LGBTQ Awareness/Help Threade

Hi!

This is a threade for discussing lesbian, gay, transgender, and queer subject matter. The intended purpose is to provide a safe space where people can talk about news, issues, or other topics related to LGBTQ in a civil mannere, away from things like comments sections. Friendly talk.

With that in mind, here are a few things that this threade is for:

• sharing or discovering aspects about yourself or others which are related to the subjects of this threade
  
• attempting to find information about the subjects of this threade which may help you or others get assistance with their lives or greater understanding of the times we live in
  
• building your self confidence by participating or just reading about these things so that you can help yourself and/or others deal with the issues covered in this threade
  
• keeping up with, or helping others keep up with news about human rights issues pertaining to these subjects
  

This threade is not for:

• stepping past the line of respect for people who live or have lived in different circumstances from you
  
• complaining about why this threade only covers these particular subjects
  
• starting arguments for the sake of arguing (please remind me if I slip into doing this)
  
• accusing this threade or people in this threade of various things just to capture some artificial moral high ground
  
• other things which would involve being a jerk, although the board is already against this anyway, so why are you even considering it

Below is a list of things which may be useful to you.

If you think something is worth adding here, let me know and I'll check it out.

Subjects of Intereste

(i am going to fill this out with general information)

Status of LGBT rights, globally (Wikipedia)

Current status of marriage equality in the United States:

SpoilerShow

(as of 12/22/14)

Trans feelings getting you down? Know somebody who is feeling that way? Check out the Trans Lifeline.

GLAAD's Transgender Media and Education Program (quick reference: GLAAD Transgender Guidelines)

a less formal transgender primer

wait what happened to the old thread

shenanigans

anyway, right now my concern is the hobby lobby ruling and the things that are happening after it

also, looking for a reliable stonewall reference to link to

Modnote: For any inquiries re: Chwoka's question, please PM a moderator for details.

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Thank you for making this thread, Weirdee. I hope it'll be a useful resource for people.

archbishop desmond tutu condemns homophobia, would "rather go to hell" than support it

I brought this up in IRC, but New Zealand's next census (2018) will hopefully implement genderqueer options.

Exactly how these options will be presented is still open to debate/submission, and it's not going to be perfectly representative if there's young people in a household where it wouldn't be safe to "out" themselves via census, but I think it's a step in the right direction. Thoughts?

maybe a separate form for every person above the age of 10?

There's a separate form distributed for every individual who is expected to be at that household at midnight on the Tuesday the census is conducted. This includes children above and below the age of ten; I don't know off the top of my head if there's any actual rules about filling in the census form in someone else's stead.

florida's up today

oklahoma (now at 26)

same sex marriage ban removed in colorado

us representative attempting to trim religious exemption from ENDA

catholic school in vancouver (canada) changes policy to allow gender expression

same sex marriage ban removed in florida

I don't think I've come right out and said it yet, but I'm a trans woman.

I'm in the closet offline, for the most part. I let my ex-girlfriend (who is still a close friend) know, as well as a friend who I stayed with in Chicago. Today I told an old friend from Boston. They were all very cool and understanding.

My dad has appointed himself the gender police, because apparently a nineteen-year-old can't figure something out about themselves. I don't fit the narrative he knows, so I'm a Fake Trans Woman, possibly a Confused Man. Part of it, I think, is that he "wants me to be happy," which he always expresses in the worst possible way - in this case, he took a Time magazine article and underlined shit about how trans women have it bad, as if I didn't know that and as if he was trying to convince me to be cis because it's Safe, it's a Good Idea. He and my stepmom have still been referring to me as a man, so I dropped a hint earlier that I don't appreciate it.

This led to an argument which culminated in him saying me yelling was "real feminine," because obviously women never scream or get upset, and he suggested I'm doing this because it will make me "feel cool." I only told him this because I thought he'd be mature and understanding about it, and even then, I did it only because it felt like the right time. I've now learned that I can't confide in him, and that I should never trust him. He's proven himself irredeemable and, frankly, erased any of my doubts that he's straight-up emotionally abusive.

It's obviously not fair to disagree with your assessment of your father, because I don't know anything about him nor your relationship with him nor your life. Honestly, most of what we hear about him from you is him being a shithead, but I also take that in the context of that's the sort of thing you're mostly likely to want to vent about; "my father and I had a pleasant conversation about a shared interest" just isn't something people share often. So, when I say this, I'm neither trying to undermine or contradict you, just share a somewhat similar experience I had that may be relevant to your life and relationship.

When I first came out to my own father (at the time I identified as bisexual because I had crippling issues with my own sexuality that stemmed from my upbringing), the first thing he said was that he didn't really believe in bisexuality. I have rarely felt more offended, incensed, and betrayed in my entire life. I decided then and there to essentially sever all meaningful ties with him; he simply didn't get it, didn't care to get it, and never would. His reaction came from much the same place as your father's: he wanted me to be happy and knew that bi- or homosexuality made for a harder life, and hoped that I could just settle for being simple and straight, on top of which he (likely similarly) had subsurface discomfort with the idea of queerness, and the only way he could express that was through denial of my identity. Even now, I still think it's one of the shittiest things he's ever done, and there was a period of a few years there where pretty much everything he did was shitty.

