Now, we all know that raparative therapy doesn't cure homosexuality, and in fact administering electric shocks or administering non-consensual medical treatments to homosexuals is generally frowned upon these days, even if it was not 30 years ago.

That said, raparative therapy is still a technique used on gender variant children with terrifying frequency.

Andrea James, a Canada based trans activist recently gave a run down on one of the worlds most well known 'gender clinics' and their raparative therapy techniques.

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) decided that gay people were no longer mentally ill, but that changed nothing for trans and gender-variant people. In fact, "experts" led the push to create a new disease called "gender identity disorder," which they successfully got added to the APA's big book of mental illnesses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Though trans activists have been protesting to get this mental illness removed in the 2012 revision, these Toronto "experts" hold key positions among the people doing the revising.

Even worse is a sub-disease they created called "gender identity disorder in children." They have made a lot of money claiming to "cure" hundreds of children who are "too feminine." While they also treat kids who are "too masculine," in most clinics which have adopted their methods, 5 to 30 times more children assigned as males are treated. The methods? No playing with dolls, no drawing with the "wrong" colors like pink or purple, and no playing with or drawing pictures of girls. The anxious parents who bring their children in to be "cured" are expected to enforce all rules. They are sent home with instructions to make the child go through all their possessions and remove anything "inappropriate," as well as ways to use reinforcement to "correct" their child's thinking and behavior. How did nonconformity become a disease? And how did Toronto become infamous for this? It's a textbook case of pathological science with roots in the 20th-century eugenics movement, and it shows how a few misguided people can have impact all over the world.

Read the whole post here

Over at Accepting Dad, the news is that there is a new study that has found supportive parenting practices to be good for the mental health of our gender variant children.

He says:

This is what I take from the study; I’m not a scientist and I can’t speak to the statistical analysis, I’m just looking at the text of the study itself:

1. Supportive parenting which acknowledges and accepts a child’s gender non-conformity is good for kids; even when this non-conformity leads to awkward social situations and various degrees of peer disapproval. Taking the good with the bad, supportive parenting is associated with better outcomes than suppressing these behaviors completely ‘for the child’s own good.’
2. Accepting and affirming a child’s impulses and deeply held feelings, while monitoring and limiting a child’s gender expression to lessen a communities negative response works well for the children in this sample.
3. Higher levels of pathology in the Netherlands sample does not invalidate early transition or hormone blocking but it suggests that early social transition and blocking is truly a last resort. Everyone knew this anyway, but for parents who are moving slowly and cautiously and feeling guilty about that, this study would seem to validate this approach.

Sounds good to me!

Drag kings and queens, crossdressers, transsexuals, genderqueers! Transgender people of all kinds!
Friends, family, partners, supporters!

Come march with us in the Mardi Gras parade. Come on, it's heaps of fun!

We're using the theme "The Transsexual Empire Strikes Back" because it's bold and pro-trans and funny - you don't actually have to be transsexual to join us (but if you hate transsexuals then you shouldn't be in this group). A long time ago in a country far, far away, somebody wrote a book called "The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male" that said a lot of mean and silly things that we don't agree with.

You could come as your most glamorous self, or wear a sci-fi costume, or come in drag (or even sci-fi drag?). The important thing is that you turn up, and if you turn up looking awesome, that's even better.

If you're coming to the parade and you don't live in Sydney, book your accommodation as soon as possible. Like, now. If you leave it too late, it might be hard to find a place.

On the day, meet us near the War Memorial in Hyde Park. Try to get there around 4pm. If you arrive late it will be difficult for you to find us, and if you arrive after 6pm we will not be able to get you into the parade at all.

RSVP on FACEBOOK or via This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

I hope that everyone is having a great summer. Here at AGA we've not been online much over the past month, but we're back now, and gearing up for 2010.

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

By Peter Hyndal

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.