Tonight’s Icebreaker was your name and your gender pronoun. i.e. he, she, zi (gender neutral), or no preference.

Next we voted on the changes on the constitution. The majority of the members “yay”ed it, so now we will be giving our revised constitution to SGA, for them to vote on it as well.  SGA will not be meeting until the Tuesday after break so we will be asking them to “suspend senate rules” and vote on our constitution the night it is introduced.  More details next week.

Next we talked about the roster for the QSU. Student Activities likes to have an estimate of how many members are in a student organization. They ask that all groups provide a roster of members so they have an approximate head count of the organization. For QSU we do not force anyone to be on the roster but we want to give everyone the opportunity to be on it. We cannot promise confidentiality with this list. If you choose to be on our roster, simply reply to this e-mail and we will put you on the list – we need your name and Student ID #.

Kyla Bender-Baird gave a presentation to the group tonight on the Trans Community. She is a Grad student here at Towson and she is writing her thesis on Trans issues in the workplace. She began researching this topic because she did not know much about the subject, so she delved into further research.

• She started off with an introduction and the question of, “What is Gender?” She went further into gender pronouns and explained in detail what “zi” and “hir” mean and why someone would choose to be called ze/hir as opposed to he/him or she/her.
• A lot of people tend to get gender and sex confused. So she gave a wonderful quote from Mary Boenke, “Sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears.” Meaning that your biological sex depends on what type of sexual organs you have and what you were assigned as birth, and your gender is how you see and express yourself.
• She then brought up the issue of privilege and identification in the Trans Community.
• She also talked about the different types of Trans identities and how others may perceive a member of the Trans community and how everyone has filters and preconceived notions and how we project them on everyone else, including transgender individuals.
• She then explained more in depth what her research is centered around: Transgender Employment Discrimination, which led into a discussion over ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act). 
• And her discussion concluded with the concept of “Putting the ‘T’ back in LGBT”.

Kyla was very eye opening and informative and she is looking for Trans individuals to interview for her research. You can reach her through e-mail at kyla.benderbaird@gmail.com Also if you have any questions she loves to talk about her research and is open to all questions!

Announcements:

• The Coffee House was a huge success thanks to the efforts of Briana Edwards, Danielle White, Theresa Macheski, all the performers and all the people who donated. We raised $110 for the VH1 Save the Music Foundation!!

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