Paving Neural Pathways & Embracing Community with Oomiya Kawas
In this episode, Josh and Oomiya share personal stories of identity and explore ways to support community building, LGBTQ+ youth, and being our authentic selves.
Listen to Public Hearing wherever you get your podcasts and on WICN 90.5FM, Worcester’s NPR affiliate station. And, while we celebrate women all year round, our guests for the month of March are all women who live, influence, and/or impact the City of Worcester, MA. Learn more about our show at PublicHearing.co
Transcript for this episode
Joshua Croke (00:00):
Hello, hello Worcester and the world. This is your host, Joshua Croke, and you're listening to the Public Hearing podcast and radio show. Our show is about exploring compelling futures for our cities and communities through the lens of Worcester, Massachusetts. Did you know that Worcester is the second largest city in New England. As a gateway city with over 186,000 residents facing a lot of gentrifying attention, Worcester is not dissimilar to other cities facing similar challenges. On Public Hearing, we talk with members of the community residents, artists, small business owners, local activists and politicians and other folks who care about inclusive, equitable and prosperous growth. You're listening to the Public Hearing podcast. Public Hearing is available wherever you listen to podcasts and on WICN 90.5 FM on Wednesdays at 6:00 PM, Worcester's only NPR affiliate station. Our guest today is Oomiya Kawas and I am so happy to have you here with us Oomiya, thank you so much for taking the time.
Joshua Croke (01:01):
And I would love to introduce you by allowing you to introduce yourself to our listeners. And for listeners who are familiar with the show, we always encourage folks to share what they want to bring into this space. That could be your work. That could be your passions. It could be a connection of all of those things. As well as parts of your social location or parts of your identity and experience that you want to bring into this space that you feel are important for people to understand kind of the context in which you have experienced the world and kind of move through life in 2021 and considering some of the challenges that we face in society today. So welcome, and thank you again so much for being here.
Oomiya Kawas (01:45):
Thank you so much for having me Joshua. I'm so excited to be a part of the Public Hearing podcast. And I'm just really glad to be here a little bit about me or a small introduction. My name is Oomiya. I am a queer and non-binary, fat, daughter of a Muslim immigrant. And I have spent much of my time in central Massachusetts. But I have traveled to the Middle East and many coastal regions of the United States and have been very lucky to have those experiences.
Joshua Croke (02:31):
Thank you so much. So I'm going to start with a big question and then we'll go and allow that to take us where it does. What do you feel are some of the greatest challenges facing us in our time right now, here in our local community, but also that might echo kind of more broadly, but what are some of the largest challenges that you see in your life and in your work?
Oomiya Kawas (03:00):
So I didn’t really introduce my work very much in my introduction, but I feel like it is relevant to this question, but I work as a clinical youth mentor and parent coach and also a gender resource specialist for a nonprofit in the city and mostly working with, you know, higher risk youth and families. So I think that gives me some unique insight into some of the challenges that we face in our communities. And I would like to address the challenge of the sort of individualistic society that we exist in to the point where we have sort of lost our ability to be in community with one another. And you know, I really believe strongly that it takes a village, it takes a village to survive. It takes a village to thrive. You know, we need our community, we need that support.
Oomiya Kawas (04:12):
We need that love. We need people to hold space for us and we need to hold space for others as well. And I think we are really missing that. And as you mentioned, you know, in the beginning and the introduction Worcester is facing some pretty serious gentrification right now, which is just further diminishing the ability to be in community with one another. And we see people being, you know, pushed out of their neighborhood that they've lived in for 30 years because they can no longer afford to live there. And so the very hard and real work of building community where you land sort of gets taken away and now you have to start over. So to me, I think one of the biggest problems we're facing is building and maintaining strong, connected community with one another.
Joshua Croke (05:11):
And so what are some of the mechanisms that you feel really help support building that community back or really celebrating the connectedness of community? Cause I think you're totally right in the individualism and that mindset of it's me versus you it's us versus them. It is, you know, and I think that there are some folks who might be listening to the show as well. When we talk about gentrification and their responses sometimes are like, well, what you don't want growth? You don't want to see, you know, new businesses coming to the city and like, no, that's not what anyone's saying. It's a very specific approach that people take to development that leads to displacement. And I think really a lot of that is rooted in a lack of true priority and commitment to resident populations. People who have been born here, people who have moved here and built their lives here, like you said, people who have lived here for 30 plus years who are now being priced out of homes that they've made have been renting for decades, but because of the difficulty of building and accruing wealth and purchasing your own property and things like there are so many like levels of systemic, I'll call it oppression, let's call it what it is, right.
