Reflections on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the World Conference on Youth

I've now been back in the UK for one week and I don't think I've still completely processed the intense experience that was the World Conference on Youth. There was a lot of talking, not a lot of sleeping, and hundreds of amazing people that I met and got to know. Here are my lasting reflections on the 7 days in Sri Lanka:

Speaking to the Gender Equality session on Wednesday.

1. We've got a long way to go on sexual orientation and gender identity. During the conference my time was divided between facilitating sessions to understand what youth participants wanted from the outcomes and attending the negotiations with the government representatives to influence the outcome document. The majority of young people (not all) were all for including a mention of sexual orientation and gender identity in the outcome document and that enthusiasm for protecting this marginalised group carried across to a number of government delegations. There was the inevitable split in countries that wanted to see this term included and those who really didn't - in the end the last mention was removed in the very last discussion before negotiations closed and there was nothing I could say or do by that point to keep it in.

2. Nobody knows what they're arguing about. The reason the last mention in the text had to go was that none of the countries involved really got the issue they were having this battle of wills about. We started by putting in 'LGBTIQ' everywhere. I applaud the enthusiasm but this term is not inclusive and it hashes together the separate but interrelated issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. Working out some better language through our youth negotiators the proposition of 'all gender identities' and 'sexual orientation' in various paragraphs at least started to make some sense. But when you sit down to a discussion where its considered that gender can incorporate both sex and sexual orientation yo know that the nuances are not understood.

3. We've got to be more tactical. When homosexuality is still criminalised in many countries, we will not succeed in suggesting that diverse sexual orientations should be celebrated. If we can implement the UN Human Rights Council's resolution on ending violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity and moving towards decriminalisation that is the first step. I know it hardly sounds ambitious but if efforts within platforms like the World Conference on Youth focused on calling for the implementation of this one idea we might take this first small step towards something great.

4. We can achieve a lot even when we don't get everything. It's disheartening to see progressive language being deleted left, right and centre, but having taken stock since the conference I can see that what was left behind is still pretty amazing. Yes, perhaps people became so focused on getting sexual orientation out of the text that they didn't notice what else was left in. We talk about gender, other gender identities' and gender based violence in lots of places within the Colombo Declaration on Youth. We also make strong points about girls, women and violence against them.

5. Its a game, but its still personal. Any process negotiated with governments is going to move one step at a time. It's like a game of chess, you've got to keep your eye on the end goal, but you won't get there in just one move. Changing a word here and there can make all the difference, but will still feel like no difference at all on a personal level. 'Diverse sexual orientations and gender identities' aren't just an abstract concept, they're a daily lived experience for me, and stepping away from the conference on my way to board the plane home was a stark reminder of how much I want to get to check mate ASAP.

My gender expression (the clothes that I wear, other aspects of my appearance and mannerisms) is fluid - this is why I define myself as queer. I will wear dresses and skirts to look smart and particularly when representing of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts as a time when the 'young woman' part of 'queer young woman' needs to be at the fore. I wore dresses and skirts and leggings for the duration of the conference but chose to travel home in a preferred outfit of baggy jeans and tank top. As I went through airport security and the metal detector sounded for nearly everybody we were patted down. I stepped to the side of the female airport official. She looked at my puzzled and then proceeded to touch me very inappropriately. After too close an investigation between my legs she laughed something to her colleague about 'not sure a woman or a man' and waved me to pick up my bag. I didn't tell anybody I was with at the time - I'd just been brought down to earth with a bump and was full of memories of previous incidents.

6. We need to taking action too. Talking about words on a page is a slow, but I will admit necessary, process to eventually achieve change - but in the meantime, we also need grassroots action to change hearts and minds.

LGBT* and Mental Health

Whilst facilitating the theme of Gender Equality at the World Youth Conference in Sri Lanka, I was personally pleased to hear the demand from lots of youth to consider the needs and situations of LGBT* individuals in a future development agenda. It was thought early on that those needs would most likely not be included in the outcome document of the event - negotiated by governments and youth, there are many states who do not want to see it in there (yet many others who do). In fact sexual orientation was the very last term to be removed from the document before agreement.

But regardless of that text, there were important discussions to be had and talking about the subject brought new perspectives to youth and government officials from across the world. The issue brief published ahead of the conference for the health strand contained the following fact: 

"About 20% of adolescents will experience a mental health problem, with suicide being one of the leading causes of death in young people."

This wasn't linked in the brief to any particular causes, but from my personal experiences this is a key issue for LGBT* youth. I'm writing this on the flight home so I can't access the information to give statistics, but people are far more than just numbers. I know myself how it feels to be made out as 'not normal' on a daily basis, even in a country like the UK where the legal mechanisms are in place, and that can cause a whole host of mental health problems. 

