Using This Guide

This guide is designed for people who want to use Pier Kids to engage and inspire family friends, classmates, colleagues, and communities in honest, and potentially challenging, conversations. It is an invitation for dialogue that requires preparation before you and your community dive in, as well as a commitment for all participants to be fully present. Conversations that invoke experiences of political violence and exclusion and/or feelings of belonging, safety, and identity can be difficult to begin and facilitate. This resource offers support and structure to guide the process. In contrast to debates in which participants try to convince others that they are right, this guide envisions dialogue undertaken in a spirit of openness and active listening where divergent viewpoints are heard and responded to with care and respect.

Individuals and communities may also come to the conversation after viewing Pier Kids with varying degrees of knowledge, as well as dynamic and different experiences. The discussion prompts are intentionally crafted to help a wide range of audiences think more deeply about the topics in the film. Rather than attempting to address them all, choose the questions that best meet your needs and interests. And be sure to leave time to consider taking action. Planning next steps can help people leave the room feeling energized and optimistic, even in instances when conversations have been difficult and/or uncomfortable. Whenever possible, please consider a closing activity that gives participants an opportunity to offer gratitude to one another before closing.

For more detailed event planning and facilitation tips, visit communitynetwork.amdoc.org.

Helpful Concepts, Definition, and Language for Framing

​​GENDER IDENTITY & SEXUALITY:

Gender: The attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s biological sex. Behaviors that are compatible with cultural expectations are referred to as gender-normative; behaviors that are viewed as incompatible with these expectations constitute gender nonconformity.

Sex: The public classification of people as “male or female” at birth, based on bodily/anatomical characteristics such as chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, and genitalia. (GLAAD)

Gender Identity: A person’s private sense of and experience with being a boy or man, girl or woman, or a gender that may or may not correspond to the individual’s biological sex. Gender identity is personal and is not visible to others.

Gender Performance/Gender Expression: External manifestations of gender, expressed through one’s name, pronouns, clothing, haircut, behavior, voice, or body characteristics. Society identifies these cues as masculine and feminine, although what is considered masculine and feminine changes over time and varies by culture. Typically, transgender people seek to make their gender expressions align with their gender identities, rather than the sex they were assigned at birth.

Gender Non-conforming: This is a term used to describe people whose gender expression is different from conventional expectations of masculinity and femininity. Not all gender non-conforming people identify as transgender, nor are all transgender people gender non-conforming.

Sexual Orientation: Describes an individual’s enduring physical, romantic, and/or emotional attraction to another person. Gender identity and sexual orientation are not the same. Transgender people may be straight, lesbian, gay, or bisexual. For example, a person who transitions from male to female and is attracted solely to men would identify as a straight woman. (Not the same as gender identity.)

Cisgender: A term used by some to describe people who are not transgender. “Cis-” is a Latin prefix meaning “on the same side as,” and is therefore an antonym of “trans-.” A more widely understood way to describe people who are not transgender is simply to say non-transgender people.

Transgender (adj.): An umbrella term for people whose gender identity and/or gender expression differs from what is typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. People under the transgender umbrella may describe themselves using one or more of a wide variety of terms—including transgender. Some of those terms are defined below. Use the descriptive term preferred by the person. Many transgender people are prescribed hormones by their doctors to bring their bodies into alignment with their gender identities. Some undergo surgery as well. But not all transgender people can or will take those steps, and a transgender identity is not dependent upon physical appearance or medical procedures.

RACE & RACISM

Race: A social and political construct (race is not biological); “a power construct of collected or merged difference that lives socially.” (Kendi)

Racism: A system of advantage based on race that is historic and deeply embedded in institutional structures and benefits White people. Or, a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities. (Kendi) Racism is different than prejudice, hatred, and discrimination. Racism includes one group having power to carry out systematic discrimination through the institiutional policies and practices of the society.

Discrimination: Harmful acts commited against a person due to an aspect of their identity (often discrimination involves institutionalized power and exclusion).

Prejudice: A preconceived judgment or opinion, usually based on limited information.

Antiracist: One who is expressing the idea that racial groups are equals and none need developing and is supporting antiracist policy through their actions or expressing antiracist ideas.

Racist: “One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing racist ideas.” (Kendi)

ADDITIONAL TERMS:

Houselessness: Rather than using the language of “homelessness,” houselessness is a framing that recognizes housing is a basic human right and also that a home, and a community, can be created and exist even when people are denied their basic rights to affordable housing.

QTBIPOC: Queer, trans, Black, Indigenous people of color.

Sex Workers: Sex workers are adults who recieve money or goods in exhange for consensual sexual services or erotic performances as their jobs. Sex work is work.