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View Full Version : Please help the Federation of Families



Kris
11-24-2008, 09:42 PM
Hello all,

First I want to apoligize for my lack of partisipation of late. I have been employed by Oregon Family Support Network and it's a job that pays for 10 hours a week and I seem to be doing more like 50 hours a week - it leaves little time for anything that is unwinding, except going to sleep. I wrote before I went to see if I could find someone in the Atlanta area - (of course I just missed SCC but that is another story)
Federation conference is about children / family mental health and how systems need to respond to it. Of course, since I am such a supporter of the T spectrum, I was excited to see that for the first time they had a supporter who taught classes from the LBGT youth and families perspective. So of course I signed up for the class with all the excitment of the world - hoping that they had a lot of research done and several T youth for everyone from all over the country to learn from.
Well I went and I can't express in words how sad and disappointed I was. There was no one from the T community there. The people that were there did studies on gay youth, and found them outside of bars. WTF?!?! How many youth do you find outside of bars? Maybe prostitutes! And of course the reason also I was upset was because the LGB people totally confused the homosexual side of the gender spectum with the transexual spectrum. WTF?!?! Who told them that if you are Trans you are most certainly gay? It was so incredibly frustrating! They talked about how a Trans person went to Blue Cross / Blue Shield to get the surgery that was needed and how they clipped magazine articles out of the newspaper about being homosexual.
So I am asking everyone from this site if there is anyone who has ideas to write to me and their story to share so that I can go to the Federation and send them away so maybe we can get someone who is a T person in Washington DC to come and present their story... or even ask if we can get them sent and all expenses paid for. The first part of this is asking, heartfelt if some people here can help me, by sending me stories, and giving me permission to use them for the Federation to see how important that it is that the gender spectrum is represented in an accurate way so all the transkids that are out there, who can't join this website, or others because of their age need - desperately need representation so that they are included, and we have a much lower risk of suicide - attempted suicide.
I do not want to see studies represent all of the population of the Queer kind when one part of the LGB "T" population is left out or the study is warped and continues to leave someone out and get the study from one part of the population. I can't imagine standing in front of a group and presenting that I did a study about mothers and only went to the public welfare department to represent all mothers across the world. There are plenty of more places to get feedback and stories from than a BAR! Gosh even having to ask for this gets me all riled up again because I can't believe that there were people there who know nothing about the gender spectrum and went away feeling so "informed and understanding so much better."
URGH!
Thanks for reading.
Kris
PS. Please send me a private message on this site so that we can connect on a more personal note if you are willing to help.