A few housekeeping matters:
- The Blog is now fully integrated into our website. You can see the new blog here. Remember to subscribe to the new RSS feed. This is the last post that will appear on the old feed!

- We’re still in need of donations for our community space. We are unfunded, and run completely on volunteer time and donations. We have recieved a few small grants, and continue to apply for more, but we desperately need funds if we are to continue to grow. If you can afford to give, please do.

- Our end of year report from 2009 is available now. You can download it now if you’d like to see an overview of everything we have achieved in the last 12 months.

- Memberships are still open! If you would like to get involved in one of the fastest growing queer organisations in the ACT, check out our membership page for details.

I’m looking forward to seeing you soon, so remember to keep an eye on our Events page and we’ll hear from you soon!

Cheers

Ryan

As a transman, I have some reservations about the time and energy that we, as a queer community are putting into the current marriage debate.
My primary reservation is that there are so many much more pressing law reform issues that affect the LGBTIQ community that are not being dealt with at all because priority has been given to the marriage issue. From a human rights perspective, I would argue that the top three most urgent issues facing the LGBTIQ community are the legislative requirement for sterilisation of trans people as a condition for gender recognition, the refusal of governments to adequately deal with issues of intersex surgery on infants and children, and the incredibly high rates of discrimination and victimisation of sex and gender diverse people in our community.
My secondary reservation stems from the fact that trans and intersex people are constantly called upon to actively support essentially gay and lesbian causes, while the gay and lesbian community has an awfully long history of refusing to acknowledge or supporting trans and intersex issues. It is this blindness to trans and intersex issues that I particularly want to address  – because as I see it, this blindness is not only intensely frustrating for trans and intersex people – it is also potentially damaging for the marriage campaign itself.
To get right back to basics, what is at the heart of the marriage issue is that the commonwealth marriage act defines marriage as being between a “man” and a “woman”.
The entire marriage debate has, to date, been waged on the basis of who should and who should not have access to marriage. And when I say “the entire debate” I mean that both we, and those who oppose us, are engaged in dialogue ONLY about whether people in same sex relationships should be able to access marriage in the same way as people in heterosexual relationships.
In other words, we have ALL engaged with this debate on the basis that it is a debate that is ACTUALLY ABOUT sexuality.
Although I agree that there are very sound human rights based arguments about why same-sex relationships should be recognised by the state in exactly the same way as heterosexual relationships, I do not agree that this is the only, nor even the most powerful, debate to be engaged in.
When we frame the debate only in terms of sexuality, we don’t question whether its true that marriage currently only occurs between men and women. Nor do we question whether the definition of marriage or of men or of women is problematic. By not raising these issues, the ONLY sphere we allow our own debate to occur is in the context of us having to justify why a change should be made. We set the argument up so that those who oppose us don’t actually have to argue for anything – except the continuation of the status quo.
But if we frame the debate in terms of gender then there are legitimate and destabilising questions that we could be asking – questions that those who oppose us would actually need to respond to and questions that I think, they would find very difficult to answer.
My experience of marriage right now, in this country is that IT IS NOT something that only happens between a man and a woman – There are many trans women who remain legally married to their wives. And there are transmen who can legally marry other men. And there are many people who are unable to marry either a man or a woman because for a whole range of reasons it is unclear whether they themselves are men or women.
It is very clear to me that the marriage debate is one where it makes much more sense to engage with the debate on the basis on GENDER and NOT on the basis of sexuality.
What the marriage Act doesn’t define – and nor does any other legislative instrument in this country at a Commonwealth, State or Territory level – is what a man or a woman actually is.
And the reason that these terms are not defined in legislation is that there is so much variation in the natural biology and social context of the human experience that it is completely impossible to define categorically what a man or a woman actually is.
The biggest issue facing trans and intersex people in Australia at the moment is about identity recognition – the fact that there is NO CONSISTENCY in the way that governments recognise a persons sex – that the same person will be legally recognised as male by some government agencies while being legally recognised as female by other government agencies.
So I think the biggest question about marriage is quite simple: “How can a government on one hand maintain that marriage can only be between a man and a woman if that same government is unable to consistently articulate what a man or a woman even is?”
In the ACT there is also second important question: “How can the ACT Government maintain that it is serious about the importance of legal recognition – when although they seem desperate to legally recognise my relationships, they refuse to legally recognise the very essence of my individual identity as a man?”
So as activists, let’s start to scratch just a little below the surface. Let’s start to demand a little bit more of those people who claim to be our allies.  Let’s REFUSE TO just accept THE MYTH that marriage is, or ever can be effectively restricted to unions between “a man and a woman”.
Let’s start shifting the discussion to HOW we want the legal definition of marriage to be changed, rather than WHETHER it should be changed at all. And let’s remember that all we need to do to achieve this shift is to engage with the marriage debate on the basis of gender rather than sexuality.
To do these things is to shift the marriage debate to an arena where we CAN win – because we shift the debate to an arena where our argument is evidenced not by us arguing on moral concepts like human rights and social justice and equity but where our argument is evidenced by the natural and undeniable diversity of sex and gender that always has and always will exist in our society.

