4th Annual TransOhio Transgender & Ally Conference

4th Annual TransOhio Transgender & Ally Conference will be held the weekend of

August 5-7, 2011 in Columbus, Ohio!

Call for Presenters

Interested in submitting a proposal for a workshop, presentation, discussion or performance? For information, visit the Submission Page.

This year we are expanding our Conference this year to include:

Friday, August 5th: Provider’s Day

Explicitly for medical, legal, and social work professionals

Continuing Education Units (CEU)

More information coming soon.

Continuing Legal Education (CLE)

More information coming soon.

Interested in submitting a proposal for a class, seminar or workshop? For information, visit Submission Page.

Submit your proposal online! Submissions are due Friday March 18, 2011

Saturday, August 6: General Conference

Covering a broad range of interests throughout the community

Sunday, August 7: General Conference

Continuation of programs with a diversity of topics

Volunteers

As with any event, it takes people-power to make events such as the Conference happen. Volunteers will be

needed for Friday at the Provider’s Day and throughout the General Conference:

* Registration/Check-In

* Setup/Break-down

* Session proctors

* Information table

* Meet & Greet

* Saturday evening socials

* And more!

Interested in volunteering? Contact our Volunteer Coordinator, Sarah (sarah@transohio.org).

Sponsorship Opportunities

Do you work for a company or are you involved in an organization that you think might like to be a sponsor of this event? If so, visit our Sponsorship Opportunities page!

For more conference info, visit http://www.transohio.org/

Film Showing to Benefit TransOhio

They say that when someone comes out of the closet, they can't stop talking about it. Vancouver filmmaker Gwen Haworth not only talked she made a movie. Using archival family footage, interviews, phone messages, and hand-drawn animation, Haworth's documentary SHE'S A BOY I KNEW begins in 2000 with Steven Haworth's decision to come out to his family about his life-long female gender identity. The resulting auto-ethnography is not only an exploration into the filmmaker's process of transition from biological male to female, from Steven to Gwen, but also an emotionally charged account of the individual experiences, struggles, and stakes that her two sisters, mother, father, best friend and wife brought to Gwen's transition.

Under Haworth's sensitive eye, each stepping stone in the process of transitioning becomes an opportunity to explore her community's and our own underlying assumptions about gender and sexuality. When Steven starts to wear his wife Malgosia's clothing, she struggles with whether Steve "wants to be with me or to be me;" when Steven changes her name to Gwen, her father comments, that's "when I realized I lost my son;" Haworth's gender reassignment surgery, or vaginoplasty, forces her sister Kim to grapple with her own experiences in the medical establishment and raises questions about the implications of the medicalization of gender.

In these tender and difficult moments, SHE'S A BOY I KNEW forces us to question our own assumptions about the role that names, clothing, and anatomy play in our constructions of gender identity. As her transition progresses, Gwen is forced to reckon with the end of her marriage and the loss of her status as son and brother. But in doing so, she also discovers that while the nature of personal relationships may change, the love and support present within those relationships can remain just as powerful and sometimes even more so.

At turns painful, funny, and awkward, SHE'S A BOY I KNEW explores the frustrations, fears, questions, and hopes experienced by Gwen and her family as they struggle to understand and embrace her newly revealed identity.

Monday, February 21 · 8:00pm - 10:00pm

Gateway Film Center

1550 North High Street

Columbus, Ohio

$6—Benefits TransOhio

Peer Support for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender (LGBT) Individuals

by Ronald E. Hellman, M.D., FAPA, Director,

LGBT Affirmative Program of South Beach Psychiatric Center

The LGBT Affirmative Program (LGBTAP) of South Beach Psychiatric Center was initiated in 1996 as one of several multicultural services provided by this large, public sector community mental health center in New York City. The program is based at the Heights–Hill Mental Health Service in downtown Brooklyn, one of seven outpatient clinics at South Beach, which serves a multi-ethnic, low socioeconomic population with serious, chronic mental illnesses.