But the thing is, a lot of that just comes from a place of confusion and fear. That's where familial denial like this comes from nine times out of ten. Your father doesn't understand trans issues, trans mentalities, trans identities; he doesn't know how to communicate with you, why you could want this, what it means to feel the way you do; he worries that this means losing you or losing the ability to know you or that it somehow invalidates the person he cares about. It represents, to him, a loss of someone important to him, because he's been fed the cultural narrative that cis people are all fed and feed each other, one of how sad and unfortunate and alien trans people are, as well as one of how gross and unsettling and fundamentally wrong or crazy they are. This is exacerbated by the rising complementary cultural narrative of the Fake Trans Girl, the Trans Trender, the hipsterish little co-opter of antinorm identities as a form of countercultural rebellion and paradoxical subcultural acceptance. From the perspective of someone outside the community, and outside the experiences you have had, and the generational and technological gap that have made understanding and exposure so normal and ubiquitous to you, which would he prefer to be the case? That this is just a phase you're going through that he needs to shake you out of, or that you're consigning yourself to a life that probably ends with AIDS and drug use or being beaten and murdered in a bloody hate crime? You say he doesn't understand, and that's true; the depth of his lack of understanding, and the script he has been fed all his life that fill that lack with the opposite of understanding, mean that for him and from his perspective, it's better and easier to believe that this isn't real. All this, on top of the normal human reticence towards change and the unknown.

The thing is, it's easier to change and educate people than you think. Or than I think, at least. It's an ugly and slow process, and the speedbumps along the way will probably hurt and may even hurt more than makes it worth it to try, but it's doable. I know that the invalidation of something you feel strongly about yourself, something that took years and painful emotional awakenings to come to terms with, is one of the ugliest things that can be done to you, and nothing excuses his response or how he's handled things since your first approach; that said, it's not set in stone that this will always be the case. True irredeemability is rarer than it seems, I think. It may be worth it to you, once you've distanced yourself a bit and given things time to set in, to help him learn the things you have. An adolescence and young adulthood with ubiquitous mass communication does wonders for opening people up to disparate worldviews and atypical lives, but it's not the only way to become tolerant and understanding, or even to reverse intolerance and ignorance. I know I would have regretted it if I had gone through with my initial intention to simply drift off and wait for my father to die; you may as well.

Or maybe not! This is all just me talking and my experience filtered through my perceptions and preconceptions. I hope that one way or the other, you find a more comfortable place in your life.

Also, how do you prefer to be referred to? I mean, presumably feminine pronouns (or not, you tell me), but like, username and name choices? I know in your position I would probably find MrGuy and Guy pretty dissonant.

I'd prefer feminine pronouns but at least for the moment I'm sticking w/ MrGuy and my birth name, the former mainly because I find it kind of amusing in retrospect.

I really appreciate the support, Slo, + I'll take what you've said to heart.

Hi I don't usually post here but thought this might be worth mentioning.

https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/409792.stm

The uk army is allowing soldiers to go through gender reassignment, but unfortunately still not allowing gay men or women. Said trans* soldiers are also not allowed to date while serving, if I read this correctly, because they can't tell if it'd be relevant to the ban on homosexuality.

There was a piece in the paper this morning on a specific soldier. https://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/ne...istan.html

So um, yeah thats my news for today I hope this doesn't upset anyone sorry if it does

thank you for sharing, forge!

A friend has linked me this story:

SpoilerShow

These regulations seem quite accepting, though I haven't done any other research into it. But a nice story if true.

The laws in Denmark regarding changing one's gender identity have changed

https://www.theguardian.com/society/shor...rk-new-law

Lots of things have happened. Also, I got a new job, and it took me a while to adjust. Apologies for the lack of activity.

As it is right now though, the marriage sweep is closing in on the final states. Of course, there is so much more work to do...I do not want to overemphasize this whole marriage thing when there are people who need help reaching the living standards where that would be relevant to them. Progress on that front has been slow, though.

I have updated the links section. There is one particular link of interest. I bet you can't guess which one it is.

Hey help how do I neatly summarise genderfeels along the lines of "I want a more androgynous/masculine-leaning gender presentation than I've currently got, but don't want to do it until I can answer "nah/neither" to every man woman and dog on the street's "which gender" question without necessitating a whole extra explanation"

Well i mean you could just do what you do with romantic orientation (aka biromantic for most folks, and panromatic) for those who are clued in except with she/they/whatever pronouns? Then again, if a rando asks you about what gender you are, responding with a shrug or saying 'whichever you want to refer to me by' doesn't really need any further explanation, so.

There's always calling yourself a tomboy if you really want something that the over 50's will get

It's not so much a dearth of labels as, like,

feeling most comfortable in ambiguous/neutral gender presentation, even when I'm not in the mood to have people asking me whether I'm a guy or a girl? It's less "I'm not sure how to have this discussion" and "I don't want this to still be a discussion topic, c'mon people, plz hurry up and get your collective shit together."

My mood on this varies! Sometimes I totes feel up for discussing and dismantling gender with people who have never really considered it, other times I'm.... not. Other than through feminine-enough clothing choices, I don't get a choice in whether people ask questions (that I may or may not be willing to field) or not.

You could do the vaguely sarcastic route and get a tshirt/badge printed :v

But yeah no i don't think there's much of a way to get around that aside from presenting more female on days when you really cbf. Maybe look into some small things that indicate femininity so you don't have to do the whole dressing up looking pretty rigmarole? Like wearing some jewellery or carrying something that looks more like a purse or w/e?

Sorry i'm not much help :x

I have sort of a similar but opposite problem to Schazer's, in that "gender-neutral" clothing is almost always just considered Male By Default, and anything more feminine than that would probably just get me labeled as a crossdresser. (ugggh)

(As a side note, does anyone have any hot tips on how to make a full beard look more androgynous? Because I really enjoy not shaving every day and I would hate to have to give that up.)

Also, Schazer have you tried telling some of these people to mind their own damn business? Like, who raised these people that they think it's acceptable to go up to random strangers on the street and start quizzing them on their gender? Get lost creeps.