Last year I spoke calling for unity among the Sex and Gender Diverse community. This year, I looked outside the community to government, community and medical institutions, calling for them to include and accept sex and gender diversity as a natural part of life.

My speech is behind the jump.

First of all, I’d like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, who are the traditional owners and custodians of the land we meet on today.

Every year, all over the world, thousands of transgendered people gather on the 20th of November to memorialise those of us who have fallen prey to violence in the last 12 months. Every year hundreds of transgendered people are the victims of hate crimes, and have their names added to the ever growing List of the Dead. Every year, hundreds more die unnamed, and are not remembered, because their status as gender diverse was unknown, or was never reported by the mainstream press.

There are segments of the transgendered community who are more vulnerable than others. As a middle-class, white, able bodied non-sex worker, living in one of the most affluent cities in Australia, I have a massive amount of privilege that keeps me safe from being attacked and slaughtered on the street or in my home. I acknowledge that privilege, and ask that everyone here please think for a moment about the structural oppressions that lead to the list of the dead being predominantly sex workers, and people of colour. We also recognise that the violence perpetuated against the most vulnerable members of our community is an expression of the same transphobia that all sex and gender diverse people experience every day.

One of the issues we face with gathering data is the underreporting of discrimination and violent crime against transgendered people. Both in the media, and the trans people themselves approaching authorities. However, there have been several studies of the health and well being of transgendered people that have provided us with invaluable insight into the situation of transgendered Australians.

Beyond Blue have pointed out that 90% of transgendered people have faced discrimination for being trans. A study conducted in 1994 found that 49% of transgendered people have been raped in their lifetime. One third of trans people face discrimination more than once a week. Even though trans people have above average education, most of our community subsist on an income of less than $25,000 a year due to employment discrimination. With statistics like that, Is it any wonder That more than half of us suffer from clinical depression? That the suicide rate of the trans population is 300 times that of the general population?

Thats right. THREE HUNDRED TIMES that of the general population.

We are not trash! We are not garbage! We are not alone! We are fierce, stronge, resilient, brave, proud and beautiful people. We are special, and loved when we are alive, and mourned by our friends and families when we are dead.

We know we’re worth more than the systematic destruction of our lives would indicate. We deserve human rights. We deserve to be full and included citizens of this nation, and fully included members of our community.

We call on the ACT Government to change the legislation that discriminates against trans people, and makes them a target for transphobic attack every time they have to produce identity documents. We demand the right to equality and recognition before the law. We demand the right to privacy. These are basic rights recognised internationally, and supposedly enshrined in ACT Law in the Human Rights ACT. We demand access to marriage, and to civil partnerships. We demand effective anti-discrimination legislation.