Joshua Croke (06:31):
That disallow folks to generate that wealth and really feel like they can connect to an established community for fear of what that might mean. So I know I just had a lot there, but interested in your thoughts.
Oomiya Kawas (06:47):
No, absolutely. I think you touched on some really great points and I'm feverishly taking notes because I want to, you know, comment on them. And, and, and the first thing I want to do is clarify a little bit the difference between individualism and being able to exist as our authentic selves. I believe firmly and wholeheartedly that we should be able to exist in a world where our authentic selves is good enough and is valued and is seen as worthy. And and however, we arrive, right, our bodies, our gender, our sexuality to be valued in our community. And so I think that is different from individualism. You know, that I am referencing when I say that's a problem that we have in our community is that individualism. And so I just wanted to clarify that a little bit and say that, you know, when we're building authentic community in this way, and we're sort of saying, okay, we're going to acknowledge, Hey, none of us are free.
Oomiya Kawas (08:03):
If all of us aren't free, right? My freedom is tied to your freedom and yours is tied to mine. And so I think the, you know, and this is going to sound a little cliche, I think, but the tool that we need is empathy. We need to be understanding of one another. We need to be able to pause and validate each other's experiences because the way that you walk through the world and the way that I walk through the world are different and both how we see ourselves and how we see other people and also how the world sees us. And so we have to account for that when we are acknowledging one another's experience. And I think that really takes a learned skill of, you know, learning to be empathetic and learning to understand that.
Oomiya Kawas (09:06):
And, you know, I hear you sort of touching on this like, Oh, you know, people might feel like, well, we're gentrifying because we want to see growth happen and we want to see prosperity happen in the city. But the truth is if your growth is pushing people in lower socioeconomic statuses, out of their homes and out of their community, that they have been in for a long period of time or any period of time, like that growth is just an illusion. It's not actually growth. It is growth based on looking at a small population of people. And so when we take that idea and we say, okay, well now that everybody who lives here is, you know, a certain socioeconomic status or above we see so much prosperity in Worcester. That's not really an accurate pool of information, right. We're sort of, we're missing out on so many other factors. And so I think that's, you know, really important to touch on there. I think if, you know, if we're not viewing growth as the way that we all come up together, all of us, then it's not really growth. It's the illusion of growth by just taking a micro sample.
Joshua Croke (10:32):
Absolutely. And there is so much, I think people in certain positions of authority in communities broadly, but, you know, we'd talk in the lens of Worcester here, look at and leverage the power of silencing and not bringing forward the true experiences of folks here. And they have the ability to do that in a lot of spaces. And so there are some folks who like to walk with blinders and say, Oh, you know, I'm here, I'm new to the city, or I've moved into one of these nice new buildings, and this is the type of space that I want to live in. And it's like, I don't understand why people wouldn't want to live in these spaces. And, you know, the piece that you're talking about about building empathy, I think is so important. And you said something as well, which, you know, relative to like, no one is free, unless everyone is free.
Joshua Croke (11:34):
And I feel like that's really hard for some people to wrap their minds around, you know, cause they're like, well, you know, you could be in a, you know, add a couple stacks of privilege. I know that I grew up with a lot of that of, you know, well, I have this stuff, you know, I have the stuff that one would want, so it is that really true? Like, is that, you know, if I'm not seeing oppression and feel like I'm experiencing it and I'll add the caveat of people not acknowledging where really identifying or recognizing different types of oppression that really echoes into all layers in our society. But to the point of building empathy and also acknowledging like the power of silencing others, you know, how do we continue to move forward and elevate and amplify voices so that they are heard and not just heard, but they are brought into spaces where decisions are being made and are you know, I don't want to say allowed because that's, again like a very power dynamic term. Right. But are able to come into space and claim their communities and what they want to happen in those, and really drive the development and growth that they want to see in those spaces.
