Vol. 108, Iss. 8 | Tuesday, April 17, 2018
The Flat Hat The Weekly Student Newspaper
of The College of William and Mary
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Lambda to reform as Rainbow Coalition
The Lambda Alliance voted to approve the constitution of the Rainbow Coalition, a group meant to better serve the needs of the broader LGBTQ+ campus community LEONOR GRAVE // FLAT HAT NEWS EDITOR Forty years since its founding in 1978, the Lambda Alliance at the College of William and Mary is implementing a new organizational model: The Rainbow Coalition. The Lambda Alliance was originally created to provide a supportive space for LGBTQ+ identifying people on campus. According to their constitution, which was last updated March 22, the purpose of the Lambda Alliance is to provide a social space to educate about and advocate for the gender, romantic and sexual diversity of the College community. This is done by promoting awareness of issues pertaining to the community while establishing a support network of concerned and interested individuals, regardless of sexual, romantic or gender identity. However, some students worry that the Lambda Alliance is in over its head and cannot address the needs of all LGBTQ+ students on campus without significantly changing its structure. “Our community is huge, and Lambda was not built to handle it,” Lambda Alliance Activism Co-Chair Alexina Haefner ’19 said. The Rainbow Coalition aims to take some of the burden off of the Lambda Alliance to represent every single LGBTQ+ voice on campus. The coalition would be an events-based organization consisting of an executive board in charge of programming events and affinity groups focused on building a community.
Our community is huge, and Lambda was not built to handle it. — Lambda Alliance Activism Co-Chair Alexina Haefner ’19
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The organization’s new constitution and name change were ratified at the Lambda Alliance’s LGBTQ Student Community General Meeting and Forum April 3 in Tucker Hall Theater. The results of the vote were 32 yea and one nay. Haefner proposed the restructuring and then worked on the plan along with the rest of the Lambda executive board, as well as with Associate Director of the Center for Student Diversity Roxie Patton and Director of Student Leadership Development Anne Arseneau. “A meeting-based model, while it creates a great social
space and builds a strong community for those who attend meetings regularly, doesn’t serve the needs of the broader LGBTQ+ community in the way an event-based model can,” Haefner said. “We’re essentially eliminating the idea of membership or a dominant club culture for the Rainbow Coalition — it’s here to serve the LGBTQ+ student community and respond to diverse needs with programming in lots of different areas, geared towards different subsets of the community.” Haefner said that she is optimistic about what the relationship between Lambda Alliance and Rainbow Coalition will be going forward. She said that the Rainbow Coalition model will allow Lambda executive members to focus on the social programming at the core of their club, which creates a space for LGBTQ+ students to form tight-knit communities, instead of being expected to be an educational and activism organization in addition to a social one. “Rainbow Coalition, on the other hand, will be able to develop better educational events, activism initiatives and events for students who are often under-served by the broader LGBTQ+ community, namely students of color and trans and nonbinary students,” Haefner said. Membership in Rainbow Coalition will be divided into two sections, the first composed of voting members and the second of affiliate members. To qualify as a voting member, one must have attended at least one Rainbow Coalition event. Ryan Glover ’21, who serves as the Lambda Alliance’s activism co-chair along with Haefner, has also been involved with the restructuring discussion process. While Glover said they think the Rainbow Coalition might face issues with advertising itself and promoting events, they believe students are generally supportive of this change. “Based on the forum that was held in which we passed the constitution, the regular club meetings in which we have talked about the Rainbow Coalition, and my personal conversations with students both within and without the Lambda Alliance, I think the large majority of students are on board with this change,” Glover said. Glover said they hope the Rainbow Coalition constitution will help create a more inclusive organization for LGBTQ+ students on this campus, independently of how heavily they are involved with LGBTQ+ events. “Though we will still be part of one big LGBTQ+ family, the two organizations will eventually, I think, be their own separate entities — which I think is for the best, for both Lambda and the Rainbow Coalition,” Glover said. This restructuring effort was first announced to the
community in an email sent out to the Lambda Alliance listserv March 25. “We know that over the past few years, people’s experiences with Lambda have been varied,” the executive board said in the email. “While some students say Lambda has been a formative part of their time at W&M, others have had negative experiences. An LGBTQ student organization should serve the needs of all LGBTQ students on campus, not just those who go to Lambda meetings. Lambda was initially formed to serve a small, mostly closeted L G BT Q
population, not the 600+ students with diverse needs that we are today. We are saddened by the possibility that some students have not had the support they needed, been able to feel part of their LGBTQ community, or felt connected to LGBTQ history and identity during their time at W&M.” According to the proposal, the Rainbow Coalition would See RAINBOW page 4 COURTESY PHOTO / SAMANTHA WHITE
STUDENT LIFE
