Oral History Program Kinsee Gaither Interviewed by Ryan Wash 20 February 2018 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Kinsee Gaither Interviewed by Ryan Wash 20 February 2018 Copyright © 2025 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Gaither, Kinsee, an oral history by Ryan Wash, 20 February 2018, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Kinsee Gaither. It was conducted by Ryan Wash on February 20, 2018 at Weber State University Women’s Center. Kinsee discusses leadership and activism as a woman in Utah. RW: Hello, I am Ryan Wash. I am here with the program director of the Weber State University Women’s Center, Mrs. Kinsee Gaither herself. Hi, Kinsee. KG: Hi, Ryan. RW: Thank you again for taking time out of your day to answer a few questions for us. We’ll get right into it, I know you’re a very busy, successful woman. Could you please start by telling us a little bit about your background, your childhood, teen years, where you grew up, hobbies, family values, education, etcetera? KG: Sure. I was born April 3, 1995 in Newport Beach, California. I was adopted, but I was adopted at birth, so my family that raised me is the family I’ve always known. I moved to Utah when I was about three-and-a-half, four years old, and I’ve lived here ever since. I grew up in a very Mormon household. Pretty conservative values, very strict right and wrong, those sort of things. But it was a little bit different, I think, than most conservative Christian households in that my mom wasn’t a homemaker. Like, that wasn’t her expected role. She worked as well as my dad. Both worked, so I didn’t grow up thinking that was the only way to be a wife or a mom is to stay at home all day, cook, clean, and decorate the house. She’s a teacher as well, so she’s always worked my whole life, and so has my dad, obviously. I graduated from Bingham High School in 2013. I briefly went to Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington for a semester, but I hated Spokane and it 1 was really expensive, so I moved back to Utah and started at Weber the following fall semester and have been there ever since. I’m gonna graduate with a bachelor’s in political science and a minor in communications at the end of the summer of 2018. RW: Awesome, congratulations. What experiences did you have in your childhood, your teen years, your adulthood, etcetera that led you to believe that you were and could be a leader? KG: I don’t really think I have like one defining moment that was like, “I can do this and I’m capable of being in charge of people.” I think it’s just kind of always been my personality to want to take charge. I think the more prominent part of my personality is honestly just that I’m a little bit OCD and kind of a perfectionist, so that necessitated me being a leader, because it meant that if I didn’t lead people, things wouldn’t get done how I wanted them to get done. It’s almost like I became a leader out of necessity to [minimize] my anxiety and make my need to be good come to fruition. Like I already said, I grew up in a house where my mom, she’s really the head of household. I mean, my dad makes more money than her financially, but it’s never been a [case where] he makes the decisions, anything like that. It’s always been pretty much my mom, honestly, because my dad’s a very much “Go with the flow” person. This might be a tangent—I know it is—but I think that women are more likely to have a moment where it’s like, “Oh, I can be a leader,” because we’re socialized to think that we can’t be. I think that we’re socialized that we should be 2 caretakers and make sure that everybody else feels comfortable, safe, valued, whatever, and I think that comes at the expense of our own well-being. I think that being able to grow up in a household that never was like, “Women don’t work,” or “You should get a career, but you need to give it up at some point for your family” helped me feel like being a leader was natural and something that was an inevitability of my life or my personality traits. I think that has a huge part of it, quite frankly, just the way I grew up and how I saw my mom interact with other people. RW: Okay. So, Kinsee, what are your core values, and how have they influenced your leadership experiences and leadership ability? KG: Well, I think that my job is one that involves a lot of social justice, so I think that I have values related to that, then also values as in what my work ethic is like. In my head, at least, they’re kind of separate, because I think sometimes my socialjustice-type values aren’t exportable to other situations besides work and those sort of circles in such an easy way. For my work values, something that I work on a lot is holding myself accountable, and I think that translates into holding other people accountable as well. Because, at least for me, that’s when I thrive, when somebody’s very direct with me and very clear about the expectations, and that they need to be met, when they need to be met, how they need to be met. That really works for me, because it helps me feel like I’m accomplishing things. So, whatever works for me is just kind of what I end up doing for the people that I supervise, the people that I’m in charge of. 3 Every week, I have a meeting with the students that I supervise to check in, go over progress, assign new tasks, stuff like that. I try to, at the end of every meeting, set clear deadlines for when this thing is supposed to be done. I really just make sure that there is no wiggle room for them once the deadline comes to be like, “Well, I didn’t know,” or “I didn’t know how to do this,” or anything like that, because I think that, obviously, it does a disservice to the work we’re doing at the center, but I think it does a disservice to them. If you’re never held accountable for