Laura Reid is a student with a passion. As president of Feminists for Reproductive Equity and Education (F.R.E.E), she can be found in Washington D.C. lobbying for legislature or right here in College Station, conducting activism back home. Her Campus got the opportunity to sit down with Reid moments before F.R.E.E’s celebration of 100 years of Planned Parenthood (the highlight of that was definitely the penis and vagina cupcake station) and get deep about women’s rights and feminism. Check it out!
What has been your greatest struggle in life?
In life, my biggest struggle has been being able to communicate my ideas clearly with someone else, especially someone who doesn’t have the same belief set that I have.
What advice would you give to female college students here at A&M?
I think the biggest recommendation I can give is to find your niche and community because depending on where you live it is extremely hard to interact in a community that doesn’t hold your same belief set. Even Texas A&M is supposed to be known as being super friendly to women on campus yet there are still rape jokes made about our student body president’s family. Finding a community of women who care about the same issues that you do is essential.
The first semester I got here, I didn’t know anything about Texas A&M other than that [it was] very research driven and that you had a lot of opportunities as a student and that traditions were super important. But I did not know anything about the political climate so when I first got here, I was still in classes with men who questioned why women were even in college. That was so out of the norm for me that I just went around asking my professors, “Is there a feminist group around campus? Please help me find one because I can’t do this!”
How do you view men in the Feminist movement?
The way I view men in the feminist initiative is broadly under the term ally. And to me being an ally means not forcing that community to make space for you in their movement. It’s about you making space in your community for their movement. So, I am involved in TAMU Anti Racism on campus and I see myself as, instead of expecting them to adhere white views on racism, it’s my job to make sure that their views are being communicated in our predominantly white university. I kind of see it as the same thing for men who want to be in the feminist movement.
There’s definitely room for men and people of every different gender in the feminist movement but to take away the feminist of feminism is completely contradictory to what we are trying to do. Because we live in a male dominated society, feminism often gets framed in terms of men instead of in terms of women. Things like, “feminists hate men,” or “women are trying to be like men,” is not the goal of feminism. It’s to have equitable opportunity to the same things and when you try to compare feminist goals to the standard of what our current male-dominated society views as achievement, we’re just perpetuating that same belief system because then it becomes about women being like men instead of people just being the way they are and being allowed to possess traits that fall into feminine or masculine qualities without being labeled that way.
How do you feel about the term, “feminazi” and radical feminism?
Words like that are a reflection of the fact that we still don’t live in an equal society because somehow being equal is seen as a radical position to hold. There is research that shows that in a classroom where women speak 50% of the time and men speak 50% of the time, and obviously this research works in a binary, men view it as women talking a majority of the time. When people are talking about equal rights, we have to realize that we live in a culture that still views being equal as radical and on the other hand as something that somehow magically already exists without any work whatsoever. It’s wrong to dismiss people labeled as radical feminists because every time we advance more, there is always somebody seen as being more radical and not sticking to the rules. I know people self identify with the category, radical feminist, and that’s fine, but to label other’s activism as wrong seems really inappropriate to me. We can’t all express activism in the same way or through the same means.
What piqued your interest in fighting for reproductive rights for women?
When I went around asking my professors for a feminist club, the first one they suggested was Pro Choice Aggies [now F.R.E.E] and when I started going to conferences with them, I realized that the feminist movement included a ton of different issues that I was never taught about before because I was raised with the idea that women are equal to men and that there is nothing that I can’t do. But that didn’t change the fact that the space around me wasn’t welcoming to that. Being a part of that group really changed my entire perspective on what feminism and activism should be because F.R.E.E is a direct action group.
What does F.R.E.E do to make a difference?
We lobby at a state and national level to the Texas legislature and then to senators and representatives in Washington D.C. but we’ve also spoken to the student government [at TAMU] about a bill that they tried to pass before and essentially influence their decision on that. To us it’s basically change at every level.
