The U of S is aiming to create more positive spaces on campus.

TAYLOR BOROWETZ

The University of Saskatchewan Students’ Union Pride Centre recently hosted Positive Space Week: a time to focus on creating safe and welcoming environments for everyone.

The campaign was held on Jan. 19–23, but its message will help to create change far into the future.

Positive spaces are not gendered or exclusive, but open and accepting to all identities and ideas. They are places where individuals can express their gender and sexuality without fear of judgment or harassment. According to Craig Friesen, USSU Pride Centre coordinator, positive spaces are absolutely necessary.

During the week there were three workshops aimed at creating more positive spaces for all students, faculty and staff. Members of the Provost’s Advisory Committee for Gender and Sexual Diversity ran these workshops alongside Pride Centre volunteers. The seminars included learning what different terms mean, discussing privilege and showing participants how to use their language and actions in a sensitive and de-gendered way.

One goal of these workshops, and Positive Space Week, was to highlight the need for inclusive spaces on campus to accommodate gender and sexual diversity, Friesen said.

He said that especially in a university, a place that focuses on the transfer of knowledge, everyone should be a leader when it comes to making safe spaces for gender diversity.

In an interview with Global Saskatoon, Friesen pointed out that having positive spaces is also important to students’ mental and physical health. If you don’t identify with a binary gender, or your biological sex, even something as seemingly harmless as going to the washroom can put you at risk. According to the University of California Los Angeles School of Law, approximately 10 per cent of transgender individuals have been sexually or physically assaulted just for using a traditional, gender-segregated bathroom.

The Pride Centre also wanted to emphasize the change to the university’s Discrimination and Harassment Prevention Policy in 2014. The policy now includes gender expression, gender identity and two-spirit identities. Friesen hopes to increase the number of people who know this progress was made. The Pride Centre is aiming to inform students, faculty and staff about this change, and what it means to life and proceedings on campus.

An individual’s gender expression and gender identity, as the names imply, include the way a person expresses their gender through the roles that they choose and the gender that they identify with, respectively. The term “two-spirit” is used by some indigenous North Americans for gender variant individuals who have two identities, or do not subscribe to rigid gender roles. This policy change is a small step in the right direction towards protecting the rights of the LGBTQ community at the U of S.

The centre will continue to push for more degendered spaces on campus, and further highlight the policy changes that were already made. The U of S is making progress in select areas, including the admissions process, but Friesen says more needs to be done to be accepting of all genders beyond male-female binary. The plan to install gender-inclusive washrooms at the university has been gaining momentum around campus as an achievable way to make a substantial amount of students feel more comfortable and accepted every day they come to class.

The positive space workshops are not a new development; they were initiated by a previous Pride Centre coordinator, but have since expanded their influence. There is currently a positive space program run all year mainly targeted to faculty and staff, but students can make use of it as well.

In the future, the Pride Centre is hoping to provide monthly positive space workshops for students, and everyone on campus.

For more information, Friesen’s interview with Global News is available online.

The Pride Centre is open from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, and is always accepting new volunteers.

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Photo: flickr / Life Style Mix