My Story

Almost exactly 10 years ago I dropped out of school. Aged 13, I was depressed, I was suicidal, and it is only thanks to my supportive family that I continued my education from home and improved my mental health. At that point in my life I didn't understand my sexuality or my gender identity but I felt "different". On a regular basis I faced comments and taunts based on what others perceived - my peers told me constantly that I should have been born a boy. Week after week, month after month, as a teenager I started to believe that and saw it as an unrepairable fault in me as a person. The media, songs, stories, television all supported this notion - a binary system where I definitely didn't identify with the portrayal of women. It's all very well to tell young people to stand up for themselves when being bullied, but what do you do when you think they are telling the truth? The words make you so deeply unhappy because your telling them to yourself too. 

The internet was part if the problem - binary genders present across the web and plenty of homophobia cropping up more and more as websites became participatory. But it was also part of the solution. By using the internet I was able to find information (sites like Stonewall and Scarleteen) and other people going through the same (these were pre-Facebook times when live journals and MySpace were the in thing). When you find 4 or 5 people who are different in a similar way to you, the world is a much less bleak place, even if they live a long way away. 

Solutions

So what can we do to improve the mental health of LGBT* teenagers today? Campaigns like "It Gets Better" and Stonewall's latest ad addressing homophobic bullying have a role to play. Messages of diversity and acceptance beyond the binary gender system are growing within the media that teenagers consume regularly, though there is still room for improvement. 

We need to provide activities in formal and non-formal education that reinforce these messages of acceptance too. One of our rapporteurs, the vital note takers, for the gender equality strand of the conference gave me a copy of a resource from IFM SEI (http://ifm-sei.org/toolbox/rainbow-resources). It is filled with age-appropriate activities to approach the subjects of gender identity and sexual orientation with groups of children and young people. You can find a copy of the resource here. 

How else can we foster a culture of acceptance and improve the mental health of young people? 

Including Men And Boys in Achieving Gender Equality

One of the questions raised in the Gender Equality strand of the World Conference on Youth has been "How do we include men and boys in achieving Gender Equality?". All of the delegates agreed that we should involve people of all genders in achieving gender equality and, perhaps, men and boys can be considered the group that is currently the least engaged. 

The question is how? This list is by no means exhaustive, but offers a few suggestions: 

1. Try to have visible gender equality in panels and events on the subject. We often end up with women talking to women about gender equality - engaged women talking to engaged women too! If we incorporate more male and minority gender identity panellists, hopefully this will help to change the dynamics of the audiences too. We wouldn't think twice of pointing out the injustice of an all male panel on a subject, so think twice and create more diversity in your events.

2. Consider men and boys as part of the solution, not the problem. We need an environment of mutual respect and collaboration to achieve gender equality.

3. Use non-formal education curriculums and activities (like Voices Against Violence - link to it) in co-educational and boys only contexts. 

4. Think about the language and terminology that we use and call out our peers when they use harmful gender stereotypes. These shape how we perceive people's gender and are often damaging and limiting to men and boys as well as girls, women and other genders. 

5. Promote role models who support gender equality. By highlighting and increasing the visibility of role models that break down gender stereotypes, we can promote a broader understanding of gender identities and promote gender equality. 

Looking Back at Gender Equality

This speech was delivered to the Gender Equality session of the World Conference on Youth on the 7th May 2014. 

Before I left to come to the World Conference on Youth in Sri Lanka, I was speaking to a newspaper reporter. He said to me "gender equality is a great thing for women, but I don't see how it's relevant to everyone and other development issues."

I went on to explain how gender equality is a cross cutting issue, effecting everything from sustainable energy to education, but I think this highlights where we have got to so far. People have understood that the principle of gender equality improves the lives of women. MDG 3, achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women, has firmly put this subject on the table in development discussions. Though perhaps not everyone knows how to implement it, some don't want to implement it, and it's not been fully integrated into other development issues. 

Up to now, we haven't addressed succinctly how gender equality can improve the lives of everyone regardless of gender identity, how to address the root causes of these inequalities, and how we can mainstream it through other issues whilst maintaining it as a goal in itself. It is relevant to education, it is relevant to energy, to food security, to health and more. The MDGs went a little way towards mainstreaming gender equality, with gender based indicators across education and other goals - but to be truly mainstreamed there is still more to do. I was reading through the issue briefs for this event and there are notable cases, such as the one on full employment and entrepreneurship, where the effects of gender identity aren't considered or it's given just a name check. Adding men and women, girls and boys to a sentence isn't what mainstreaming is all about, but this has been taken as an easy approach across various policy making settings. We need to consider how issues manifest themselves differently for people dependent on their gender identities. The growth and employment consultation, as raised in the UN Women paper, highlights discrimination in accessing labour markets and variations in wages on the basis of gender identity. Talking about how we tackle these inequalities is how we can truly mainstream gender.