Oomiya Kawas (12:58):
Absolutely. Yeah. I'm so just like in agreement with what you're saying, and I think there are a couple of things and a couple of, sort of, for me when I'm doing this work and, you know, a part of what I do with the Gender Wellness Initiative is to give workshops to different organizations on how to be better accomplices to LGBTQ individuals with a focus on transgender and gender variant folks, you know, as myself identify as non binary. And we know, right, statistically we know that the most marginalized communities are, you know, exists within the LGBT community. And so this is something that we want to have these conversations and a few things that I always try to talk to folks about initially is like, let's get on the same page about what these terms mean when I say privilege, and I say, systematic oppression, I want you to understand, you know, the definitions that I'm applying to these words, when we talk about this, because people feel uncomfortable, you know, especially like in my line of work, I'm often talking to folks who have a lot of privilege, right.
Oomiya Kawas (14:19):
And so it's an uncomfortable topic and people want to say, well, you know, I've worked very hard. I'm, you know, I'm not privileged. I've worked very hard for what I have. And so this is where I don't want to get into this argument about this. So let's define these things right off the bat, you know, privilege is not defined by how hard you have worked. It's defined by the social experience that you have had based on the accident of your birth, right? You had no choice in the fact that you were born a white man, white assigned male at birth. You know I had no choice in the fact that I was born a, you know, person of color, female assigned you know, it's like, these are things that we chose, but they did set us up in the world to experience it differently.
Oomiya Kawas (15:22):
Right. And in the ways that we experience it. So that's something I always want to say before we get into this privilege conversation, because it's nuanced and I never want folks to be feeling like I'm sort of targeting them in this way of like, well, I've had to work really hard and you're not acknowledging that this is not about that. I think the other thing that's so important to talk about is how do we discern discomfort and oppression, right? Because when we have these conversations and people are uncomfortable and it is typically the most privileged people who are uncomfortable and that feels like oppression. And so we need to make sure that we're having this conversation, we're saying, okay, what, how do we discern, right. As people in positions of privilege, now to go back to this, there are so many rooms that I walk into where I have the most privilege.
Oomiya Kawas (16:25):
You know, I facilitate youth groups, I facilitate caregiver support groups. So in these rooms, like I have the most power. And it's important that when I'm in these rooms, I'm always leveraging my privilege to protect the people who are less privileged than I am. Right. And sort of stand in the way and sort of put up a barricade to somebody who might be more privileged and help them to build a bridge and understand why it is so important that we leverage our privilege, why it is so important that we can discern discomfort and oppression, why it is so important that where using every opportunity that we have to do this work and to say okay, I'm going to be the person who says, Hey, that makes me really uncomfortable. And I don't want to participate in conversations like that when somebody is saying, for example, something that I might perceive as transphobic, right.
Oomiya Kawas (17:26):
Because I am a passing, non-binary person, nobody, I out myself, you know, it's like, and I think a lot of people in the LGBT community, they experienced that as well. Right? It’s like, Oh, how, how am I gonna like wave my flag so that the other people in this community know to find me. And so when in that position in a community, right? So even though I exist myself at various intersections of marginalized identity, there are places and ways that I have so much more privilege than other people. And it's important that I'm acknowledging that and that I'm leveraging that privilege, every opportunity I get and that, you know, it's kind of bringing me to this theory that I have sort of been harping on for the last, you know, several months, which I like to call trickle up effect.
Oomiya Kawas (18:29):
So, you know, we sort of, when we think about the trickle down economics, the idea is that wealth will trickle to the poorest people through allowing it to start at the top and trickle down. This is my, you know, I'm a social worker, health educator. So that was my very simplified economics definition of it. But when we talk about the trickle up effect, which is what I like to use in social programming, which is what I do so much of, I like to talk to organizations and people about creating safe, equitable, nurturing spaces for the most intersectionally marginalized individuals. And when we do that, we are actually creating safe, equitable, nurturing spaces for everyone who will arrive there. And so by focusing on creating equity and safety for the most intersectionally marginalized individuals, we actually are creating a safe and equitable world.
Oomiya Kawas (19:39):
And so when I say, none of us are free, unless all of us are free. It comes back to that sort of illusion that if we're only taking a snapshot of a specific population who may feel free, right? But that freedom is an illusion because we are all tied to one another. And we see that, you know, even recently with the Coronavirus and with all of these social expectations if we are not building a world where we can all be safe, where it is equitable for all of us, where does nurturing for all of us, we're actually, it's not sustainable, right. It's just not going to be a sustainable world. And so I think that's, you know, a big part of how I approach these social problems and social situations.
