Today I participated as part of a panel of LGBT educators and youth workers to a graduate class of teaching students at the University of Canberra. The other presenters were excellent. Two educators presented on having non-normative family structure, and a youth worker presented on homosexuality and bisexuality. I attempted to speak about supporting gender non-conforming children in their roles as teachers.

I'd never spoken on this topic before, but unfortunately I was the only person available for the presentation. I felt very nervous, and probably should have made more effort to prepare before hand. Still, people seemed to be into the presentation, and I gave out our website address, so that hopefully some of the people in the room will be able to come here and find some more useful information.

Talking to people who genuinely want to be able to help trans people is something that really makes this gig worthwhile. Sometimes I get frustrated, and burned out, and wonder if anyone actually cares about this stuff... and then I present somewhere, or speak to someone who is curious, and interested, and wants to be helpful. The vibe I got from this presentation was amazingly positive, and I really appreciate that the teachers at the University of Canberra are making the effort to equip their students to make life a bit easier for the next generation of gender non-conforming and queer kids going through our schooling system.

I have added a page of emergency support services to the main website. So far we have financial services, legal advice, and emergency accommodation listings. I urge you to go and have a look at it, and if you know of another service that should be listed there, and isn't, please don't hesitate to let me know!

Emergency services that are safe and accessible for trans people are not common in Canberra, and this places us in a 'beggars can't be choosers' situation with some service providers. There are some services that may be problematic for trans people who do not pass, for sex/gender diverse people who are bisexual, genderqueer and intersexed people who identify outside of the binary and so on. This is unfortunate, but A Gender Agenda's dealings with other organisations, as we urge them to adopt more inclusive policies, will never prevent us from redirecting sex and gender diverse people in need to an organisation that may be able to help them.

All that said, if you do approach an organisation that is listed on our website, and have a negative experience with them, please let us know. This allows us to not only modify our listing, but to contact the organisation, and try to work with them to create a more accepting environment for sex and gender diverse people. I firmly believe that most issues arise out of ignorance on the service providers part, and education can do much to eliminate difficulties for sex and gender diverse people in community organisations. After all, people don't work in community orgs for the money! They do it because they are good people, and want to help the world be a better place!

The directory of support services will expand as time goes on, we plan on adding sections for medical practices, counselling services, domestic violence and rape crisis centers, support services for people with disabilities, indigenous people, youth, and financially disadvantaged people. If you have suggestions for any of those sections, also let us know!

Currently we're working hard on getting some kind of physical premises where we can open our Gender Library. We have now spent all the money from the grant, and so there are several boxes of books in my lounge room right now. The sex and gender diverse community has donated a spectacular number of books to this project, and we are immensely grateful for everyone's support!

Setting up a library is quite a lot of work! Even though we don't have a premises, and so wont be loaning the books out for some time, there are still plenty of tasks to keep me occupied. I need to input each books information into our library software, cover each book so that it doesn't get damaged, and put stickers on the ones that are not for loan, and warning labels on heinous titles like 'The Transsexual Empire' by Janice Raymond.

Tonight I created a LibraryThing account for the Gender Library, so that I could access their nifty 'recommendations' feature, and reviews of some of the books I haven't read, so that I could put appropriate information into our software.

There are currently 117 books listed, which is by no means all of the books we have. We also have a number of pamphlets, zines, and magazines that are published by small community groups, and so do not have ISBN's, and we have DVD's, and a few Aussie books that just weren't listed in the US Databases. Not to mention the books we purchased from Melbourne which I still need to collect!

Anyway, if you would like to have a look through the books listed, this is our Profile, and this is our list of books. Feel free to make recommendations of titles, or let me know if there is a book in the collection that I should put a 'Warning: Transphobic Content" label on!

A while ago Peter and I were on a radio show and discovered to our chagrin that our website address is almost impossible to communicate clearly verbally! We painfully spelled out our email addresses and the web address, several times.... A-G-E-N-D-E-R-A-G-E-N-D-A-DOT-O-R-G-DOT-A-U...

After the radio show, we decided that we should probably change our website. We were a little concerned that changing the domain might mean changing the name of our organisation, and we are rather fond of our name. Eventually though, we came up with some domains that were available, but wouldn't require us to change our organisations name, and then narrowed it down to one that we liked most.

The other night we switched our domain over to www.GenderRights.org.au , and after much pain and grief, I managed to get the website migrated across, and working, and set up some magical things called '301 redirects', so that all of our visitors would be able to find us again.

However, this momentus change has lead to a few 'frequently asked questions', so I'm taking this opportunity to answer them now.

Q: Does this mean you are changing the organisations name from A Gender Agenda?
A: No, we're just changing the domain. Our slogan is 'Gender Rights are Human Rights', so Gender Rights fits as a domain name, without us changing our organisations name.

Q: Does this mean that A Gender Agenda is going national?
A: We've only changed our domain name, not our direction or mission. A Gender Agenda is a rapidly growing organisation, and we are very active locally in the ACT, but we are far too small and over worked to pull off any kind of national organisation (Though the question is deeply flattering every time its asked!). We'd love to go national one day, but really can't right now.

Q: Oh no! I wont be able to find your website now!
A: Chill. The old address will automatically redirect you to the new website. Once you've been redirected, just bookmark the new site, and delete the old bookmark. The redirect will work for about a year, before the old domain goes offline.
If you have a link to us on your website, changing it over to the new domain as soon as possible would be most appreciated.

Q: I'm having trouble getting to a page I had bookmarked. It redirects me to the new site, and then it gives me a '404 Page Not Found' error!
A: Unfortunately I'm learning as I go with this website biz, and I have lost a few pages in the migration and upgrade (not that I'm exactly sure *how* that happened). If you had a page directly bookmarked, or click on a link in google, and it takes you to a 404 error, go to the home page, and try navigating manually through the website to where the page logically should be. If you can't find it, and its important, email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and I'll try to find the info for you.

Q: What about the A Gender Agenda email list I'm subscribed to?
A: The email lists will also be migrated to the new domain over the coming week. You'll be notified once that has happened, so don't worry too much about it.

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!