User:Kkaltenheuser

Current Life Status: Senior at Drake University double-majoring in Graphic Design and Sociology with a minor in Printmaking.

Over the course of the Fall 2015 semester, myself amongst others will be working with various wiki pages for a class. Check out our page here: Global Youth Studies (Fall 2015)

For the Wikipedia component of this course, I am interested in learning about these topics:
 * Gay-Straight Alliance
 * Transgender Youth

Research Proposal
At this present time, a Transgender Youth page already is in existence but there are problems of citations and only touches on the topics of coming out, vulnerability, ensuring the security of the child, media representations, and outcomes. While these are all valuable topics, I believe that more can be added in terms of what health care is available (in depth presentation) and the ethics of that provision, along with the legal side that the youth would have to navigate in order to officially change their gender and name. Something else I would be interested in adding is information on homelessness and survival sex under the subheading of vulnerability; plus, there are some areas under vulnerability : suicide that can be updated with more current information. Due to a lack of sourcing, I plan to go through and add sources where I can to the existing work, while thoroughly adding sources to my own work. This will not only add credibility, but allow people to click through to learn more about that specific area within transgender youth if they so wish to. For example, you can read all you want about the suicide rates of transgender youth on a wiki page, but there is a world of information about this topic, so direct them to The Trevor Project for instance or GLAAD. I plan to build off of previous research concerning the medical procedures that are available to people who identify as transgender based off of whether they are planning to transition from male to female (MTF) or female to male (FTM). Along with some of the ethical implication that come with this transition at a younger age, by utilizing a TED Talk and various other resources to provide a neutral view of its ethicality. In terms of providing information about suicide, I plan to find more recent examples on hopefully a global scale to show that this isn’t just a “U. S. issue”. The final thing I hope to go for is finding the rates of homelessness and survival sex for youth not only here in Iowa, USA, but also in another Western nation.

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