We call on the police force to protect and defend the trans population of Australia. We demand that our deaths be investigated, and we be taken seriously when we are assaulted. We damand that we are not outed as trans to violent predators, as happened in NSW and Victoria last year, or laughed off as happened to A Gender Agenda members when reporting a violent crime, just this year!

We call on the medical establishment to stop discriminating against gay and lesbian trans people. To provide much needed medical care and sexual health care to transgendered people. To stop acting as gatekeepers, and start acting as the ‘medical professionals’ you are supposed to be.

We call on the Gay and Lesbian community to start including us as more than a letter on the end of an acronym, but as unique and valuable members of the community in our own right, and on the wider Australian community to open their hearts and minds to the trans people who are your children, parents, friends and coworkers.

Organisations like A Gender Agenda often feel like we are facing an insurmoutable task. Our to do list seems to get longer every day, and the number of people who have heard of us, and contact us requesting help keeps on growing. We call on the government to acknowledge and fund the valuable work that we perform.

The thing that makes our hard work so worthwhile is the strength and resilience displayed by our community. The support offered by organisations that sponsor our events, and help us hold fundraisers. The new friendships that are formed, the young people who will grow up strong, the older people who have finally embraced their life and decided to live to the fullest.

We rest assured in the knowledge that even if we never achieve the legislative changes we so desperately need, we’ll have made a difference for a handful of people, and that the number of demoralised, disheartened, lonely, and depressed is reducing, and that the list of the dead is a few names shorter, because of us.

Peter gave a moving speech at the opening. You can read it beyond the cut. The ACT Human Rights commission also sent a speaker, who’s speech you can download in PDF Format here.

Firstly I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land we now call Australia and specifically the Ngunnawal people on whose land we meet today.
Secondly I welcome all of you – Ladies, Gentlemen, and most importantly all the rest of us – I’m Peter Hyndal from A Gender Agenda and we are thrilled to be hosting the “Gender Rights are Human Rights” exhibition. I think you’ll agree that we have a range of very impressive work.
I would really like to thank all the artists who have participated in this project – Robyn Grafkin, Erica Green and Gabriele Thomson who can not be with us this evening. Peta Bourne, Tina Fiveash, Margot Seares, and Ingrid Singh who are here, and especially Stephanie Parker who is not only a contributing artist but who has also put an enormous amount of time and effort into helping to organise the exhibition.
This exhibition could not have been possible without the financial support of Pink Tennis the Canberra Gay and Lesbian Tennis Club, and we’d also like to sincerely thank the Tennis Club for their support.
It’s interesting that no government or government department actually collects statistics about transgender or intersex people, and yet every government maintains that there are not very many of us at all. For example a very commonly quoted statistic is that out of every 150,000 people born female there will be one one transgendered person who chooses to live their life as a man. This would mean that there is only one trans man living in the ACT. I have it on very good authority that there are at least 5 times that number of trans men – in this room this evening – let alone in all of the ACT!  Based on the contacts that A Gender Agenda has, we believe that around 1 in 200 people in Canberra are Sex or Gender Diverse.
When we talk about transgender and intersex issues many people feel they do not have the information they need in order to understand.
I’ve had a flick through one of the most recent research papers published in Australia. The findings are consistent with a range of earlier Australian papers as well as many international studies, and the lived experiences of our community.
These are things that we know to be true:
We know that compared to the general population, our community is better educated – and yet we have unemployment rates 3-10 times greater. In relation to income levels – we also know that the greatest grouping of our community members is in the “less than $25,000 pa” category.
We know that the majority of us are the victims of discrimination, stigma or violence on multiple occasions every day. We know that there is a direct causal link between the experience of discrimination and the incidence of depression and so it comes as no surprise that 40-50% of us meet the criteria of being clinically depressed at any given point in time. This is a rate at least 40 times higher than the general population.
We know that depression is the major predictor of suicide and we also know that our community commits suicide at a rate more than 300 times greater than the general population.
The most common argument against law reform for identity recognition is that it is “too complicated”. I want you all to look at me now as I stand in front of you.
And I want to ask you – how can it be simple or easy to continue to insist that I am legally a woman?  When I stood up to speak every one of you identifies  me as being a man – how can it be so “complicated” for the law to recognise this reality?
They say a pictures worth a thousand words. And I hope that’s true because there’s been so many millions of words written that haven’t seemed to make any difference at all. So it’s heartening to believe that the fabulous art work around us also has the capacity to make a real difference.
Thankyou all for coming  Please engage with the artists about their work, encourage your friends to come and look at the exhibition later over the next week, and enjoy the rest of the evening!