The issue of gender based violence was also a key area missing from the MDGs. The countries most likely to miss the targets are those involved in conflict or post conflict situations and women and young people are disproportionately victims of violence. Specific consideration needs to be given to peace and reconciliation in a future development agenda, and we need to involve women and young people, as the disproportionate victims, in peace building processes and in the commissioning of services related to sexual and domestic violence. Empowerment of women is too often being read as the disempowerment of men, gender equality does not mean that. Intimate partner violence, sexual violence, these are gendered issues that really need everybody, regardless of gender identity, on board in order to truly eliminate them. 

The MDG on education has succeeded in bringing enrolments rates of girls closer to those of boys in primary education, but are these just numbers? We need to invest in the quality of the education being provided and look beyond to secondary, tertiary, non-formal education and lifelong learning to understand how we can create education systems that support young people and adults to gain knowledge and skills, not just the youngest children, and to do this with gender sensitive facilities and curricula. 

We have made a lot of agreements in the past. The Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Beijing Platform for Action, and the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, these all have a role to play. They aren't universal. There are countries that haven't ratified some of these agreements. There are plenty of cases where it hasn't been enacted. They are a tool that we can use, to build upon and to be bolder about our hopes and dreams going forward. But we must not forget to consider how these aims will be achieved.

The MDGs were successful in capturing the imagination of those who had to be involved in their realisation. The 8 goals could be remembered the world over. They went beyond "UN speak" and we must think about this again for the post 2015 agenda.

Civil society have been critical to achieving progress in gender equality so far and will continue to be so with any future development agenda. My organisation, the world association of girl guides and Girl Scouts, and other youth organisations have been approaching the subject of gender equality, not as a nation state, but nevertheless a fundamental partner in development. The programmes that Girl guides and Girl Scouts deliver enable girls and young women to become powerful agents of development in their local communities, in their countries and through international platforms.

MDGs weren't seen as relevant to every country - my own, the uk, probably won't meet the goal of gender equality, we have too few women in parliament. But the government don't feel under pressure to act - people in the uk see the mDGs as goals for other countries, yet they are still aspirational for us and we should want to meet them too. This needs to change in the future agenda - all countries still have problems and can still improve the lives of their citizens. We should all feel ownership of the goals and a responsibility to make them a reality - something that perhaps the MDGs have not delivered in all countries.

My task for participants in the Gender Equality strand of the conference - to have thoughtful conversations about gender inequalities in the specific breakout sessions. But also to keep thinking about gendered issues when at various other themes each afternoon - by talking about gender equality outside of discussions specifically on that topic will enable us to go beyond what the MDGs have achieved so far. 

How do we get true gender mainstreaming in the post-2015 agenda?

When I was reading through the issue briefs (downloaded from http://www.wcy2014.com/resources.php ) for the various themes and cross cutting issues that we will be discussing at the World Conference on Youth 2014 this week, I was struck by the dramatic variation in how the authors had tried to mainstream gender considerations. 

For example the brief on "realising peace, reconciliation and ending violence" did this extremely well by dedicating an entire section to specific impacts on youth and women and ensuring there were specific items to resolve these impacts in the recommendations. Turn to "youth and waste management" and you will find no mention of how this issue may differ based on gender identity for the entire piece (perhaps the research hasn't been done?) or, perhaps what I personally feel is more concerning, have a look at "full employment and entrepreneurship" and the phrase 'young women and men' has been used in the place of 'youth' throughout.

Whilst this latter approach does succeed  in ensuring 'youth' is not read as exclusively male, it does nothing to recognise that the issue is experienced in a different way dependant on gender identity. UN Women have touched on employment issues in their brief for the "gender equality" strand and have the following to say: 

"Women suffer discrimination in accessing labor markets; they are over represented in vulnerable employment; and are paid lower wages than men for work of equal value." 

So in this respect there has been research and consultation done to find the gendered aspects of employment issues and so this needs to be thought about in discussions this week. I believe the structure of the conference will help to facilitate this - the participants from the gender equality sessions in the morning will disperse to be part of seven different thematic areas in the afternoons. This, I hope, will mean  the gender perspective is brought up in each of these themes to truly mainstream gender in the conference outcome documents and participants mindsets.

My challenge now is to see if gender equality can be thought about in the other six cross cutting issue sessions each morning, not to mention whether we can get consideration of minority gender identities in there too!