Transcending Boundaries Conference

Come visit us at NoHo Pride tomorrow!  NoHo Pride this year has moved to the 3 County Fairgrounds.

The march starts at noon, and we’ll be at the event all day.

http://www.site.nohopride.org/ for more information about NoHo Pride.

Among other things, today is the Day of Silence - http://www.dayofsilence.org/

Taken from their website:

“The Day of Silence is a student-led national event that brings attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment in schools. Students from middle school to college take a vow of silence in an effort to encourage schools and classmates to address the problem of anti-LGBT behavior by illustrating the silencing effect of bullying and harassment on LGBT students and those perceived to be LGBT.”

Are you participating?

Come join many previous Transcending Boundaries Conference presenters, as well as staff at the Five College Queer Gender & Sexuality Conference this weekend!  It’s one of our favorite events, and we hope to see you there!

Read more at http://www.transcendingboundaries.org/blog/164-3rd-annual-five-college-queer-gender-sexuality-conference.html.

nikitadupuis:

“While we often see figures of 1 in 2000 intersex births, this considers only infants with ambiguous genitalia in hospitals that track statistics on the gender assignment team.  Including all intersex conditions results in a ratio of more like 1.7% of all human beings having some sort of intersex condition.”

http://www.transfaithonline.org/intersections/intersex/

materialworld:

Three African transgender and intersex rights advocacy organizations have formed an alliance to enhance the trans and intersex movement on the continent. The organizations include South African based Gender DynamiX (GDX), Uganda’s Support Initiative for People with atypical Sexual Development (SIPD) and Transgender and Intersex Africa (TIA).

Ugandan Intersex activist, Julius Kaggwa A press statement issued in Kampala today (February 2) by Julius Kaggwa, the SIPD director, said the partnership “Will concentrate its efforts mainly on advocacy in Sub-Saharan Africa.” …

Kaggwa added, “The main focus of this new entity is to support a growing transgender and intersex movement and to engage regionally in advocacy for the human rights of transgender and intersex people. While forming a platform for all regional work of the three organisations, Transitioning Africa is not a new NGO, but will remain a formal partnership of the three organisations and thus retain autonomy locally and regionally and the capacity for its activities will be provided by the three organisations in the implementation of its activities, such as capacity building workshops, advocacy support to other organisations, exchange programmes and mentorships.”

The vision of Transitioning Africa is to see a strong transgender and intersex movement in sub-Saharan Africa, based on human rights principles, while the mission is to strive for gender recognition within social movements in Africa.

via Behind the Mask | The Voice of Africa’s LGBTI Community – TRANSGENDER AND INTERSEX GROUPS FORM PAN-AFRICAN ALLIANCE

materialworld:

The Unspeakable Sex: Memoir of a Well-Hung Woman by Hida Viloria

“When I was about nine years old my mother said to me, ‘When you were born they didn’t know if you were a boy or a girl.”

The Unspeakable Sex: Memoir of a Well-Hung Woman is a memoir of sexual coming-of-age by Hida Viloria, who was born with ambiguous genitalia but, through a combination of luck, circumstance and parental concern, escaped infant surgery and subsequent hormone treatment and was allowed to grow up in the body she was born in. It spans the author’s life from ages twenty-six through thirty-three.

At twenty-six, Viloria discovers she is “intersex” from an article in a San Francisco newspaper, and is forced to face the question, Am I a boy or a girl? She soon decides to stop doing things she’s been doing all her life that women are supposed to do, like wearing makeup and women’s clothes. To her surprise, instead of being perceived as a lesbian, she is suddenly perceived to be male.

When she finally meets other intersex people, one year later, she is shocked and saddened to learn that most people like her have been brutally scarred, physically and psychologically, by infant surgeries and hormone treatments meant to “correct’” their bodies. She realizes that she must tell doctors, and the world, that she is happy she was allowed to keep her unique body parts.

via Hida Viloria

littlelostpoly2:

This is us!  :D

Polyamory (via a-blog-called-everything)

(via a-blog-called-everything)

gqid:

Identity symbols by Damien Marie AtHope

I received a message from Damien Marie AtHope recently about their design of these identity symbols. I am always interested to see development of symbology pertaining to gender and sex identity. I had remarked that the genderqueer symbol here shows the male and female symbols together (albeit in a different way than variations of a merger, like the transgender symbol), when androgyny is but one meaning of genderqueer and the term can refer to neutral or outside of man/male and woman/female too - AtHope then designed some more identity symbols with further specificity. There are further variations available as well that I will post in the future.

As always, I am interested to see everyone’s ideas for symbols and colors to represent identity - I think that finding a powerful representation of a group or oneself can be a very powerful thing, so please feel free to submit any designs or ideas!