Following a heated election season featuring sometimes hostile rhetoric toward LGBTQ people and potentially discriminatory policy proposals, local organizations are working together to reassure and educate LGBTQ individuals living in fear.
The LSU Women’s Center, in partnership with Louisiana Trans Advocates, Equality Louisiana and the LGBTQ+ Alumni Chapter of LSU, is hosting a self-defense and de-escalation training seminar for LGBTQ students and community members Saturday. The event will include training from Baton Rouge Krav Maga instructors and techniques for preventing physical violence.
Peter Jenkins, University alumni and president of the LGBTQ+ Alumni Chapter, said the idea for the self-defense training began to develop after they were harassed while shopping at a local Target.
A photo was circulated on Facebook of Jenkins, who is transgender, standing near a women’s changing room sign. The post was captioned to insinuate Jenkins was entering a women’s bathroom, and numerous death threats were made.
After the incident, Jenkins said they started thinking about personal safety and whether they would be able to defend themselves. They brought the conversation to Louisiana Trans Advocates and other advocacy groups, and that’s when they realized a self-defense seminar could be an important service in the community.
According to a June 2016 New York Times article, LGBTQ individuals are twice as likely to be targeted for hate crimes as African-Americans and LGBTQ hate crimes have surpassed the number committed against Jews.
Though Jenkins said they had not heard of local instances of hate crime, the possibility still exists.
“We’re doing this program so that when someone is in that situation — because unfortunately we know it’s going to happen more often now — that they’re in a position to protect themselves,” Jenkins said. “I wish that we were in a position in our country where we weren’t having to teach each other to defend ourselves against hate crimes and bigotry, but we’re not there yet.”
Women’s Center director Summer Steib said she was approached by students and faculty with similar safety concerns in the spring as heated debates about transgender bathroom access swept the country. The community partners decided the best way to quell concerns was to be proactive, she said.
“Folks have expressed a general sense of unease, particularly people who are maybe gender nonconforming or transgender,” Steib said. “It’s not easy to look at them and say, ‘Oh I’m going to put them in this box of female or this box of male.’ Sometimes those are the folks that are feeling the greatest sense of fear.”
The event was originally scheduled for Aug. 20, but after flooding rocked the city in mid-August the partners decided it was best to postpone the event, Steib said. LGBTQ and minority leadership groups have expressed unease following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory Tuesday, but Steib said the date correlation was just a coincidence.
Despite the coincidence, Jenkins said the LGBTQ community is fearful that important equality measures advanced under President Barack Obama’s administration will be reversed now that Trump is slated to take office in January. There’s been an increase in traffic to the self-defense event’s page and more people sharing the support organizations’ information on social media, they said.
Jenkins said events like the self-defense workshop are extremely important right now. National reports of hate crimes and harassment have increased in the days following the election, including a report from a University of Louisiana at Lafayette student that was later disproven by police.
False or not, the incident hints at a larger problem, they said.
“Whether or not the student made it up, we pretty much all completely believed that could happen,” Jenkins said. “The fact that we’re in a position where we think that could have happened is a problem.”