Joshua Croke (20:35):
And if I could compliment that with some of the research and work that I do, and what you're talking about is so resonant and I'm just like, yes, yes, yes. For folks who can't see us, because this is a radio and podcast show, we're frequently snapping back and forth on camera, but you know, the idea, I do a lot of work as a facilitator. And I always like to set the stage in those sessions that while I'm doing a lot of talking and while that a lot of the focus right now is on me kind of helping to nurture this space. I am not the leader here. I am really here to help facilitate and make your conversation as easy, effective, and supportive and is healing as possible. And so to a lot of what you were just talking about, I look to, there are practices for inclusion.
Joshua Croke (21:29):
There are principles of inclusive design for the built environment that talk very similarly. If we're looking at building physical space, a new park, a new building, a hotel, any products that we interact with, if we build those products with the most intersectionally marginalized at the forefront, those products are going to be better for everyone to use and to interact with and engage with. And there are different modalities and there needs to be multiple forms of interaction with the built environment that support and like amplify the ability for folks to engage with and use them regardless of their identity or their mobility or other factors that influence that. Similarly, and just, sorry, just quickly. Similarly. I also apply an equity centered design framework to how I do all of my work. And oftentimes when we talk about community and building empathy and trying to solve complex social problems like homelessness, like you know, juvenile detention and the school to prison pipeline, when we're talking about structural issues in society, people are starting to come to the table and say, well, and sadly, it's like are finally coming to the table to say, well, if we're talking about improving public education, like we need to bring some youth into this conversation.
Joshua Croke (23:02):
Right. And we are finally starting to say, we need them to bring the voices of those who have been most impacted to the table. But what a lot of people miss is they miss providing the agency and opportunity for those people to actually lead the decision making process. And they also don't take the time to focus on community healing and addressing harm caused. And so at the root of my work, when I start working with clients is like, we dive into harm and healing exercise, like, what are the harms that have been caused? How can we open up a dialogue to start understanding what that has, how that played out in people's lives before we're just asking them to participate in a conversation that they may have been asked to participate in their entire lives and are not seeing the change. So I'll pause there.
Oomiya Kawas (23:59):
I mean, yes, I'm getting so excited over here, just, you know, having this conversation because I am, you know, just, yeah, these are all things that I'm thinking about. And you know, a lot of what you're saying is reminding me of an incredible, incredible disability, justice activists, Mia Mingus, who works and transformative justice. She co-founded the Bay Area transformative justice center in San Francisco. And this sort of coming together with both the person who has been harmed and the person who has done the harming and having teams of people there to facilitate you know, this restorative justice, you know, how do we make this better? How do we continue on to be in community together because we need one another and I'm just, I'm so you know, passionate about this work. And I think that the other thing that I feel like you really touched on that had me had my wheels turning and had me thinking was just giving people some in the room privilege, you know, being able to have a seat at the table.
Oomiya Kawas (25:17):
And how can we acknowledge on a like more macro level, how having this bigger pool of people who are now able to utilize these tools actually helps this tool progress faster and better, right? It becomes a more valuable tool because there are more minds looking at it. There are so many brilliant individuals who don't have the opportunity to be in the room and by not opening up that space to them, we are missing out. And that's a huge piece of this. And I think of, you know, many anecdotal stories that I've heard about young people growing up very poor in the inner city and finding a way, you know, I'll be at oftentimes not fully or at all legal ways, right. But to make money and to gain some wealth, right. We talk about like, how do people who don't have any, begin to gain wealth, right.
Oomiya Kawas (26:23):
Where other people are accidentally burst into a family that has been able to, you know create significant amounts of generational wealth. So it's like all of these ways, you know, when you see a kid who grew up and who learned how to make that money and create something themselves you have to think like, I want this person in the room. I want to hear their experience. I want to know how they manifested that, how they were able to create that for themselves out of such a challenging situation, you know, like this is a resilient person, but oftentimes you know, what happens is like that community is over policed that, you know, young person ends up in jail or in juvenile detention. And they're never able to fulfill that, you know, in themselves, like they're never able to get into that space. They're never able to create that change or better that tool that has been developed. And so, and I think that's happening now. I think, I mean, we know that that is happening in these communities, and so we want to make sure that we're opening that
Joshua Croke (27:43):
And to always challenge exceptionalism as an expectation, I think is something that I find so important in particularly in conversations when I'm opening dialogue for discussing privilege and starting to kind of dismantle some of people's perceptions around what that is, what it means, their discomfort that they feel, you know, especially when you get into a conversation about race and racism and racial justice and folks say, you know, well, Barack Obama, we had a black president. So like, there's no reason that anyone else shouldn't be able to, you know, and I'm cringing and gritting my teeth when I say this horrible term, but pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, which is literally like, just think about doing that for a second, like physically go and try and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It doesn't make any sense. It's not possible exactly.
