Confidence Intervals

  Hello there, guys, gals, and fellow non-binary pals! Pride is among us! A whole 30 days where we get to recognize the LGBTQ+ community and our incredibly hard-fought journey to achieving equal rights - which is somehow still on-going, 70 years after the gay rights movement began. This year, I want to take part in it for the first time, and let you all in on some of our history and what Pride means to me. First and foremost, Pride is not a celebration - it was not borne out of a desire for a big gay party. Pride is a protest. In the 1950s, the United States government was actively  seeking out homosexuals in an attempt to purge them all from the workforce. And when I say actively, I mean that cops were hiding behind secret doors in men's restrooms, waiting for gay men to come in to engage in sexual activity together. Some were even entrapping gay men by soliciting them for sex. This was a time when communism was a big threat in the country, and the rationale was that homosexuals

  Everybody is different. We know this, it's not news to us. But do you know just how  different everyone is? I want to focus on something that hopefully will shed light on the answer to this question. It's called the ADDRESSING model, created by Pamela Hays (2016), and it highlights several major domains of identity markers that together start to make up who a person is. It's typically used for training therapists to understand differences between themselves and their clients, but it's something that I really, strongly believe needs to be introduced to everyone. We're in an age of embracing diversity, and I think we can go deeper than we have been up to this point. Listed below are the different domains of the ADDRESSING model (Age, Disability (developmental and acquired), Religion/Spirituality, Ethnicity/Race, Socio-economic Status, Sexual Orientation, Indigenous Heritage, National Origin, and Gender), along with some questions for consideration for each. I want t

  In choosing to read this, you are expected to do the following: ·        Read this slowly. This is a story of my experience, but it is also educational for a lot of you. You are going to read some things that you will immediately disagree with, and that is okay. However, some of the things you will disagree with are a matter of perception or a misunderstanding of information. You will need to realize this, because you are not going to change my mind by arguing the point, and I’m not going to change yours (at least on the perception point – I dare you to consider the factual information). In order to go forward, we will need to have a mutual respect of our differences of perception, because this is my *reality* and the reality for many like me. Your disagreeing doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist for me, and your believing it “shouldn’t” doesn’t mean that it does not, and will not continue to, exist. ·        Realize that I am talking about human beings. I am fully aware that this is