For SGA, there was a bill in 2015 in December that was asking Texas A&M to take a stance on a [national bill that would require sexual assault] survivors to report to the police department if they wanted to report to the university. We spoke in an open forum to SGA about passing a bill in opposition to that because we don’t believe that survivors should be forced to report to anybody. We know that forcing victims to do something just makes the experience worse, and that’s not justice.
At a national and state level, we lobbied against Texas’s HB2, which added a bunch of abortion restrictions in Texas and the supreme court struck it down in June. We also lobby for things like REHYA, which is a bill requiring comprehensive sex education that’s also LGBT inclusive. Right now abstinence only is the norm in Texas and in a lot of different states and we know that when people can’t have basic conversations that you [have] in sex ed, you can’t have conversations about consent. We ran into that problem when we started presenting consent workshops. People couldn’t have basic conversations about consent because they were never taught about it as an actual issue. The other thing was that people are embarrassed to talk about it because they don’t want to talk about sex.
What are consent workshops?
Since August 2015, F.R.E.E started leading consent and Title IX workshops that were based off of the honors thesis that I wrote in 2014. Basically they educate students about what Title IX is and what their rights are under that, what A&M’s definitions of consent and sexual assault, [victim’s] reporting options and local community resources. To us that seems like really basic information, but a majority of our campus doesn’t know about it. Every time we do a workshop and we ask people what Title IX is, 99% of them don’t know.
What is Title IX?
Title IX is a piece of legislation that says that sex discrimination in schools essentially is illegal because if a school receives public funding and then if they mess up even one investigation regarding sex discrimination under Title IX, they can have all their federal funding pulled. It started out as sex discrimination in sports [for example], if there’s a men’s team, there needs to be a women’s team, but now it includes everything from sexual discrimination to sexual harassment, sexual assault and anything under that umbrella. Right now, A&M is under Title IX investigation for mishandling sexual assault cases [along with] over 150 other universities not to mention k-12 [schools]. The fact that we’re under Title IX status and then on top of that most of our students have zero idea of what Title IX even is, is a huge problem. A&M didn’t add a definition of consent up until last year into their student handbook. If we can’t even have these basic conversations, then we are not doing our job in educating students of what their basic rights are.
Why do you think A&M is so backwards in dealing with consent and sexual assault?
I think it’s because we live in a broader culture that not only doesn’t want to talk about sex, it doesn’t want to talk about sexual assault. Texas A&M isn’t unique in having these problems on campus, but they are another example of the broader issue that we are not addressing sexual assault and not preventing it. A&M had a campus climate survey in the last two years that came out (link to survey results here) [featuring] self-reported statistics from students. If you look at the self-reported statistics versus the numbers that A&M has in its annual crime report that it has to release, they’re like vastly different. The self report shows thousands of students saying, “in my time at college, I have been sexually assaulted,” and our crime report from last year [says there were] less than 20.
We have been asking Texas A&M for a really long time now to require mandatory consent seminars. A&M’s response has been to do 20 or 30 minute presentations during new student conferences but those aren’t enough because we have a ton of new students in our consent workshops and when we ask them about their experience in these news student conferences, their reaction is, “I have no idea what that presentation was about and I remember there were some resources, but I can’t really remember what any of them were.” What F.R.E.E did was go to Texas A&M again and say, “ this isn’t working. We gotta find something else to do,” so we applied to Texas A&M’s I.I.D.E.A Grant and we were awarded one over the summer so what that means is A&M is now helping us fund consent workshops that we can give to the student body. And we love doing that and we love doing educational outreach, but at the same time it puts all of the pressure on student leaders on campus to try to meet our population system wide of almost 60,000 students. That’s not possible for just our organization, so obviously we’re going to do as much as we can but we still need additional backup from A&M. Having something like a mandatory consent seminar for all new incoming freshmen as in like a course you take that doesn’t add hours into your degree plan, but that is automatically included would be one of those options that A&M could actually do.
Want to get involved with F.R.E.E?
Tune into their website, and check out their facebook page for upcoming events and meetings.
*Their next consent workshop is in collaboration with the Honors Student Council and will be held on November 11 from 4-5 pm in the Memorial Student Center room 2501.