Oomiya Kawas (28:38):
Barack Obama was born into an immense amount of privilege, right? Like we can say, yes, he is a black man. He has faced you know, systemic racism and certain amounts of marginalization, but he is also born into a lot of intersectional privileges in that same way. And so it's to sort of use Barack Obama as well, if one, you know, black man born in this position can get here. Every black person should be able to get here or, you know, insert person of this race who has done it. And, you know, the people of this race who haven’t. Right. It's and, and so when I think about this too, right, it's like the idea of leveraging your privilege, the idea of assessing the room you're in if Barack Obama is in a room of black trans women, he is literally the most privileged person there.
Oomiya Kawas (29:41):
Right. And I'm sure in a lot of other rooms that he sits in, you know, and so we have to acknowledge that it is not a one size fits all privileged or not privileged, right. It's intersectional. And it changes based on the space that you're occupying. And so when we all are like, that should be the goal here is like, let's all examine our privilege in the spaces that we're occupying and make sure that we're leveraging it where we can, because it's the right thing to do. And because it's good for society. I just think that that's, you know, it's, it's not like this two dimensional thing that we're looking at, you know, it's situational it's happening and factors change, right? So it's like your privilege can change based on things that happen to you. And so we have to acknowledge that as well.
Joshua Croke (30:42):
And so Kimberly Crenshaw who coined the term intersectionality back in the eighties, I recently heard her talk about a definition that she's constantly asked so regularly to kind of redefine because people want to build structures and constructs and frameworks around intersectionality. And, she kind of challenges that by saying intersectionality is like a prism in which we are looking at outcomes that we might not understand because of a variety of different factors. Right. And that's paraphrasing, that's not like word for word, but I've thought that that was really powerful because that also helped evolve my perception of intersectionality and like how to better talk to folks about what that is. And when we're talking about different layers of privilege, you know, wealth privilege, white privilege, celebrity privilege, I talk about time privilege, like the ability to dedicate large amounts of time to things generates different outcomes, right?
Joshua Croke (31:48):
Like, so there are so many different layers to privilege. And so I appreciate you like providing that frame. I want to, because I know that we're going to come back into this and it's going to come full circle, but I want to talk a little bit about your work with youth. It's something that is very near and dear to my heart. Something that I, as a non-binary, queer person who navigated a lot of familial conflict coming out and coming out multiple times and in different ways over many decades now you know, hearing a little bit more about your work and you know, how you really work with individuals like on that individual level.
Oomiya Kawas (32:35):
You know, we do a lot of work. I work predominantly now, you know, when I started, I was just working as a youth mentor. And as I grew in my role and also in myself, right, the more authentic I became, the more I started to come out, I was something of a late bloomer, if you will. And for many good reasons. But when we work with young people, we set a treatment plan, we set some goals. And now my work predominantly around working with, you know, LGBTQIA+ youth, a lot of times our goals are starting right at self-esteem and self-worth, right building these young people up teaching them how to love themselves, teaching them that they don't have to be exceptional to be worthy, that their being is exceptional and that they're loving themselves and being who they are is a radical act of resistance in this world.
Oomiya Kawas (33:53):
And that is exceptional in itself. And so it seems like a simple place to start really, but it's complex and it is nuanced. And, you know, we are going against years and years of internalized, you know, as you said, sort of the isms or all of the intersections of marginalized identity, right? So internalized homophobia, internalized transphobia, the things that they have heard about people like them, that they now believe about themselves. And you know, something that I like to do often is, you know, we do sort of like cognitive behavioral therapy skills with these young people. And so we learned to retrain our brains with this tool. So let's take the simple act of positive affirmations, something we do often. Okay. Let's look in the mirror together, let's look at ourselves and say, I love you.