anything, I don’t think you grow, and I don’t think you develop. That’s probably the biggest part of my leadership style. I think sometimes it’s a bad thing, because sometimes it means I have less wiggle room. As in, if a policy isn’t being followed, there’s not a lot of grey area in my head for, like, “Why isn’t it being followed?” I think that’s something that I’m learning a lot, is that sometimes policies need to be a little bit more flexible, and sometimes experiences implicate that. I guess my more social-justice-type values, obviously I’ve read bell hooks, and it’s like, you know, Margin to Center, so really just elevating the voices that aren’t listened to now or that aren’t given the same sort of credibility, or expected credibility even. Whether that be with the kind of events that we do, the kind of speakers we bring out, the kind of issues that we talk about, what we post on our Facebook page, all of those sort of things, I really try to keep that in mind. “Who is this appealing to? What is the message that it’s sending?” If it doesn’t align with that, we go back to the drawing board and try to figure out something else. 4 RW: Awesome, very insightful. Name a person who has had a tremendous impact on you as a leader, maybe someone who has been a mentor to you? Why and how did this person impact your life generally, and your leadership abilities specifically? KG: My biggest mentor, especially at this job—and this job has certainly been my most important and impactful job, I would say—her name is Paige Davies, and she’s the Safe@Weber Advocate. What that means is that anybody who’s experiencing domestic violence, stalking, dating violence, sexual assault, harassment, anything like that, she helps them walk through the legal process, but also not necessarily just the legal process. If you don’t want to report to the police, you don’t have to. She’ll help you safety plan, talk to professors, if you need to move, get a different job, if you need a police escort, those kind of things, she’ll help you coordinate all of that. But then, if you do decide to press charges, she also helps you navigate that process, because I think that’s a whole other thing. Before this year, she used to split her job title between the program specialist, which is now my position, and the advocate. She still does so much work, but it used to be even more work. The accountability thing that I already talked about I really learned from her. Just thinking about myself, even who I was just like a year and a half or two years ago, a lot of the time I would make excuses for myself by being like, “Well, it’s okay that this didn’t get done because you were having a bad day, or because you needed to take care of yourself.” 5 I’m not saying that because I don’t think those things are valid, but I think that, sometimes, if you take too much care of yourself it compounds and makes everything else more stressful because you’re putting all of those things off, and then it makes it easier to retreat into taking care of yourself more. Paige taught me a really good balance of how to make sure you’re taken care of, but also how to make sure your work is done first. I think that’s really important, especially because we do work at the Women’s Center, so we have a lot of people coming in that have experienced various levels of trauma. Figuring out that balance of not getting so sucked in and so emotionally invested in what’s going on with their life so much that it impacts you negatively, I think is a really hard balance to strike. She says something to me all the time, whenever I get stressed, and it is something that has changed—this sounds so dramatic, but it has literally changed my life. It’s right there, written on my white board. “It doesn’t matter that it’s perfect, it matters that it’s happening.” That helped me a lot, because I’m an anxious person, so a lot of times I don’t want to do things because I’m like, “I don’t think it’ll work out correctly,” or if I’ve made a mistake I don’t want to own up to it because I don’t want to get in trouble for it. That really helped me understand that nothing that you do is ever going to be perfect, it’s fine. What matters is just that you’re consistent in what you’re doing and that it’s always happening so people can count on you. Kind of like I was talking about earlier, you know, finding a balance of flexibility in policies while still having an office that runs smoothly. I think that 6 she’s really good at knowing when to have a moment with somebody that’s like, “You’re not getting your job done and that needs to change,” or being like, “You’re not getting your job done, we’ve noticed things aren’t going the way that they usually are, what can we do to help?” Different employees need different things at different times, and she’s really good at knowing when that is. That’s something I really try to be more aware of now that I’m in a supervisory position. RW: What do you see as the biggest challenges of being a woman leader in Northern Utah? What do you do to overcome these challenges? KG: I think that it’s a huge culture thing. This is actually something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, because we are putting together a student advisory board which is made up of women who represent underrepresented groups, so trans women, women of color, Black women, disabled women, LGBT women, etcetera. One of the questions that we ask in the interview process is, “Have you ever felt like you have been treated unfairly because of your identity?” I’m paraphrasing it, but that’s essentially what it is, because then the follow up is, “What kind of programs would you like to see to resolve that disparity?” A lot of them have said, “I haven’t seen any.” It’s kind of confusing for me, because in my head I’m like, “That’s probably