Trans enough | Gender 101 | Politics and advocacy

Genderqueer Australia is a fully inclusive organisation. This means that people of all sexualities and gender expressions are welcome to join in with the organisation, online and in our regular and irregular events.

Genderqueer Australia volunteers will always conduct themselves as inclusively as possible. Our overriding ethical guideline is this:

Everyone is worthy of respect

What does this mean for me?

Those that attend our events and website are asked to conduct yourselves respectfully and inclusively.

We ask you make no assumptions about gender presentation, sexuality or appearance.

We request you reserve political discussion or advocacy for meetings with other organisations.

Anything that is said in a GQA chatroom or event should be kept between you and whomever you have spoken to.

Generalisations

Try not to make generalisations and remember that your experience with people is subjective to you.

For example: “All Men are arseholes” is a generalisation. It is lumping every person in the world who identifies as male into the same category. The XKCD cartoon to the right is an example of a generalisation that “girls suck at math”. The simple answer is that not every girl sucks at math and it is statistically improbable that every girl on the planet (living or dead) sucks at math.

The physical help we give

Genderqueer Australia works as an interested group of people putting time  and energy into the things we enjoy doing.

We are neither heirarchical (people at the top, people at the bottom), nor collective (everyone discusses what’s to do).

This means that we don’t have a specific membership. People come to us with project ideas and we do our best – time permitting – to help them.

The resources we create

This website is a resource of knowledge and experience. We are constantly building a resource of templates for workshops and project work. This is the GQA toolbox.

We share the benefit of our knowledge and experience with the community and loan others our tools and delighted when they are returned in better shape from the experience (see Creative Commons for more information on this!)

Genderqueer Australia is a community resource of shared experience and time.

We are volunteers putting our free time into this projects. We’re not paid so it’s important to enjoy what we’re doing.

This is about having a sense of satisfaction at the end of the day.

If we’re not having fun and enjoying what we do, it’s time to rethink!

Genderqueer Australia is strictly a support organisation and does not give legal advice nor participate in political engagement or advocacy of any kind.

So where do I go?

Here are the organisations we think can best handle legal advice, political advocacy or political engagement for you if that’s what you’re after!

Transgender Victoria

Zoe Belle Gender Centre

Ygender

Sydney Gender Centre

Queensland Association for Healthy Communities

Sex and Gender Education Australia (SAGE)

Know of any other organisations?

Click the blue comment button below and add the details, and we’ll add them to the list!

Having fun | Bring your own project | Agile development methodology

What do you mean by “sustainability”?

To us, sustainability means working so we have fun and achieve things we believe in. But it’s more than that too!

Simple wins: The number one priority!

The number one priority for Genderqueer Australia is to Keep It Simple!

Every complex project can be made simpler through just a little more work.

Ask questions

With all projects, we ask the following questions:

• Who is it for?
• What is it?
• When is it going to be done?
• Where is it going to be done?
• Why is it being done?
• How are we going to do it?

If we can answer these and agree, then we’ll progress.

Keep it short

We believe the best way to keep people happy and keep things on-track is to make sure each part of a project can be broken-down so it can be achieved in 5 weeks or less.

By doing this we achieve the following:

• We keep peeps interested – the shorter time-span means everyone can have a sense of achievement
• We can change directions if necessary

This philosophy is owed, in part, to the Agile development methodology used in software development.

Find out more about Agile on Wikipedia.