Back To the Main SiteBeyond Boxes Series: Solutions
Peter Hyndal presented at a Men’s Health Conference in Newcastle, last week. A “National Health Gathering” presented by the Australasian Men’s Health Forum. For the conference he wrote a paper named Beyond boxes: Sex and gender diversity and health service provision
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:
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, and the final post in the series is beyond the cut
Beyond Boxes: Primary Health Care
Peter Hyndal presented at a Men’s Health Conference in Newcastle, last week. A “National Health Gathering” presented by the Australasian Men’s Health Forum. For the conference he wrote a paper named Beyond boxes: Sex and gender diversity and health service provision
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
Todays post, is beyond the jump:
Beyond Boxes Series: Medical Professionals and Making Men
Peter Hyndal presented at a Men’s Health Conference in Newcastle, last week. A “National Health Gathering” presented by the Australasian Men’s Health Forum. For the conference he wrote a paper named Beyond boxes: Sex and gender diversity and health service provision
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.
First post: Introduction and Terms
Second Post: What does sex and gender diversity have to do with Men’s Health?
Todays post, is beyond the jump:
Beyond Boxes Series: Sex and Gender Diversity and Mens Health
Peter Hyndal presented at a Men’s Health Conference in Newcastle, last week. A “National Health Gathering” presented by the Australasian Men’s Health Forum. For the conference he wrote a paper named Beyond boxes: Sex and gender diversity and health service provision
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 first post is First post: Introduction and Terms and todays post, is beyond the jump:
Beyond Boxes Blog Series: Introduction and Terms
Peter Hyndal presented at a Men’s Health Conference in Newcastle, last week. A “National Health Gathering” presented by the Australasian Men’s Health Forum. For the conference he wrote a paper named Beyond boxes: Sex and gender diversity and health service provision
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.
Todays post, is beyond the jump:
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.
AGA’s Plans for 2009
A Gender Agenda have plenty of plans for 2009, we hope that something coming up tickles your fancy.
Sex and Gender Diversity Community Survey
The survey closed early in January, and we’re currently in the process of analysing the data. Once we’ve looked at the info, and pulled out some interesting factoids we’ll publish our findings to the AGA Website. We hope that our data will be instrumental in convincing the ACT Government that people undergoing medical transition are of a significant enough number in the ACT to have services and funding provided to us.
T-Boy Get-Togethers
Most of the trans guys in Canberra have at some point thought that they are the only FTM in the area, but we actually have a pretty healthy population! We hold regular informal get togethers for FTM Spectrum folk (not everyone there identifies as a man… I for example, identify as a genderqueer), and so if you’ve been looking for a laid back and chillaxed group to hang out with, shoot me an email at webmaster@agenderagenda.org.au and I’ll add you to our email list. This year we hope to be able to hold bi-monthly events, a dinner or coffee night on a weekday evening after work, and a Saturday lunch event – picnics, and bbq’s etc.
TransAction! Day – Feb 27
A Gender Agenda are looking forward to the first ever TransAction! Day. TransAction! Day is eventually intended to be a day of education in schools, and as such has already stirred up some controversy in the USA. The Illinois Family Institute is calling it ‘Deviant Transgender Day‘ which I think is a very amusing, and catchy name for it.
We don’t have the resources to plan anything really spectacular for this year, but will probably hold a BBQ on the weekend following, and send out press releases in the weeks prior.
Mardi Gras Gaggle – March 7
A Gender Agenda are marching with Tranny Panic for Trans Rights in the Australian Mardi Gras Parade. We’ve got a group of about 16 takers so far, but the more the merrier! I hope you’ll consider coming along. For more information or to register your interest, contact our Mardi Gras organiser Robyn Grafkin at baglieg@gmail.com ASAP.
Butch Auction Fundraiser
We hope to run a Fundraising party at the end of June. We’re aiming to coincide with New York Cities annual Trans Day of Action. The night should be loads of fun, with performances from local musicians and Drag Kings and Drag Queens. Tranny Panic will also be running an interactive performance to raise awareness about trans people and our constant battle over toilets.
If you are interested in performing at the Butch Auction, or you are some-kind-of-masculine identified man, woman or genderqueer and wish to be Auctioned off to raise money for A Gender Agenda’s work, please shoot me an email at webmaster@agenderagenda.org.au.
Workshops and Education
Later in the year, perhaps September and/or October (dates to be announced), we plan on holding a series of workshops about issues facing the sex and gender diverse community. We want to cover a variety of topics, from dating and sexuality, raising children outside of traditional gender roles, the intersection of trans and intersex needs, and how to deal with trans people within your organisation. The workshops will cost money, so that we can afford to fly presenters in from other cities, and so that we can book a nice venue and so on. We will be offering subsidies and free places to sex and gender diverse identified individuals who would like to attend, but cannot afford it.
Possible Film Festival
Pending news about sponsorship of the event, we may be holding a “Breaking the Binary” film festival, for talented young film makers who want to say something about being sex and gender diverse. More news about this will be published to the AGA website if we can get sponsorship.
Well! Its going to be a busy year! I hope that something there appeals to you!
Annual Report 2008
2008 was a great year for A Gender Agenda.
We had lots of new members join, including yours truly. We also made friends with the New Canberra Transgender Network, which means that we shall be more aware of trans women’s issues, and they shall be more aware of trans men. We held a combined Christmas party in December that saw record numbers of the Canberra sex and gender diverse community get together and socialise. We all had an awesome time, at a very pleasant restaurant. We even had visitors from Sydney and Wollongong come all the way down to hang out with us.
We made a submission to HREOC’s Sex and Gender Diversity project, and participated in their community consultation. Although we were disappointed in the decided focus of HREOC’s project, we look forward to seeing the recommendations that are made to the Federal government. We will be continuing to lobby the ACT Government to improve things in the ACT for the sex and gender diverse community.
A small delegation of our members attended a workshop in Sydney called “Gender Dysphoria to Gender Euphoria: Working Towards Gender Belonging”. (Leaflet can be downloaded from here). The workshop was held at the AIDS Council of New South Wales, and was conducted by Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad & Elsa Almas from Norway. The workshop was extremely inspiring, and we hope to hold something similar here in Canberra later this year.
In November we participated in SpringOut, the Canberra LGBTIQ Community Pride Festival. We had a stall next to NewCTN at the Fair Day, and held several events during the festival, including a film night, a Picnic/BBQ and a candle lit ceremony for Transgender Day of Remembrance. At the end of the festival, our Co-ordinator Peter Hyndal won an ACT Pride Award for his work with AGA, and contribution to forwarding trans rights and building a vibrant gender diverse community.
November also saw us launch a community survey in an attempt to learn more about the face of the ACT Sex and Gender Diverse community. We had 93 responses, which was far more than we expected, especially since we know that not all members of AGA or NewCTN actually filled in the survey. This has increased our estimate of the number of sex and gender diverse people in Canberra and the surrounding region to several hundred. It is clear that medical and other services are not nearly adequate, and we hope to be able to use the data we gathered to apply for a Health Pact grant to allow us investigate further how services in the ACT can be improved for the Sex and Gender Diverse community.
2009 looks to be an even bigger year, and I hope to see new faces at our events. If you would like to get involved in A Gender Agenda, or be notified of our events, don’t forget to subscribe to the Blogs RSS feed, or send an email to events-subscribe@agenderagenda.org.au to our join our email list.
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