What does being an ally mean? Being an ally means standing alongside someone. With regard to gays, lesbians, transgendered and others, it means someone who takes a stand against oppres- sion. An ally works to be a part of social change rather than being a part of the oppression or some- one who is merely a bystander. Ally training mean learning how to be an ally for gay, lesbian and the transgendered people as well, who get bullied, abused or ha- rassed.
As a staff writer, I had the opportunity to participate in the first “Ally” 101 meeting of the year. The training is a very audience-en- gaged meeting. We started off by introducing ourselves and say- ing one super power we would like to have and what pronouns we use most often. Sophomore Paige Wagner said her superpower would be to talk to animals and her pronoun was normal stuff like he, she, they etc. Before the meeting officially started we got an idea of what each person was like.
The first exercise a circle and were asked questions like “have you ever been or witnessed someone being bullied?”
If we answered “yes,” we stepped in the circle and if it was a “no,” we stayed where we were. After that, we were asked what we noticed and took in from the exercise. What we noticed as a group was that people were open about answering the questions they were asked and weren’t afraid to step in the circle.
Junior Cheyenne Irizarry commented on the question about people being harassed and said ,“I’ve witnessed people being bullied and harassed and wherever and whoever it is it just bothers me wherever I see it.”
The one part that stood out to me the most was when the assistant director of programming for student diversity initiatives Sarah Carter, asked us to guess the percentage of a fact she got from a survey taken in 2009. She asked us to guess five different percent- ages. There was one question that stood out to everyone and shocked the audience.
