Back To the Main SiteCommunity Picnic: October 09
A Gender Agenda love our picnics. They are laid back, family friendly, low pressure, and tend to be lots of fun. Our last picnic attracted close to 70 people across the afternoon, and everyone seemed to have a ball!
This picnic is intended to be a fun day out for the entire alphabet soup. You don’t need to be trans to attend, you don’t even need to know a trans person. If you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, genderqueer, intersex, asexual or questioning your gender or sexuality, or know someone who is, you are more than welcome to come along and join in the fun.
Remember that you can bring your whole family, parents, partners, kids, and pets. Its a day out in a park, and there’s a playground for youngsters to play on. There are also BBQ facilities for those who want to cook food.
We try to be as inclusive as possible, so if you have a disability or other special requirements that we might be able to help with, please shoot us an email, and we’ll do our best.
WHAT: A Picnic
WHEN: 10th of October 2009, 12.30pm
WHERE: Glebe Park in Civic
WHO: You, and your family
WHY: To get to know other people of diverse age, sexuality, gender identity and expression, in a fun and family friendly environment.
Another reminder will go out closer to the event, but pencil the date into your calendar now!
Coming up for A Gender Agenda
SpringOut 2009
Its that time of year again… the run up to November, the month of Canberra’s local Pride Festival. A Gender Agenda and NewCTN are holding a joint stall at SpringOut’s Fairday this year. We’ve got lots of fun activities and events planned for the day, so come along and check out the festivities!
Also during November we have planned an Art Exhibition of Trans Political Art, with the grant kindly provided to us by Pink Tennis, the local Gay and Lesbian Tennis Club. This will be shown both in the Legislative Assemblies Exhibition Space, and in another Art Gallery, that we are still confirming.
There will also be an A Gender Agenda Picnic on the last Saturday of November, so mark the 28th of November in your calendar, and keep it clear!
In less cheerful news, we will be marking Transgender Day of Remembrance again this year. TDoR falls on the 20th, which is a Friday this year. We are hoping to have a ceremony inside a building, but again we haven’t yet confirmed locations. More details will be posted closer to the date.
Anyway, we hope to see you at an event soon.
2009 Sydney Mardi Gras
Our Entry in Mardi Gras was a raging success. We had 22 people show up on the day to march with us. We wore fantastic green t-shirts, had awesome placards, and made waves with the crowd, the other floats, and the commentators alike!
It was my first ever Mardi Gras, and the feeling of marching with 21 other trans people, genderqueers, and our friends and families while being cheered on by the crowd, was an incredibly empowering experience. We handed out hundreds of stickers that said “Gender Rights are Human Rights” and lollipops with “Trannies are Sweet” written on them. Trans people and their supporters in the crowd screamed “I love trannies too!” at us from the sidelines, and we had post op FTM’s flash their scars at us.
I was thrilled to see the level of support for our community from other LGBT organisations, and from the wider community. Some people were obviously confused by our marching group, and our placards gave more than a few cause to pause and think about their preconceived notions of what a trans person looks like, and what they experience.
So, maybe next year YOU will be marching with us too! :)
Parents Attitudes and LGB Health
A friend of my mothers once told me that it is a sin to be gay. This should have been entirely unsurprising given that my mother is heavily embedded in the Christian church. However, I was surprised in this instance because I thought that this particular woman would know better… she had a Masters in Science, and a Masters in Teaching, and was almost a year into her MBBS, to become a GP. A medical doctor. When I questioned her thinking, she went on to explain that it is clearly a sin, because Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual people suffer poorer health than the general population.
That logic is flawed right from the beginning, after all, the native Aboriginal people of Australia have the poorest health of any minority group in the country, but one can hardly claim it is a sin to be born black. (For more information about Indigenous Health, see Health Info Net)
The part of that argument that I most want to address today though, is the incorrect notion that LGB people are suffering from poor health *because* they are LGB. A recent study has shown that there is a clear link between a young lesbian, gay or bisexual identified persons health, and their relationship with their family. That would imply that these people have poorer health, not because they are LGB, but because their family has a negative attitude to a large part of their identity.
“For the first time, research has established a predictive link between specific, negative family reactions to their child’s sexual orientation and serious health problems for these adolescents in young adulthood such as depression, illegal drug use, risk for HIV infection, and suicide attempts,” said Caitlin Ryan, who is the lead author of the paper.
So, if you are the parent it would seem that the greatest gift you can give your child, the best way that you can help ensure them a happy, healthy future, is not by trying to ’stamp out the gay’ in them… but to love and accept them for who they are, whether they are same-sex loving, or have a gender identity at odds with how you perceive them.
Connecting Generations: The importance of History
Jason Tseng of the Bilerico Project recently wrote an article called Reinventing the Wheel: Cultural Reproductive Labor and its cost on Queer youth
In it he discusses how queer youth are faced with the problem of finding and then reproducing queer culture often without the benefit of mentorship by the previous generations of queer people.
Because of the highly lateral dispersion of queer people in our society, (being that there are few indicators showing that queer people are more likely to come from one part of our society than the other), from our entrance into the world, the queer nation is constantly a nation in diaspora. With each successive generation, the new queer generation is mustered together by a collective sense of “otheredness,” and introduced to a radically new culture to which we may choose to cleave to.
However this process is highly individualized and extremely informal, with very few opportunities for mentorship or leadership. What often occurs is learning through mimicry and trial and error. Queer youth learn to copy examples of queerness that they see in television, in film, the older queers they might see on misadventures into queer life. But most importantly, queer youth learn about being queer mostly from each other.
This process of recreating queer culture is not without its benefits. It means that we are a highly adaptive culture, and although there is a massive ‘generation gap’, I think that young queers are moving in the right direction, particularly when it comes to accepting gender variance and making cultural space for all kinds of trans people and new sexual orientations.
However, there are also problems. For example, we forget our history so quickly. The history of the LGBT movement is not taught in school. When I came out, I had no idea what ‘Stonewall’ was and was quite alarmed when I saw a documentary about the first Australian Mardi Gras. (Police brutality!? IN AUSTRALIA? What a shock!) Then on the trans side… who knew that the first medical transitions occurred only a few decades ago? Amazing!
Another notable issue for young people, is that even today, and particularly sex and gender diverse children and teens, we are still often rejected by our families, leaving us alone, and somewhat vulnerable. We create new queer families, and tribes, but we miss the mentorship from the older generation. Sometimes we wonder what on earth will become of us… we wonder if we’ll ever grow up, what we’ll look like when we are 40, 60, or 80. We wonder how other, older people coped with transition, with being genderqueer, whether they lost their family and friends too, or maybe they patched things up? If so, how? How hard is it to have kids? How do you go about having kids? What about negotiating the legal minefield surrounding marriage?
There are so many questions, and its often hard for young sex and gender diverse people to find older mentors who can help them with their unique gender journey.
There are ways to combat these problems. There are websites about our history that celebrate successful trans people. Organisations like AGA have members who range in age, providing a valuable source of mentorship. As individuals we can all do our bit, helping out young people, and people who are newly awakening in their identity as gender diverse.
Its very important that older people understand how important they are to the next generation of gender diverse people, and that young people have access to safe mentors and leaders.
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