Back To the Main SiteThe AGA Youth Group
The A Gender Agenda youth group met for coffee this evening at Tosselini’s. I fucking love our youth group! Its for people under 30 who are trans, intersex, gender questioning, queer, genderqueer, and the friends and partners of any or all of the above. We’ve only had two meetings so far, but each one was heaps of fun, and we’ve already made four new friends, who I hope keep coming along.
Canberra is a pretty sleepy little town, and even though we’re national leaders with regard to Gay and Lesbian rights, we tend to be a bit behind the times when it comes to queerness and gender diversity. There seems to be a pretty persistent belief that all trans people are straight elderly ladies who started out as boys. Tonight as I sat at a table with a pair of cute radical queer dykes, young trans men, and young queer trans women, I felt very at home, and mused that most people don’t even realise that we have this many gender diverse and radically queer people in Canberra, let alone this being a rather smallish gathering of a narrowly defined demographic. I really hope that AGA’s youth group continues to grow, both in numbers, and in diversity of genders, sexualities, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and abilities.
We started talking about what kinds of things we might do in the future, and floated such ideas, as having a glamorous and highly silly dress up party, a craft-a-noon, going bowling, or just meeting up for another coffee. We’ll also be adding a mailing list for the youth group to use for discussion and organising, so no doubt things will start to happen.
I’d like to finish off this post, by thanking Robyn and Gabrielle for taking over the task of organising the Youth Group. You are both AWESOME!
Desiring Gendered Bodies
Pleasure Activism Australia was kind enough to republish an article on gender and sexuality that I wrote. They are a great website, and a group working for a very important cause. After all, who couldn’t use a little extra guilt free pleasure once in a while? Anyway, go check them out, and here is my article reposted for your enjoyment.
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.
The Butch Auction Fundraiser
From Transgender Day of Action 2009
June 26 saw our first ever Transgender Day of Action fundraiser. I have to admit it, I was nervous in the lead up, terrified even! However, on the night, things went incredibly well!
The venue was HUSH Lounge, and the price was right. People started rocking up well before we opened the doors. I’ve never seen Canberran’s looking so queer and fabulous. There were queers that had come all the way from Sydney and Melbourne because it seemed like such a novel event.
There were several main events. We had stage performances from the Canberra Kings, and a belly dancer who left all the ladies drooling for more. We also Auctioned off volunteers, including a Bondage Rope master, a Photographer, a Chef, and of course all the Drag Kings. One of the local dykes fetched the hefty price of $500 in return for one dirty dance!
We departed from the usual trans event policy of Unisex toilets, and split the bathrooms at HUSH along another binary. Head and tails! Our polite Toilet Valet would toss a coin, and tell you whether you were allowed to use the Heads or the Tails bathroom. Most people took this with good nature, in the spirit it was intended, but unfortunately one person took offence, and verbally harassed our valet. I find it utterly remarkable that anyone would come to a trans event, thinking that they can cause a fuss about being asked to use the men’s toilet! At least surrounded by trans folk, and our allies, she would have been thoroughly embarrassed for being the one scolded by the MC’s.
By the end of the night, I was exhausted. I’d MC’d with Mr Rocco Hardness, and staved off disaster when the Auctioneer called to say he couldn’t make it, 15 minutes before the Auction was due to begin. One of the local dykes, who usually Drag Kings but hadn’t been on stage that night, kindly volunteered to run the Auction for us.
We made about $2000 in donations, and it was truly a community effort. We couldn’t have done it without the support of the Canberra Kings, HUSH Lounges staff, and all the volunteers from A Gender Agenda who faithfully ran the Toilet stall, took donations at the door, and generally made sure the night ran nice and smoothly.
Transmen and Transwomen Unite!
Trans Women and Trans Men can be Friends Too! The art is from Sleazo Sketch Town's talented writer/artist.
There seems to be a massive cultural and political divide between trans men and trans women. Trying to get us all to work together can be like herding cats at times! There are naturally vastly different perspectives on what is important, and what needs time and attention. There are different ways of communicating, and different ways of organising. All of these differences need to be acknowledged and compromised on.
I know that on the trans-masculine side of the divide, there are a lot of boys who have significant passing privilege, and want to just fade into society. On the trans-feminine side there’s a lot of girls that just wanna have fun! And when we are all thrown together, we can throw one hell of a party, but getting political work done is more of a challenge.
A Gender Agenda has always had a mix of trans men and trans women, but somehow we still developed a reputation for being an organisation by and for trans men. Recently we’ve been making an effort to dispel that myth. We are for all trans people, and not just those physically transitioning.
We think its very important for people questioning their gender identity to be able to contact us and speak to someone who they can identify with. Our organisation has a variety of people actively working with us, and with people that contact us looking for advice, and support.
Peter Hyndal is available for gender-questioning people, and trans men to speak to. He’s been working with the trans community, and in trans politics for years now, and was a founding member of A Gender Agenda.
AbbeyJane is our new contact for Trans Women. She’s the founding member of NewCTN, and over the past few years NewCTN has grown into a flourishing social organisation for trans people and crossdressers. We are very pleased to have AbbeyJane on board with us.
Robyn Grafkin is the person I jokingly call our ‘Pride Officer’. Robyn’s job is to collaborate with other queer and pride organisations such as Tranny Panic (who we are attending Mardi Gras with), and the SpringOut Committee, who organise Canberra’s local Pride Festival.
I publish the website and research political actions and events that are happening around the place, to keep us all informed. I’m the person to contact if you want to get involved in organising stuff with us, want to write for the website, or have a gender-related event you want to promote.
Obviously, in our society where gender related hate is so commonplace, not all of our members are comfortable being openly associated with us. We are extremely accepting and facilitating of this. We have people that attend our events, and help out with other projects but who’s names will never be mentioned on this website. If you think that you would like to get involved, but want to remain stealth… don’t let the few of us that choose to be openly mentioned on the website intimidate you!
We hope to see many more talented individuals get involved with us in the near future, so don’t be shy. Drop by one of our events and say hello, or shoot us an email. :)
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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