The ACT Government is again seeking community views to help shape the next stage of the Territory’s Social Plan. We invite you to join the conversation. “

I’d strongly encourage anyone with a bit of time to sign up for the forums and start waxing eloquent about the needs of the trans, intersex and genderqueer populations of Canberra. The more voices that speak up, the better. We gain visibility, not only within government departments, but also in the wider community as other non-LGBT members of the Canberra region read our responses.

Possible things you could consider bringing up:
- The need for crisis accommodation for sex and gender diverse people
- The need for a safe non-commercial social space for sex and gender diverse people to meet
- The lack of trained medical professionals in general, and specifically ones aware of sex and gender diverse issues
- The need for funded sex and gender diverse organisations, run by and for sex and gender diverse people
- The need for a program that targets innovative social enterprises and provides them with support that allows them to more effectively service the community.

To get involved in the consultation, check out the website: http://bangthetable.com/actsocialplan

For more information about the consultation see here: http://www.cmd.act.gov.au/policystrategic/socialplan/developing_an_update

They have requested that A Gender Agenda advertise their fabulous youth project, and we are more than happy to oblige! Qwire have made a fantastic effort to create an environment where they hope that trans, intersex and genderqueer youth will feel comfortable participating. I strongly recommend that if you have any interest in music, you consider getting involved.

They are seeking interested participants who would like to take on roles in singing, production, development, design, music and lyrics writing and arranging, and anything you else can think of, to develop and produce a public performance and commercial recording of an “event”.

Any way, here’s the info:
Participants aged 16-25, who identify as Lesbian or Gay, Trans or Intersex, bisexual or any other colour of our rainbow are who we are looking for!

Not only will participants produce their own performance, but they will be supported, coached, and joined by members from the Qwire, as well as music and production professionals from around Canberra, ACT and nationally.

Participants will also be encouraged and welcomed to join with the Qwire for a number of other events including:

How do I participate?
We will be holding a public meeting at 6pm on Tuesday 24th, for interested participants to come and hear more about the project, to meet and talk with Qwire members, and sit in on a Qwire rehearsal, just following our “Light and Fluffy” concert Late November.

Venue will be ANU Music Department, Llewellyn Hall, Level 5, Lecture Theatre 2. Please let us know if you wish someone to meet you there.
At this meeting, we will clarify questions about the project and seek your expression of interest, to commence working on the project, writing your own music and words, designing, developing and all the things that go with it, in the near year.
Those registering their interest prior to the meeting will also be invited to attend the “Light and Fluffy”, concert free of charge – with our guests, Can Belto (one of Canberra’s favourite choirs – other than us!),

Please contact the project Chef de Partie, Tim Little (Qwire Assistant Musical Director), on 0422210768 or cooltim@westnet.com.au to confirm your attendance, to register your interest and receive details of the “Light and Fluffy” concert.

You can also contact us on canberraqwire@yahoo.com.au for more information about the Qwire, and our regular season – you are welcome to join us

And we do mean a community space – a space that is run by and for the community – a space that the community truly “owns”. Which is where YOU come in!

We want to hear your dreams!
What will we call this “space of our own”? What functions could this space serve? What services do you think are most urgently needed? What activities would you love to see offered? What do you dream might be achieved in 1 year? 3years? 10 years?

