Hey y'all, I'm gonna livetoot some of the stuff I'm involved in on campus today. I'll be using the tag #UMSIDEI and readmore cuts in following tweets, feel free to follow along!

So, the university of michigan prides itself on a five year initiative they launched a year ago called the Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) plan. It involves 49 different schools and administrative departments each coming up with their own plan to further DEI in their own spaces

It's largely bullshit. It's not accountable to marginalized students and most units lack the expertise for this work and learn on the fly, a sign for how much this campus respects diversity labor. My unit in particular, the school of information (UMSI) is a shitshow.

I volunteered to be on their DEI committee and sat in on one meeting. I was the second person to introduce myself out of 11, and was the only one to introduce myself with pronouns.

A tenured faculty then misgendered me a couple times, corrected himself once, and refused to refer to me in the third person for the rest of the meeting. Nobody acknowledged that it had happened or made an effort to correct him

I felt super awkward about the power dynamic and did the normal trans thing where i pretended to be comfortable.

Afterwards, I sent an open email to the 3000 people on our listserv to talk about our diversity committee's poor understanding of gender identity.

I got some good apologies from community members, but a very brand-focused non-apology from the dude that misgendered me.

Their line since then has been to continue to not apologize, say that they apologized enough, say that my action was just to shame them and didn't match the magnitude of getting misgendered (which they get to decide I guess).

Also they've insinuated that I should apologize to them and that I don't belong in institutional diversity labor. I also don't know how to properly use an academic mailing list (this list is also used for football tickets and cat pics).

after all that I obv quit, but they're putting on a retreat today to explain and work on their DEI plan as a huge group. It's a 5 hour event and I'm here for all of it.

I imagine it will feel like shit and I'll have to retraumatize myself, but I'm fucking determined to make this program and school better for the people after me and the people who can't speak up about the ways they feel about diversity here.

I'll be livetooting it all day, prepare for the shitshowwww <333

the prof that misgendered me and likely still thinks i'm a gross weird dude is here, so we're off to a /strong/ start

(Also, I'd prefer if you all didn't boost these unless I post in a toot that you can specifically boost that toot. thanks friends <33)

I forgot a super heinous bit! In the five times I've talked to our dean of diversity, it's always become about my complaints about gender stuff. In four of those meetings, she told me "she has a lesbian daughter, so she gets it."

I don't know what any of her actual qualifications for this are, but I hope it's more than just tokenizing her children.

Their opening remarks talk so much about accountability to students and it's so hard for me to not laugh out loud at that.