. All while I looked perfectly healthy on the outside.

My battles with my invisible illnesses really intensified when I moved to Belfast to begin my undergraduate degree. I was leaving behind a really great support network of family and friends at home and was really stunned by how difficult life was on my own. I quickly realised that simple things like walking from Elms village to class, or carrying my laptop and books, were simply not an option and moving around this new city I didn’t know was becoming increasingly difficult. I was then diagnosed with a secondary chronic pain condition, Fibromyalgia. I felt like I was hit with the flu, with all its aches, pains, sickness and exhaustion; another new feeling that never left again. With this secondary condition came a wave of new problems. For the first time, I experienced a range of mental health conditions and fell into a severe depression and suffered from extreme anxiety for almost two years. It was a viscous cycle. The enthusiastic student that had arrived in Belfast seemed like a different person to the student I was now. As my pain and illnesses increased and became more complex, my motivation to try and deal with every day student issues decreased. I couldn’t even get out of bed with this pain never mind go to the library. At this point, all while still looking completely healthy on the outside, I knew I was mourning the “old me”. I missed my old life and all of the activities I used to do and felt completely trapped inside my own body; fighting a battle that no one could see, or even begin to understand.

Throughout my undergraduate degree, I still got involved in as many opportunities as possible. I went to London on a scholarship programme and worked in Investment Banking and Wealth Management. As my own experiences of life became more difficult, I became more interested in social justice.  I was lucky enough to travel to Washington DC and work as a Legislative Intern in the US House of Representatives through the Washington Ireland Programme. Despite these fantastic experiences, my conditions were worsening and I was in a constant state of anxiety, as I fully believed that all of my hard work over the years wouldn’t matter so long as I was trapped inside this body that attacked itself. I felt isolated, as the people around me clearly couldn’t understand what I was feeling, how could they? I was told over and over and over again – “but you don’t look sick”. When I tried to explain how I was feeling to people, they couldn’t empathise with me because my illnesses were invisible. If only they knew what was really going on inside…

So, after my graduation I took some time out from studying to think about what my options now were. I wasn’t able to follow the plan I had been making for myself since I was a child. I decided that I needed to use my skills to be able to help those in a similar position to me, but who aren’t in a position to use their voice as easily. I enrolled part-time in a Masters in Conflict Transformation and Social Justice. I became more involved in fighting for intersectional social justice issues. I am more passionate than ever before, and wholeheartedly believe this is due to the difficulties I have faced due to my illnesses. In what I first believed was my life and dreams being taken away from me, has actually turned me into an even more hard-working, driven and understanding person.

Although I am still battling with side-effects of intense medical treatments, stigma in society that exists for people with disabilities and a government that believes they can keep cutting away at our right to a quality life, I am stronger now than I have ever been. I have disabled the label on myself and I can still achieve the things I have always hoped for, I am just more realistic in what my limitations are through my disabilities. Instead of thinking “I’m disabled and I can’t do that”, I now fight to make all opportunities accessible and equal instead for all people with disabilities. I will not stop fighting to #DisabletheLabel until people with disabilities are made to feel like equal members of society, because we are no less valuable. Our labels don’t determine our worth.

Rachel Powell

Another in our series of guest blogs written by our students to provide visibility to the broad range of disabilities and the issues that students with disabilities face.

Disability was always a distant term to me, it didn’t seem to fit into my identity despite being chronically ill. The suggestion of seeking assistance from disability services was daunting simply due to that one word, ‘disability’ because regardless of the logical knowledge that disability wasn’t merely physical but also encompassed sensory, learning and mental health issues, the stigma of the expectation of a physical, visual disability in relation to this term, this label, stopped me reaching out, despite the fact that less than 8% of disabilities require the use of physical aid.

I hadn’t ticked the box when I enrolled at the University of Ulster in 2010 to say I had a disability; I wanted to be like any other student and to leave the baggage of ill health behind me and start afresh in a new place, with new people who knew nothing about me. But this is Northern Ireland and inevitably someone will know someone and so my fresh start was quickly ended when a window swung open and my name was called out from the 3^rd floor of a block of flats in halls.

