Massachusetts university offers free 'Trans 101' course

The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst)’s Stonewall Center offers a free “LGBTQIA+ Foundations and Allyship” web course, and other LGBTQ-based workshops and resources, for faculty, staff, and students.

Allyship is a social justice term referring to one social identity group assisting another. The Stonewall Center is a UMass Amherst-run LGBTQ support group. 

The center describes the allyship course as “an independent, self-paced learning experience around the foundations of sexuality, gender, gender identity, and allyship.”

Any faculty or staff who complete the course “can sign up to receive a placard for their office door that states ‘This is a welcoming space of LGBTQIA+ students.’”

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Other workshops include “Gender and Sexuality 101,” “Intersectionality 101,” and “Trans 101,” among others.

“Trans 101” promises that participants will “discuss the individual and institutional oppression that trans individuals face in a society that often enforces a gender binary.”

An “LGBTQIA+ Terminology Quiz“ is also offered to test an individual’s knowledge of LGBTQ terms.

Questions on the quiz include “what of the following is generally an affirmative term to refer to some members of the transgender community?” and “[w]hich statement best describes asexual-spectrum people?”

Options to the latter include the following: 

Another question reads, “[w]hich of the following is not a gender identity/expression?”

Optional answers include the following: 

The answer is pansexual, according to the answer key at the end of the test. 

Another resource allows allies to build their LGBT vocabulary with basic and more advanced glossaries of LGBTQ terms including “[b]iromantic,” “[b]ois,” “[d]emigender,” “[h]omoromantic,” and “[s]koliosexual.”

The last on that list, skoliosexual, is defined as “[i]ndividuals who experience sexual, romantic, and/or emotional attractions to people with nonbinary gender identities.” 

[RELATED: Students call out university for its ‘power and privilege’ workshop] 

Campus Reform contacted Stonewall Center and other relevant parties for comment. This story will be updated accordingly.