not true,” but I think a lot of women, especially women of color, feel like they can’t speak out about it. Utah is very big on comfort, niceness, those sort of things, so people speaking out about discrimination or even just times when they’ve felt uncomfortable, I think they feel like they’re making other people uncomfortable, 7 so they kind of just keep it to themselves. I think that is a huge part of the problem. I think that in Utah we are taught that microaggressions, like, it’s not that bad, or off-handed comments, you know, it’s not that bad. So, I think that people think that unless you are being brutally abused by your husband or something, you don’t have the right to talk about things that you’ve experienced, or the violence that you’ve experienced, or even just moments that have made you feel so uncomfortable. I think that’s a really big thing, because when you don’t talk about those smaller instances of oppression, of discrimination, etcetera, it makes it hard to understand how pervasive it is, and not understanding that is what creates those really intense moments of violence that people then do consider something that is valid to talk about. Also, I grew up in the Church, the Mormon LDS Church, and I do have respect for their charity, but there’s a huge cultural problem. I mean, there’s kind of a reckoning going on with it right now, where Mormon bishops and other Church officials tell women to stay in bad relationships because it’s like an eternal bond, you know, and “What about your kids?” that sort of thing. I mean, obviously, the LDS Church is a huge part of our culture, and there’s no training when you become a bishop for how to deal with stuff like that. So, some Bishops are like, “Okay, leave him. Here’s the crisis line, here’s the center, blah blah blah.” Other ones are like, “You’ll be sentenced to hell if you divorce your husband. Work through it.” It’s such a disaster, and I think that’s a big part of it. I think that the church influences this sort of broader taboo about stuff like that. 8 That’s really my biggest beef, just that nobody likes to talk about things because nobody likes to make people uncomfortable. Even just thinking about the way that like, speaking in Utah, you can just raise your voice and people are like, “Oh my God, you’re yelling at me, calm down,” because we’re so passive here. It’s like, “Oh my God, nobody’s yelling, but people have a right to be angry and have a right to feel some kind of way about stuff that they’ve experienced.” I think that sometimes Utah doesn’t give people space to feel those sort of things. I think it’s getting better, for sure. I mean, my vision might be skewed because of where I work, but I do think things are changing a little bit. Really, it’s just like, there’s a bunch of white Christian people who are married at 20 and believe that making out damns you to Hell. So, it’s hard to have conversations about racial justice, about reproductive rights, all of those sort of things, because there’s a lot of misinformation and a lot of stigma around it that makes those kind of conversations really difficult to have. You have to catch up so much to just be like “No, Planned Parenthood doesn’t just kill babies.” You know what I mean? It’s just so much work. RW: What do you do to overcome those challenges? KG: I recognize that this comes with a lot of privilege to say this, but I think that you just can’t care. Once, I was 16 in a debate round, and my partner was this boy, and he was a total moron, it was like his second tournament, and I’m very good at debate. I was like, “I’m not gonna lose this round because he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” so I was telling him what to say. 9 He literally asked me. He was like, “Please tell me what to do, ‘cause I don’t know what’s going on.” We had a judge in the back of the room—he was probably like late 30s, early 40s—and he wrote on my ballot, “You know, it’s really hard to be a powerful woman and not a bitch, and I think you failed.” I was 16 at the time, having this grown man tell me I came off as a bitch because I knew more than my counterpart in the debate who happened to be a boy. In that moment, I was literally like, “I don’t give a shit anymore what anybody says, because I know that what I’m doing is right. I know I am smart and capable.” People tell me all the time that I’m intimidating, or that I’m rude, or that I have a resting bitch face or whatever, just all these stupid recycled tropes that I can’t even believe are around, but I don’t care, because I believe in myself. Those are now some my favorite qualities about myself. You really do just have to believe in yourself, and that’s cheesy, but know that you are the way you are for a reason and having people make you feel bad about it is dumb. It’s counterproductive, it doesn’t help you, and it just lets them get some weird power trip off of you feeling uncomfortable, and nobody should feel like that. So, I really feel like just being like, “Yeah, maybe I am unpleasant. Great, it means I make less friends, so I’m more productive.” You know what I mean? Obviously, I have friends. But I just think that sometimes there are so many things that are put on—I mean, I can’t speak for other people, but I have a lot of 10 stupid tropes that put on me, but it’s just like “Okay, and?” Do you know what I mean? I’m not going to let it affect me, because I think it’s a good thing. Another thing too is surrounding yourself with people that support you in that. I have really good friends. My mom, obviously, is not like, “Yeah, you’re a bitch and who cares?” ‘cause she’s this sweet little Mormon lady, but she is always like, “Who cares that you’re strong and like to be in charge? Who cares?” My friends are always like, “That’s great.” All of my friends are like me in