Being Queer in a Cis-Straight World: Community Discussion

One of the main barriers to LGBT+ people’s wellbeing and a reason that queer people often suffer disproportionately from mental ill health is that we live in a cis-straight world that is structured around cisnormativity and heteronormativity. That is that we live in societies and cultures that assume heterosexual and cisgender identities are the norms and privileges these over any other form of sexual orientation and gender identity.

LGBT Health and Wellbeing hosted a community discussion in September 2018 to better understand the experiences of our LGBT+ community members in navigating a cis-straight world. In discussing some of these themes in more depth, we hoped to help attendees feel less alone in the issues they might face and be a step on the way to helping people improve their wellbeing. It formed part of an ongoing series of quarterly community discussions that take the format of a panel discussion and allow our community members to engage with questions that are related to their LGBT+ identities and central to their lives. 

This report collates all the different elements of the community discussion. In part 1, we screened video clips by Glasgow based filmmakers highlighting the prejudice and structural barriers that queer people in Glasgow still experience in 2018. In part 2, we asked attendees to write anonymously about a situation where the world around them made it more difficult to be themselves which we then discussed as a group. In part 3, we finished with a group chat about the positive aspects of being queer and things we could do to make our immediate environment a better place for us to exist.

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