Please come along – to share your own ideas, to hear what other people have to say, and to be part of your community space right from the very beginning.

DATE: Monday, 30th of November 2009
TIME: 5.30 – 8.30 PM

WE UNDERSTAND THAT NOT EVERYONE CAN MAKE IT BY 5.30PM. PLEASE COME ALONG EVEN IF YOU NEED TO ARRIVE LATE.

Hope to see you there, or at one of our upcoming SpringOut Events.

We’ll be posting the contents of his presentation over the next few weeks, in tasty bite sized morsels, and the full paper (with all its references intact) will be available to download as soon as its been confirmed complete.

The story so far:

1 Introduction and Terms

2 What does sex and gender diversity have to do with Men’s Health?

3 Medical Professionals involvement in Making Men

4 Issues with Primary Health Care

5 Specific Health Issues

Todays post, and the final post in the series is beyond the cut

Funding Community-Specific Health Services

There is almost no national or state based funding for services responding to sex and gender diverse people’s health needs. One reason for the lack of funding is that sex and gender diverse people are rarely identified in government strategy or policy. This absence or invisibility at the strategy level means that those in positions to make funding decisions do not include sex and gender diverse people, as there is no requirement for them to do so and/or they fear they will not be supported in their funding decisions by those above.

Organisations anchored in the LGBT community have historically often provided the only services addressing the health of sex and gender diverse people. Many of these organisations struggle to obtain competitive funding for health programs and/or are forced to invest significant resources into fundraising and grant applications. In addition, many are not entirely comfortable with the inclusion of sex and gender diversity within a target group more actively focused around sexuality. This is reflected by the fact that many such organisations have ceased the inclusion of intersex people in their official target groups. This feeling is also reflected from many within the sex and gender diverse community – those who themselves identify as fiercely heterosexual, those who identiy as neither intersex nor transsexual and also those who are not comfortable with a further division of their community along the lines of intersex vs transsexual.

It is clear that sex and gender diverse communities have enough specific health needs to warrant specifically targeted and focused health services. The importance of such specific targeting has been recognized in other population groups as evidenced by the prevalence of womens health centres and indigenous health centres.

Given the high degree of specific knowledge required it is clearly more practical to train staff at specific gender centres of excellence than it is to provide all health services with the level of training required to bring them up to this level of expertise.

To be effective, it is critical that such services operate using Standards of Care based on informed consent and mutual respect models. There are currently no such services in Australia.

What you can do in your own service:
Sex and Gender specific health services are an essential but not the complete solution.

It is also critical that sex and gender diverse people are able to access adequate and appropriate health care from mainstream service providers.

On a practical level some things you can easily and quickly implement in your own services are:

• Review your intake/client form – do you currently ask “what is your sex?”. Do you really need to know the answer to that question? What difference does it make to your service delivery if someone ticks M as opposed to F? If you really do need to ask a question like this, change the way it is asked and encourage alternative answers (for example ask “How do you identify (male/female/other)?”
• Don’t make assumptions that someone is intersex/trans/neither/both based on their appearance/voice – instead, ask clients how they identify. If it is not appropriate to ask clients directly, the sex you indicate on data collection forms should be “unsure” unless the person has specifically aligned themselves as being male or female. Ask clients what their preferred pronouns are and respect their choice. If it is not appropriate to ask clients for their preferred pronouns, avoid using a pronoun until you hear the person use a pronoun themselves.
• Where a client identifies as sex/gender diverse respect their confidentiality.
• Ensure your resources don’t assume a necessary alignment between gender identity, legal sex, biological sex, genitals, sexuality or sexual practices
• Remember it is generally inappropriate to ask someone about the shape or functionality of their genitals – do not ask someone for medical diagnosis or surgical status merely out of curiosity.
• Seek out and provide training for staff on the basics of sex and gender diversity issues (such as the information included in this session).