that we all tell people what we want, how we want it, and refuse to be embarrassed about it. I think that surrounding yourself with people like that is helpful because then you don’t feel like such a freak, or like you’re so far from the norm for demanding respect for yourself. I think my friends are a huge part of it. I think we all went on our journey of acceptance together. We all started reading Tumblr, when we were like 15, about feminism. We all started it together. I think that’s just so important. Yeah, that’s really it. You need to be with people who don’t care. You’re like, “Yeah, I’m a bitch.” I had this one person who I knew, and I would say that, and she was like, “No, you’re not, no!” Turning around, I’m like, “No, I am. I like it.” You know what I mean? So yeah, I think that’s really important. RW: In that same vein, what advice would you give emerging young women and minority leaders in order for them to be able to succeed? 11 KG: One thing that I think about a lot is meeting people where they are. I mean, it depends on what their goal is or what they’re working towards, but especially when talking about social-justice-related issues, activism, those sort of things, having an understanding of—especially if you’re trying to make change, like, in Utah for example—having an understanding of the climate in Utah and what people’s conceptions are is really useful, because then you know how to tailor your message to deal with that better, to re-educate people, whatever. More than that, kind of like what I was just saying, just know that what you’re doing is correct, and know that you are right in however you’re feeling. And just believing in yourself. Which like, it’s cheesy, but it’s true. Especially minoritized people, that’s the way that oppression maintains itself is by tricking people into thinking that what they’re doing is not valid, that they don’t know what they are talking about, that they’re not smart enough. Finding confidence in yourself like that is a game changer, because even that moment of you just figuring out what I am doing, like, “I am intelligent, I am smart, I am capable,” those sort of things, that is reversing years of socialization to believe otherwise. I think that if that catches on then that changes the power dynamics. I think it’s really helpful. Another thing that I would also say is, and this is very specific, but specifically white women in feminist movements, my biggest advice for them is to know when to speak and know when to be reflective and give space. I struggle with how to phrase this, but I think a lot of times, women’s movements is like “Well, our uniting factor is that we are all women, so let’s only talk about being 12 women.” But for women of color, Black women, trans women, and a litany of other women, they have modifiers before “woman,” and that determines their experience just as much as being a woman does. So, saying, “Let’s not talk about that right now,” like, for example, “Let’s not talk about racism, because right now we are talking about women,” it’s like, as if those two things can be separated. I think that’s something that a lot of white women need to learn. Even if you have the best intentions and really are just like, “I just love women”—which like, yeah, who doesn’t—I think sometimes that makes you toxic to women of color and Black women. That’s a problem, and that’s also a reason why women of color and Black women are skeptical of a lot of feminist movements, because in the past they are just like, “Shh, no, no, no, no, no,” you know, and it doesn’t really work. So, I think that’s another thing too. Again, being accountable to yourself, being accountable to the things that you’re saying and how they are read to certain people. If somebody tells you they’re offensive, believe them. Don’t just be like, “Well, I didn’t mean…” Just say okay and don’t do it again. That’s just my own personal beef. RW: Okay, lastly, what other insights can you share about being a woman or minority leader in Northern Utah? KG: There are pockets of good. I think I would say that. I think it’s easy to feel isolated. Salt Lake, and a little bit more southern, it’s like a very blue city. You know, there’s pride all the time, drag shows, Black Lives Matter movement, all of 13 those sort of things. A lot of that happens there, but not a lot of that happens here, so I think it’s easy to feel like you’re the only one who thinks that way. I would just encourage people to find a community that supports them, believes them, validates them, and moves toward the same goals. I mean, if they want to be involved in activism. Not everybody has to be involved in activism, obviously. But, yeah, I think there’s good everywhere. Except for, like, KKK rallies. There’s no good there. It’s also a source of energy, just having other people around you who can care about things when you can’t. That’s something I’ve experienced a couple of time with this job. I see these problems that are so pervasive and so common and so scary, and trying to figure out how to get people to care about problems that don’t directly affect them is hard. Sometimes you need to surround yourself with other people who, when you literally don’t have the energy to do that educational labor, physical labor, any of that kind of labor, one, will say, “It’s okay that you don’t want to”, but two, that will be like, “Today, I’ll do it.” Do you know what I mean? Having people who keep that excitement or motivation alive in you, ‘cause don’t think you can do it by yourself. I think you get burnt out. RW: Hey, Kinsee, this is awesome. Thank you so much for your time. We wish you the absolute best in your journey as program specialist here at the Women’s Center at Weber State University and whatever else the world may have in store for you. KG: Thank you. 14