Second IvyQ conference furthers dialogue on LGBT issues

Last weekend, members of Penn’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community traveled to Columbia University to continue the tradition that began at Penn last year — the IvyQ conference.

The conference was originally created at the Ivy Leadership summit in fall 2008 with the purpose of developing a “specific Ivy queer network,” said College junior Victor Galli, the vice chair of Political Affairs for the Lambda Alliance — Penn’s umbrella organization for the LGBT community. The conference aims to educate about relevant issues, like queer politics and identity.

The conference in New York “built on the foundation laid at Penn last year, and we learned from our experiences,” LGBT Center Director Bob Schoenberg said.

This year’s IvyQ conference followed a similar format as last year’s. Participants selected one of six tracks — with a focus on either international issues, health, queer studies, education and campus life, identity or activism — and then attended five to six workshops of their choosing.

Amanda Simpson, an out male-to-female transgender individual who works for the Obama Administration as the senior technical adviser to the Department of Commerce, gave the keynote address.

Shoenberg presented two of the workshops — one on Penn’s LGBT admissions outreach strategies with LGBT Admission liaison Jordan Pascucci, and the other on the stratification of campus LGBT communities.

The representatives from the other schools were “very interested in what we had to say and eager to implement plans” for admissions strategies similar to Penn’s, Shoenberg said.

Currently, Dartmouth College is the only other Ivy League institution with a similar outreach program. However, the conference also revealed more common ground between the schools.

All of the representatives at the stratification workshop said “their freshman classes were the most LGBT [queer and allied] that they had ever experienced,” Shoenberg said. Penn, along with the seven other Ivies, had a “large number of first-year undergraduates at the conference.”

“This year was pretty heavy in issues that the LGBT community doesn’t always address, such as transgender issues and how to be a good trans ally,” College senior Sydney Baloue said.

Controversy surrounding transgender activism led to debate over the presence of Reserve Officers Training Corps programs on Ivy League campuses. “We feel very strongly about supporting our trans population as much as possible,” Galli said.

“ROTC is important for us to continue to look into and research,” he added. IvyQ leaders are “still in the formative stages of determining some kind of action plan” in regard to campus ROTC programs, which exclude transgender students from participation.

That type of activism is what inspired College freshman Jose Romero most about IvyQ. “The Ivy League has a lot of political clout,” he said, adding that it was empowering to be around “passionate individuals who actually want to enact change.”

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.