It was a struggle to walk to University but my friends helped carry bags for me and sometimes I got a lift and I also had several hospital admissions. It was around this point when, despite my denials and reluctance to embrace the term, I finally admitted my ill health was preventing me from living the life I wanted to and was in effect disabling my everyday life. There was no way to escape it, I was disabled.

However, despite finally accepting the term, the label is not me, but a part of me. We need to disable the label, because an individual’s life isn’t made up of one thing. I view life as a pie chart with different segments for different parts of my identity, and while being ill and having a disability is a part of that pie chart, it is by no means all of it.

Issues faced by students and persons in general with a disability

I had to leave University of Ulster after collapsing and being rushed to Hospital for treatment of a cardiac issue. Unfortunately, due to my numerous admissions to hospital, no-one had wanted to accompany me to A+E on that occasion as apparently ‘I was always in hospital’. One lecturer even walked past me as I collapsed and asked for help; I don’t know if he genuinely was unsure of what was going on or was uncomfortable with my physical illness when he had assumed my ill health to be mental only. These issues mean simple things that other students take for granted like a planned night out can be altered quite quickly.

(1) Loss of services & lack of continuity of care

It was at this point I faced an issue some students with a disability will face; I had temporary GP registration at University and still saw my own GP at home as they had known me and my health issues from the start. Despite the linked up approach between the Health Trusts, when it was agreed I should have inpatient treatment at Antrim Hospital and I had to take medical leave from university (which meant I lost my term-time address) I was temporarily declared homeless so could no longer access the planned treatment and returned home and to the bottom of a new waiting list in another Trust area.

Being disabled and living away from home can complicate matters with the loss or stretching of resources when you are already known to specialists and is an additional stress to a student with a disability that many overlook. There is also the added expense of ill health due to needing equipment e.g. pads for a TENS machine, because while some can be available on the NHS, the wait to access them can take a long time. Many students have ended up buying their own equipment such as a wheelchair after being on a waiting list for over a year.

(2) Sympathy Fatigue

While many speak about positivity in the face of chronic illness, there is no escaping the fact that some days it just sucks. It can be fun to have someone listen and laugh along to the tale of the spasm that led to an apple accidentally flying across the room and hitting a friend. While ill health is a part of many people’s everyday life, this doesn’t mean they don’t need support or a friendly face to just listen from time to time. However, when acceptance of a person’s ill health becomes the norm for friends and family they can sometimes feel sympathy fatigue; it is not unusual, it shows the impact of disability extends beyond the person effected.

(3) The view from the chair

While I’d no problem signposting others for help, my own journey to acceptance of my illness was complicated by my difficulty resolving the idea of my mental ill health as a disability. It has since morphed into physical disabilities as well. The acceptance of a term, and the embracing of it as part of who I am in the here and now, allows me to make the best of each day and plan accordingly and I’m now more comfortable with accepting the use of physical mobility aids when I need them.

Most of the time I can manage but there have been occasions when I have been unable to get about unaided and I reluctantly agreed to use a wheelchair as a temporary measure. I found it very helpful and liberating as it is an extension of a person that gives a freedom that might otherwise be denied but people’s reactions to me were mixed.  Some act like I’m invisible or don’t know what to say or try to slink away like a cartoon villain hoping to get away from a situation that wasn’t awkward until you made it awkward. I’d prefer it if people just spoke to me as normal, my legs may be temporarily out of order, but my eyes and ears and my mind are functioning as usual.

Acceptance and Support

Acceptance of the term disability opened doors to access support from the University and has meant that since I’ve moved to Queens, despite spending much of my time in and out of hospital, I’ve actually made it to final year. Adaptation is key, and realising that a truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Now adaptation doesn’t mean everything is perfect, I still struggle writing long essays when, due to my blood pressure, I’m stuck on my back improvising a desk with pillows for my laptop. Due to my illness I live at home and travel everyday juggling class around appointments and deadlines and it is hard, especially when I’ve to remember which medication to take at what time, and still ensure I didn’t leave my work in the printer in McClay.

