Help Brigitte raise money

Hi friends!

Thank you so much for visiting my fundraising page and considering donating to OUT MetroWest! I'm beyond thrilled to have the opportunity to run in Falmouth this summer, and above all so happy to be raising money for this incredible organization in the process. 

As many of you know (in an overabundance of detail—thank you for your patient listening), I've done a lot of research on (Polish) Catholic nationalism this year, and, more recently, on its relation to contemporary Catholic Church teachings on homosexuality. Over the past several years, Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party has embraced long-established strategies of silencing and speech control used by the Catholic Church to shut down dialogue on homosexuality and LGBTQ+ rights, rhetorically constructing an "LGBT threat" to "traditional" families and values. The mutually-supportive merging of Church and State power in Poland has produced an environment which is incredibly hostile to LGBTQ+ expression and life, with both institutions propagating anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislation, inciting violence and discrimination and fueling an emigration of LGBTQ+ couples and families from Poland.

I wanted to run for OUT MetroWest this summer because the most recent iterations of anti-LGBTQ+ political maneuverings in the United States are strikingly similar to those in Poland (which was recently ranked as the most homophobic country in the European Union by the international gay rights organization ILGA-Europe). The various forms of anti-transgender legislation passed or filed in 37 U.S. states represent the same efforts at silencing and exclusion that we see in Poland (and elsewhere). In Poland and the U.S., political and religious actors make discourse on homosexuality and LGBTQ+ rights nearly impossible by preventing speech, discrediting it, and, as theologian Mark Jordan argues, most powerfully by "hardening the shells around words before emptying them of meaning.”

In the U.S., many of the new anti-transgender bills target children—particularly, their ability to participate in sports or receive medical care—and LGBTQ+ youth are already at a much higher risk for depression and self-harm. In working to create identity-affirming spaces and communities, OUT MetroWest does crucial work in combating the harm done by these bills as well as the rhetoric they seek to normalize. Money raised for OUT MetroWest helps to create and maintain incredibly valuable spaces for LGBTQ+ youth in Massachusetts, and I'm honored to be a part of that process!