Oomiya Kawas (35:06):
I love you. And let's do that often. And it feels uncomfortable and silly at first. And, you know, we'll laugh and be silly about it because it's sometimes what you need to do to work through it. But what that does is it retrains your brain. So if you are always taught you know, you're worthless, you're worthless, you're worthless immediately when you're having an automatic response to a challenging situation. That's like a highway in your brain. Those neurotransmitters travel very fast, write down that worthless road. And when we start to challenge those automatic thoughts and the ways that we think about ourselves, we are hiking through an untraversed path. And so it is slow going and it does not feel easy, but the more and more we hike on that path now a trail is created. And eventually that becomes your highway. That becomes the automatic thoughts.
Oomiya Kawas (36:06):
So when we have a younger kiddo, or, you know, an older kiddo who is needing to work on their self-esteem and their self-worth, we're hoping to build highways for neurotransmitters out of untraversed paths. We're hoping that we can change this automatic self-talk from something that brings them down to something that affirms them. And a lot of times I tell parents, you know, when I'm doing the work with them, your voice and the things that you say to your child becomes their inner voice. It is what they hear when they arrive at a challenging situation. That is what is in their head. And, you know, what do you want them to hear? What do you want your kiddo to hear when they are in a situation that is challenging or dangerous, or maybe they haven't been in before, you know, do you want them to hear you are worthless?
Oomiya Kawas (37:10):
Or do you want them to hear you are loved? And you don't have to do anything that you don't want to do, or, you know, you can do this. You're great. You're powerful. You have got the tools to handle this situation. So we try to do a lot of reframing. And, you know, as you know, Josh, there's a lot of young people in the LGBT community who don't have necessarily parents in their corner, but if they have a supportive adult, we're having this conversation with them if it is me, I'm having this conversation with them, you know, hear my voice. When you get to that situation, you got this, and also you don't have to do anything that feels uncomfortable. So if you feel like you need to get out of a situation, you can walk away. And so we look to change those sort of roadmaps in the brain to help young people survive a world that is sometimes pitted against them, you know.
Joshua Croke (38:10):
I bring this statistic up as much as I can, because I think it really resonates with folks. And, you know, I always lead with, if you do youth work, you work with LGBTQ youth. You don't need to know that you might never have an interaction with, or a conversation with one of those youth where they expose that part of themselves to you, which is something to reflect on possibly. But also the Trevor Project did a study that found that one affirming adult in the life of an LGBTQ young person reduced the likelihood of that young person attempting suicide by 40%, by 40%. So folks who are listening, if you work with youth, one adult, that singular adult, could be you, to affirm, simply affirm and say that you are valued, you are worthy, you are loved, saves lives.
Oomiya Kawas (39:12):
And just to expand on that, because this is also something that I use in every workshop that I do that suicidality from both the Trevor Project and the National Transgender Survey, which happened in 2015, given by the organization is slipping my mind at the moment. But we know actually that statistically folks who attempt suicide under report, for their own safety, for their own feelings of maybe being judged or embarrassed. So we suspect that these numbers are actually much higher, but statistically, right? So the, the results that were found in both the National Transgender Survey and with the Trevor Project is that 44% of LGBTQ+ youth and individuals actually will attempt suicide. And that number is reduced to 4% with that one supportive person. And 4% is actually the national average. So on average 4% of the population will attempt suicide.
Oomiya Kawas (40:29):
If you are LGBTQ identifying that number jumps to 44%, if you are LGBTQ+ identifying with one supportive person in your life, validating and affirming you, that number goes right back down to the national average of 4%. So I think that tells us two things. One, people need to get more on board with supporting LGBTQ youth period, right? It's just period. And two, there's no difference in the suicidality of an LGBTQ person without the system of oppression in place, right? So when we have that one supportive person, now we're right back down to the national average. And without that, we're seeing nearly 50% of LGBTQ identifying people, attempting suicide, because the world is so hard on them.
Joshua Croke (41:36):
I'm so glad you brought that up. And you just frame that in an incredible way. And I just learned a lot in that. And so thank you. And I think, you know, when I go back to my young, queer voice in my head, when I grew up going to church basement school in a family that was very unsupportive of my coming into my identity and starting to understand more about who I was, the voice in my head is like, Oh, LGBTQ kids are, you know, committing, dying by suicide more frequently because there's something wrong there, right? And that's the message that folks in different spaces. And unfortunately, a lot of faith spaces, at least in, again, I'll speak from my own experience in faith spaces are saying, well, this happens to LGBTQ folks because there's something wrong with them, right? That's that's sinful, or like there's something wrong.
