Q&A With 2SLGBTQ+ Youth Advocate Fae Johnstone
Image provided by Fae Johnstone
Fae Johnstone (she/they) is a youth advocate that you should know about. She is based on unceded, unsurrendered Algonquin territory (Ottawa, Ontario) and wears many hats — as lots of young changemakers do. Driven by her passion to support 2SLGBTQ+ youth and young people struggling with mental health, Johnstone works as a public speaker, consultant, educator and community organizer. She’s the executive director of Wisdom2Action, a 2SLGBTQ+ owned and operated consulting firm that works toward community engagement, knowledge mobilization, 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion and research. Wisdom2Action focuses on 2SLGBTQ+ advocacy by using available resources and platforms to put important issues on the federal or provincial agendas — like banning conversion therapy or advancing trans health legislation. Here, we chatted with Johnstone about what gender marginalized youth need from organizations, and how organizations can support young 2SLGBTQ+ communities.
What do you think organizations and institutions can do to meaningfully engage gender marginalized youth?
I actually think that's the perfect question that they should be asking themselves first. 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion is a broad spectrum, and organizations need to do internal learning and culture work as the first step. I think internal capacity building is integral. So reviewing policies and procedures, creating clear policies around bathroom usage so that gender-diverse folks are aware that they're able to access whatever bathroom best suits them. Introducing practical shifts to how you operate on a daily basis: asking people their pronouns, or having posters that invite folks to disclose their pronouns. You can never guarantee an inclusive experience to everybody: people will make mistakes, and we have to avoid making promises that we can't keep. But you can get to a point where somebody walking into your space is quite likely to have a good experience with a service provider or an administrative person who is able to be inclusive of them. From there, you have to actually engage with communities, and that's the second integral piece that people often miss. They do a bit of the internal work, but this is also about relationships and community building. And that means that we should be consulting folks with lived experience, understanding how we can better address their needs, and you can do that by reaching out to your local 2SLGBTQ+ community organizations. And then create structures that facilitate it — not a one-off conversation, but adding gender diverse folks to your boards, creating advisory councils and committees that are compensated that gender diverse young folks can sit on and engage in things like policy review and developing internal strategies. Gender diverse young folks go to a lot of services and don't have great experiences, and that is known by the local 2SLGBTQ+ organizations. A way of meeting community needs is by going to the places those communities already trust and demonstrating that you are a place they can trust.
What are some mistakes organizations make when trying to engage youth, specifically those with intersecting identities?
They often do the thing where they promise safety, and I think that it is a really complex thing for them to do. Part of it is a way of reassuring folks that like, you know, “We're a social service and we're here to help.” But if you're going to say that, you have to hold yourself to it, and that means that you have to be able to reasonably guarantee an inclusive experience. So making a promise otherwise is the first mistake. The second one is that organizations forget the histories of harm. Any trans young person that's coming into these spaces knows that health and social services have often not been good to trans people. Organizations don't realize that we are going to be a little bit more on edge from the get-go because we know we aren’t guaranteed safety. So you need to go in with a trauma-informed lens. That means recognizing that those histories of harm inform our current understanding of gender and sexuality in our world. Another mistake is hosting a one-off workshop — a one-time conversation around gender and sexuality. That can be a good place to start, but organizations also need full-day trainings, they need policy change, and they need implementation support and culture work. There are nuances in different kinds of service that are rarely explored in a lot of the training organizations do. In a one-off workshop, people get concepts like pronouns, but they aren't supported to implement those concepts as practices. We need the implementation -- not just sharing practices, but the process of putting them into place.
A lot of your work focuses on issues related to mental health. How can organizations meaningfully support youth mental health?
On one side, any justice work is supporting mental health. By taking a stance on inclusion and by building the capacity of your organization to be inclusive, that is promoting and supporting mental health. On the other hand, ask yourself what your organization can do on a more concrete level. Make sure that as a workplace, you model healthy workplace environments by not overworking your staff, making sure that folks have knowledge and competency around mental health first aid, addressing stigma, and some of those issues. More generally, we need more services, we desperately need more support groups and peer groups that respond to different identities. We need to make sure that young folks can go into one location and get all of the things that they need. Mental health is connected to class, race and gender. So people don't just need one thing, a lot of the time they need many things, like housing support while also accessing mental health support. Finding ways to connect allows us to better serve, and allows young folks who are coming in with mental health struggles, who need particular targeted support, to access those services. So, ask yourself how to center care around what youth need, rather than around how you’re used to doing business.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