Transgender author, activist Janet Mock fills Commonwealth Andrew Uhrig ’20 and Laini Boyd ’18 sponsored SA legislation to fund speaking fees SARAH SMITH FLAT HAT EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Wednesday, April 11, transgender author and activist Janet Mock sat down in the Commonwealth Auditorium with gender, sexuality and women’s studies department chair Jenny Putzi to talk about her writing, her views on popular culture and her experiences as a famous activist. This event was sponsored and organized by Student Assembly. SA Undersecretary of Queer and Trans Affairs Andrew Uhrig ’20 and Class of 2018 President Laini Boyd ’18 sponsored The Janet Mock Act, which allocated $20,007 from SA reserves for Mock’s speaking fees, her lodging and for advertisements for the events. “Having Janet Mock on campus, for me, meant that I could show a greater audience a lot of things that I believe in and support,” Uhrig said. “It meant that we, as a campus, got a chance to become more aware of issues that we face in the world today. I got to interact with someone not much older than I am who has been a first. She is the first author of an autobiography written from the perspective of a young transgender person. That is something special to me and a lot of other trans people, especially trans youth.” Mock published her first autobiography “Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So much More” in 2014. This book is frequently taught in the College of William and Mary’s introductory GSWS courses and looks at her experiences as a trans youth, her decision
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to come out while working in New York City in magazine journalism and her intersecting identities. More recently, she published her second book “Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me” June 2017. She has made the New York Times’ bestsellers list for both of these books and is known for speaking at the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. Her speech focused on why it was important for the movement to include sex workers and transgender women of color. Mock spoke about both of her books, as well as her experiences speaking at the Women’s March and other prominent events. She also talked about the work that she has done to elevate other transgender women of color that she knows. For example, she said she often refers her friends to do broadcast segments or book reviews now that she has had time in the spotlight and isn’t as interested in that type of publicity. She is currently serving as a writer for “Pose,” a musical and dance drama set to premier in June 2018 on FX. “Now that I can be a part of creating a culture of girls like me who are able to see a reflection of themselves, that’s a legacy,” Mock said. “If you can’t bring your people with you when you storm through the doors, what am I here for?” Uhrig said that one takeaway from the event is that as a white, gender non-conforming person, Uhrig has to evaluate how they exist in certain spaces for safety reasons while also utilizing the leverage they have around them.
“I also started crying when Janet spoke about she thought trans kids should learn for their safety and wellbeing, because for me that point is extremely emotionally charged since a lot of my childhood memories are mixes of traumatic and euphoric moments of expressing my gender, and I never had anyone to talk with me through gender so looking back on it now throws me off balance,” Uhrig said. “It’s not easy to think about kids and transgender people because I think about how trans women of color are the most at risk of homicide within the LGBTQ+ community in the U.S. It’s hard to think about trans kids because how are they supposed to grow up and learn that they are more at risk for being killed because they are not the gender a doctor said they were at birth?” Uhrig said they appreciated the work that Boyd did to help — she was the member of the SA senate who sponsored the bill. They said she was one of the biggest allies to trans people that they had met at the College. Uhrig also said that they hoped that people learned to help those around them. “I hope others learned that we all have work to do in our lives in order to help ourselves and those around us claim our equality and freedom,” Uhrig said. “There are so many little things that can add up to liberation, it’s not just big rallies, protests and marches. Those things are important, and I encourage people to show up, but oftentimes people’s activism ends there, and they forget about everyday things.”
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The College of William and Mary Police Department arrested Turner August ’21 April 6 and charged him with six felony counts of possession of child pornography. August, a 19-year-old from Richmond, Virginia, was arrested at 7:30 a.m. in Griffin D. Following his arrest, he was transported to the Virginia Regional Peninsula Jail. April 10, August was released on bail and his case was transferred to another jurisdiction. In an April 13 statement to the Williamsburg-Yorktown Daily, College spokesperson Suzanne Seurattan said that August’s charges could initiate the student disciplinary process. If found guilty, sanctions for Turner could range from warning to suspension or dismissal, depending on the severity of the incident and past experience with August. — Flat Hat Editor-in-Chief Sarah Smith
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Inside Opinions
Term ‘panic attack’ should not be used casually
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STUDENT ARRESTED FOR POSSESSION OF CHILD PORN
Katherine Yenzer ’21 says that students should refrain from misusing the term “panic attack” as a synonym for stress out of sensitivity for their peers who struggle with anxiety. page 5
Growing roots: the history and diversity of the College’s trees
The College of William and Mary has a large collection of rare and endangered woody species spread across campus. page 7