Joshua Croke (42:31):
So like we want to try and convert you away from that because our best intentions, and this is the challenging thing, is sometimes unfortunately they are best intentions, right? A parent who loves their kid, who doesn't want them to be this way, because they feel like it's wrong, right? And that best intention leads to death, depression, a myriad of various challenges because of these structures of oppression and people co-opt those statistics so quickly to say, like, this is the justification of why it's wrong instead of looking in the mirror and saying, what are we doing as a society that's leading to this.
Oomiya Kawas (43:17):
Right. And this comes back to that discomfort versus oppression, right. You know, being able to hold space for that uncomfortable conversation, instead of saying this is wrong, or, you know, this is an individual problem instead of, you know, a product of the societal problem. And so that is huge. And you know, it, your story really resonates with me, Josh. I mean, I similarly at, you know, and a lot of ways I grew up in an extremely liberal family. But my dad is a Muslim immigrant and my mom was born in this country, but is also Lebanese. And you know, we come from a pretty faith-based family on both sides and my parents never appeared very homophobic to me, except for like, anybody could be gay, just not, not my kids. You know, it's like, Oh, we gotta love and accept everybody, but we have a very strict standard of what we expect you to be.
Oomiya Kawas (44:32):
And I knew that from a very young age, what my parents expected of me. And so coming in, you know, we use this term a lot in this work coming into ourselves and then coming out to everybody else. The process of coming in for me was so traumatic and damaging because I knew that there was something wrong with me. You know, I was sure that I could just figure out how not to be who I was. And I spent so much time and energy trying to figure out how not to be who I was that I really lost myself. And I never had the opportunity to grow up as who I was, you know, I never had the opportunity to experience life as a young person or as an adolescent, or even as a young adult, truly as who I was, I was always fighting that person.
Oomiya Kawas (45:38):
I was always you know, afraid of that person making their way out of me. I was afraid of the repercussions of that. And so I spent 26 years being afraid of myself. And so when I finally came out at 26, I mean, and it was like pulling teeth, you know, I did not want to come out. But it was like at 26 years old, I was finally allowed to be who I was, but I was a child because I didn't have that opportunity. You know, I didn't know how to be who I was. I didn't have those experiences of being a younger person and making those mistakes and figuring out who I am and what my boundaries are and what I like and what I don't like. And so that is a shame, you know, it's a real shame that people, myself included and maybe yourself included, you know, we didn't have that opportunity to experience who we were to grow to love who we were, you know, and I see it happening to a lot of young people today, especially, you know, young trans kids coming out, being met with, you know
Oomiya Kawas (46:58):
A lot of violence, right. And not necessarily physical violence, but sometimes, but just a lot of violence towards who they are and saying, okay, I don't want to be that anymore. I'll do anything not to be that. And so when we look at it from that perspective, it's like one when people are like is trans just a phase. And I'm like, well, maybe, but like, we encourage exploration in so many ways. Why don't we want people to explore who they are within their gender identity and their gender expression. Right. It's like, there's that part. And then the other part is, you know, nobody would choose this also. It's like, if I had a choice, I would do the thing that I tried to do for so many years, because I didn't want to risk losing my community. You know, I didn't want to take that.
Oomiya Kawas (47:58):
I, and this is, you know, really comes back full circle to this like importance of community and this importance of empathy and this importance of leveraging our privilege. But it's like, I would never risk all these things. I spent so many years trying not to risk all these things because they were so valuable to me. I would never choose this. And when I came out, my dad said to me, you know, my mom had passed. So I really had to come out to my dad. And he was like, are you sure? And I was like, dad, I am so sure. And he was like, how, why? And I was like, I really, I don't know. And I tried really hard. You know, not to be this, like, this is an inevitable thing. This is a life or death thing for me. Like, it is inevitable.
