FAQ

Why do you encourage people to attend in-person Safe Zone trainings?

Here are four, of so-many-more-we-could-list, reasons. At an in-person training, you have the chance to…

  1. Meet other people in your community who are interested in learning more about gender and sexuality. While workshops and trainings are awesome they often are just the start of the conversation and it’s great to have folks you’re already connected to so you can continue those conversations.
  2. Ask questions in real time. We do our best in all our courses/materials to anticipate your questions but sometimes you need things explained differently and during in-person trainings you can get that!
  3. Hear other participant’s questions and reflections. Sometimes you don’t even know where you’re stuck or that you’re stuck at all. During in-person trainings it’s easy to learn just as much from other participants as it is from the educator.
  4. Practice talking about LGBTQ+ identities, gender, and sexuality. Lots of time we are attending trainings to prepare ourselves for future conversations or interactions we might have. In those cases, in-person trainings give us a chance to practice those interpersonal skills in ways that online trainings do not.

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What about advanced workshops? Safe Zone 201 perhaps?

Our Foundational Curriculum is a designed to create a Safe Zone 101 overview workshop. We recommend this workshop for all audiences – gay, straight, queer, allied, and anywhere in between (or outside) those categories. While some of it may be old information for some, we believe that everyone, no matter their knowledge level, will get something out of the experience.

We do have exercises that can be used for more advanced/specific workshops. Just check out the explore activities tab and search under the “201” levels for more advanced activities!

I have an activity I think you should add to the site. Do you want to see it?

Yes! One of our goals for this project is to turn it into the go-to resource online for sexuality and gender education activities, so we’d like to add as many as possible. If you have a great activity we don’t already have on the site, drop us a line. No guarantees we’ll add it, and we will likely modify it (or spruce it up a bit), but at the very least we’d love to read it!

Why do you include an asterisk in Trans*?

The term transgender is often used as an umbrella term for many other terms that indicate an individual is not cisgender.  We use the word trans* throughout this site to indicate this umbrella term-y-ness and as an inclusive way to indicate a variety of non-cisgender identities in one simple term.  We pronounce this term simply “trans” (the * is silent). Read more about this on Sam’s site here.

LGBT vs LGBTQ vs GLBTQ vs GLBTQQIAPTS vs …

As you may have noticed, on the site and in our curriculum we tend to use the acronym LGBTQ+ when referring to the queer community. Is this the right acronym to use?

No, there really isn’t a “right” one — they all have their pros and cons. This is just the one we feel has the ideal balance of legibility (and ease of pronunciation) and inclusivity. The Q (queer) is used here as an umbrella, often used to encompass all types of marginalized genders and sexualities.

A relatively new term, GSM, which stands for Gender and Sexuality Minorities, has cropped up recently, and while it has a lot of potential, it doesn’t have the universality of understanding that LGBTQ has (in the United States, at least).

My school doesn’t have a Safe Zone program — how do I change that?

Great question. First off – you’ve come to a great place to start! You’ve got few things to take into consideration. What are your goals for the program? Who do you want to train and how many individuals would that be? How can you access some (don’t need much) funding? Can you do this without an established student group? Are you into going at it alone? After you’ve answered these questions – you’ll have a good idea of where to start.

Do you have dreams of Safe Zoning the entire freshman class? Perhaps scale back, start small, build up interest and gather others who maybe want to become facilitators in the future. Think about how you can access funding to help you print materials and get a food (bait) and advertising budget.

After that you just need to get started! Advertising, booking spaces, exciting people about the program, and gettin’ to training! We’ve got you covered in terms of curriculum development, and soon we’ll have a whole slew of resources to help you become an all-star facilitator. But these are good questions to start with.