However, Queens has been very supportive thus far, and having made it to third year is amazing. You might seem daunted by the idea of disability, but anyone can develop a disability, in fact, there are over 11 million people with disability in the UK, so remember, I’m just like you, except I need a bit more support, treat me and others how you would want to be treated.

Disable the Label, while it is a useful tool to access assistance and support, I’m a person not a word.

Felicity Mckee

 
The Students’ Union building lit up purple for Transgender Day of Remembrance

Hi everyone!

In honour of Transgender Day of Remembrance, MK (a Queen’s Business Management undergrad, former President and current Treasurer of QUB LGBT+ and non-binary trans person) and Con (an English undergrad, former Non-Binary Trans Rep for QUB LGBT+ and non-binary trans person) are taking over the SU Blog for the day to tell you, members of the Queen’s community, how you can be better allies to trans people.

So, without further ado…

5 things you can do to be a better ally to the trans people in your life.

1. Gender us correctly, even when we’re not there.

A really important part of being a trans ally is defending our identities, regardless of whether we’re there or not. This means using our correct pronouns, correcting yourself when you make mistakes and correcting others when they misgender us.

It may seem like really basic stuff, but knowing our cis pals have our backs when we’re not around goes a long way in terms of helping us live comfortably in our authentic identities.

2. Don’t obsess over our bodies.

It seems to be a bit of a cultural phenomenon that cisgender people feel entitled to discuss the bodies of trans people. Whether it’s a really intrusive questions about how we have sex, who we have sex with, our genitals or surgeries, it’s really really uncomfortable for us, and quite frankly it’s none of your business.

We understand that you might be interested or intrigued about us, but a lot of us don’t really want to talk about our bodies with you, or anyone in general. So basically, if you have a question, Google it.

3. Remember that there is not one way to be trans and that trans people are everywhere.

“I kind of find the whole pronoun thing difficult, in a way” one of my (MK’s) cisgender friends told me one night in Lavery’s, “because you’re the only trans person I’ve ever met.”

I’d introduced him to two of my friends that week, both of whom where non-binary. Not only that, but we’d bumped into another friend, a trans woman, an hour before this conversation.

It’s pretty common for cisgender people to enforce a kind of prescribed look or lifestyle onto us, or assume that we live our lives in a certain way, with particular regards to our transitions. There are tonnes of barriers for trans people between their true gender identity and the way they present their gender to the outside world.

For a lot of trans people, binary or non-binary, medical transitions or surgeries are not something we intend to do or even feel the need to do and that does not make any of us less ‘trans’ or less valuable as part of the community.

4. Know the lingo.

• Transsexual implies that someone is going to change their genitals to a different sex - a lot of transgender people would rather use the word transgender to describe themselves, because who wants to tell strangers about their genitals? We’re not about that
• Intersex are people who fall between being medically female and male
• Non-binary is a blanket term to describe people who aren’t women or men
• Cisgender refers to people who aren’t transgender
• ‘They’ is a grammatically correct singular pronoun
• Tranny is a slur
• Drag queens are not trans

5. Believe us, even if you can’t personally relate.

Being trans is difficult. For a lot of us it’s new, or confusing, or completely inexplicable, and something that really doesn’t help is having to answer probing questions from cis people regarding what gender dysphoria feels like. A lot of the time we don’t even have the answers to them, and then it’s just uncomfortable for all parties involved. If we tell you something we’re feeling that you don’t understand, just take our word for it, because our lived experience is probably more accurate than anything else. Believe us.

So there we have it. Obviously this isn’t an all-encompassing guide to being a good trans ally, but these 5 points are a good place to start. Remember these and you can’t go too far wrong.

MK and Con.

_______________________________

Queen’s Students’ Union has organised a vigil for Transgender Day of Remembrance on Monday 21 November at 6:30pm in front of the Lanyon gates. Everyone is welcome. For more info, click here.