Oomiya Kawas (48:47):
If I am not who I am, I am not alive. And so I am choosing to be who I am, and I hope that you can join me. And it did take many years, but, you know, I will, in the event that he listens to this, I will give him a shout out of coming around, you know, so much love for that. But truly, I mean, nobody chooses to be trans. And I read an interesting statistic, which was that, you know, in the early or late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, only 1% of people were left-handed, but being left-handed was punishable. Like you would get beat for being left-handed and they would switch your pencil in your hand so that you would be right-handed. And once they stopped doing that, it turned out now it's like 10 to 12% of the population is left-handed,
Joshua Croke (49:42):
That's crazy that you bring that up. My kindergarten teacher switched my writing hand constantly and I'm right-handed and like, I am perfectly fine writing right-handed, but honestly, like I would pick up crayons with my left hand, start coloring, and it would be placed in my right hand. And I'm 30 years old. Right. So not that long ago.
Oomiya Kawas (50:05):
The same for my brother who was, you know, 28, every time he was a lefty and my parents would switch it to his right hand. So for whatever reason, this was happening. Well, now all of a sudden when they stopped switching the hands now, it's like, Oh, it's not 1% of people who are left-handed, it's something like 10 or 12% of people who are left-handed. And so when people say things like you know, only 1% of the population has ever been trans. So how has it now that, you know, trans people it's like the new fad it's like being gay in the nineties. It's like, well, no, but even though the space is still not as safe as we would like it to be, it is safer to come out in this world. And so people are taking that opportunity to do so.
Oomiya Kawas (50:50):
And so now we're seeing, you know, those percentages of, you know, the amount of trans people increasing, and like, it's not a phase. It's just that the world has evolved into a safer place. I don't want people to misconstrue that as the work is done and we're a safe place because we know it's not a safe place, but it's a safer place. And that is allowing people some space to come out, to live their authentic life, to find community and just survive long enough to talk about it. Right. And to not be in the closet about it for years and years and years.
Joshua Croke (51:30):
Right. Well, and we have like three minutes left and I could go on so, so long. So I want to share and extend a lot of gratitude and appreciation for you sharing some of your story. And it resonates so strongly with me and how and some of my experience. And when we talk about going back to the, like the privilege conversation and things, you know, I've had conversations with folks in my family and even it's challenged me to look at the type of privilege that I hold. Like I can walk into a boardroom dressed as a white man, right. And I can present that way and hold that privilege. And at the same time, not want to be alive because of how much it's challenging who I am internally. And it's, I give this talk now on like, you know, I have a beard and wear heels and the difference of how I've been perceived and experience like professional, personal, social situations as the, you know, handsome white man and the very queer question mark person.
Joshua Croke (52:46):
And it's really, really, you know, it's, that's a whole, maybe another time for you and I to get into another episode about this, but to round out and the next, like two minutes, and I'm going to pose a big question. So you can, you know, share like a minute or two of thought on this and then maybe a dot, dot, dot to be continued. But when you talk about CBT and like healing and working with young people, how might we apply that on a community-wide level to realize that change and that hope for more empathetic together, community based growth?
Oomiya Kawas (53:28):
I mean, this is, you know, this is the big, dot dot dot, right? This is it. How do we do that? We have to be willing to learn. We have to be willing to leverage our privilege. We have to be willing to acknowledge the spaces that we have privilege in and leverage our privilege there. We have to be willing to be empathetic to people who maybe we don't want to be empathetic towards, and we have to be willing to, as a community, honor one another's experience. And I think that is a really big challenge. And, you know, something that I always say to people is that white supremacy and the patriarchy, right. It hurts everybody. And that includes white men, right? And so when we talk about privilege in this way that white men sort of sit or people who appear to be white men sort of sit at the top of that hierarchy, I just want to highlight that that hierarchy sucks.
Oomiya Kawas (54:37):
And it sucks to be at the top of it, you know, because there's no freedom there and expressing, or in understanding yourself or being authentic because you have to fit this specific mold as written by, you know, society. And so I think it really comes down to being willing to learn and grow together and be empathetic of each other's experiences and be willing to continue to do that work. You know, it's not one workshop or one podcast or one lesson. It is continued growth, and it is something that we have to put effort into just like we put effort into making a ton of money
Joshua Croke (55:21):
Boom, thank you for listening to Public Hearing our podcast and radio show that airs Wednesdays at 6:00 PM on WICN 90.5 FM Worcester’s only NPR affiliate station. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much to Oomiya Kawas for coming on the show. I'm your host, Joshua Croke. This has been Public Hearing. Public Hearing is created and produced by Action! by Design. Our audio producer is Giuliano D'Orazio. Thank you to Eric, Molly and Shaun, who also supported the production of Public Hearing. And as always, thanks for listening.