We’ll be posting the contents of his presentation over the next few weeks, in tasty bite sized morsels, and the full presentation (with all its references intact) will be available to download at the end of the series.

The story so far:

1 Introduction and Terms

2 What does sex and gender diversity have to do with Men’s Health?

3 Medical Professionals involvement in Making Men

4 Issues with Primary Health Care

Todays post, is beyond the jump:

Understanding Health Risks
Another ongoing issue in health care is the high prevalence of (mis)understanding of risk factors that is based around a concept of sex and/or gender:

We all know for example that “men are at greater risk of heart disease” but does this mean a trans man is at greater risk than he was when he was a woman? Or that the trans woman continues to be at greater risk even after identifying and living as a woman? What about someone who is chromosomally neither male or female?

This issue also filters down to more general health and wellbeing issues that are part of targeted community health education programs. For example, how many standard drinks should a trans or intersex person have to fit within the recommended range? What safe sex information is most relevant for a lesbian trans woman who has not undertaken any surgical procedures? Whose responsibility is it to make this information available? Or to assess the effectiveness of its dissemination?

Too often it seems that health statistics and education campaigns are framed around the use of male and female as comparators simply because that is what we have come to expect. We must acknowledge that there is no inherent value in these comparators. Used inappropriately, they can serve to erase other perhaps more significant comparators (eg indigenous/non indigenous). We also need to acknowledge that using sex as a standard default comparitor is problematic for sex and gender diverse people to the degree that sex and gender diverse people are invisible within this framework – invisible to health services as individuals, invisible from health policy as a community, and provided with health information that is completely unintelligible to their reality.

Mental Health, Depression and Suicide
Very little research has investigated any health issues and outcomes relating to sex and gender identity, which poses serious problems for the development of robust and inclusive health policy. Here I will examine some of what we know about mental health issues specifically with relation to depression and suicide.

The rate of depression identified in the Tranznation report was particularly significant with 53.4% of the sample reporting one of the criteria for a current major depressive episode. Over 1/3rd of the respondents met the criteria for a current major depressive episode compared to 6.8% of the general population.

There is a long established and universally recognised association between depression and suicide. The Australian depression incidence indicated by the Tranznation report is in line with US and UK based research and that research shows around 1 in 3 trans people have attempted suicide at least once compared to approximately 1:380 for the general population.

Despite the rate of attempted suicide being approximately 125 times greater amongst sex and gender diverse individuals than the population as a whole, sex and gender diversity is not identified as a risk factor for suicide by any mainstream suicide prevention organizations in Australia.

For example, one national Australian organisation whose mission is to prevent depression states in a downloadable fact sheet that 50-60% of transgender people report having depression. Yet a search for “transgender” on the same website brings up only two other references – a brief fact sheet primarily focused on gay and lesbian issues, and a scoping study which contains no trans or intersex content at all.

The predominate focus of suicide prevention resources are currently targeted at men – on the basis of a suicide rate four times higher than the suicide rate amongst women. Personally I think that any men’s services receiving this funding has a moral and ethical duty to target at least some of these resources towards effective prevention strategies at the sex and gender diverse community who have suicide rates 125 times higher than the general population.

Broader Health and Wellbeing Issues

Most population level research in Australia has not included questions on the sex/gender diversity of respondents. Even where respondents have specifically indicated there status as gender diverse, most research ‘erases’ their response by randomly allocating their responses to either male or female categories. So while gender diverse people will have participated in this research, there is no way of analysing their responses compared to other population groups.

The 2006/2007 the Tranznation study found that on the SF36 scale, a standard measure of health, participants had poorer health ratings than the general population in Australia.

Tranznation also identified that although trans people were significantly higher educated than the general population, the largest proportion of participants earnt less than $20,000 pa. Unemployment rates, at 9.1% were more than double the national average of 4.4%. The Sydney Gender Centre quotes unemployment rates as high as 60% within the trans community.

Perhaps most importantly, Tranznation identified a clear relationship between the experience of discrimination and depression.