Several years into the program, we observed that our sexual minority population, much like our general psychiatric population with significant disabilities, had great difficulty reintegrating within the larger LGBT community and the general community at large, despite the provision of LGBT–affirmative therapies. We came to believe that it was incumbent upon us to facilitate the creation of a socio-cultural component within a recovery model, in addition to the psychosocial and medical services already offered.

This resulted in the creation of an affiliated membership program, the Rainbow Heights Club (RHC). As members, individuals did not have to be enrolled at the clinic, and this allowed LGBT patients from all over the New York metropolitan area to attend. The larger numbers helped to approximate the diversity found within the city’s LGBT community. And, with the creation of an LGBT consumer advisory group, members came up with a name for the club and helped steer program development.

LGBT individuals with major mental illnesses can be reluctant to engage in psychiatric treatment and adhere to treatment regimens over time, because they are less likely to identify with mainstream settings. They are a minority in these settings, and are also subject to stigma in the LGBT community because of their mental illness and in psychiatric settings because of their sexual minority status. And, unlike other ethnic and racial minorities, their families typically do not share their sexual identity. Thus they can be particularly prone to a lack of affirmation and supports.

LGBT patients have to adapt to largely heterosexual, cisgendered (those comfortable in their gender of birth) mental health settings in virtually all areas of service delivery. Well-intentioned, “integrated” settings fall short when they do not provide safe, culturally relevant opportunities for the alienated LGBT patient. Culturally appropriate programming, fostered at all organizational levels, has the power to transform these patients into LGBT persons in recovery.

A crucial component of recovery for the LGBT consumer is peer support. LGBT peer support allows for a process of authentic identification with others like oneself. It promotes forms of socialization, role modeling, and individuation not otherwise available in the generic setting. Mainstream cultural settings often inadvertently rob the LGBT patient of their experience as a sexual minority person with a different, yet valid, worldview. LGBTAP and RHC were organized to facilitate peer support by bringing a “proto-community” of individuals together that had never previously connected.

Separation from the dominant heterosexual, cisgendered world and connection with sexual minority peers is a common step in the healthy psychological development of sexual minority individuals. Major mental illness can tear people away from that process, and mainstream psychiatric settings typically provide no substitute. LGBTAP and RHC created the conditions and opportunities for these individuals to connect with each other, thereby creating a unique cultural community in which pride, place, self-esteem, support, and hope could be nurtured, as the weight of mental illness became merely a shared part of that larger process.

As a unique, regional program, RHC has served almost 500 members. Collaborating with staff and peer specialists, members have made their needs and interests known, the result being an ever-evolving program of groups, support, skills training, and advocacy. An outcome study of this recovery model found that participants attributed significant improvement in adherence with treatment regimens, reduction in psychiatric symptoms, enhanced self-esteem, improved stress tolerance and hopefulness to the program, despite an average of 16 years of previous psychiatric treatment.¹ To appreciate the depth of this program, please visit http://www.rainbowheights.org.

¹ Hellman, R.E.; Huygen, C.; Klein, E.; Chew, M.; & Uttaro, T. (2010.) A study of members of a support and advocacy program for LGBT persons with major mental illness. Best Practices in Mental Health: An International Journal, 6(2), 13–26.

From "Recovery to Practice (RTP) Weekly Highlights" Volume 2, Issue 4, Feb. 4, 2011. To access the RTP Weekly Highlights and other RTP materials, please visit http://www.dsgonline.com/rtp/resources.html.

Bush's Daughter, in a Break, Endorses Gay Marriage

U.S.   | February 01, 2011 By MICHAEL BARBARO
As president, George W. Bush backed a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. Now one of his daughters, Barbara, has come out in favor of  it at: emailthis@m3.1ga2nytimes.com

Will she then repudiate her affirmation like Cindy McCain?

Goodbye, Mom and Dad. Hello, Parent One and Parent Two.

By Mary Beth Sheridan and Ed O'Keefe Washington Post Staff Writers

Parent One, Parent Two to replace references to mother, father on passport forms

Friday, January 7, 2011; 11:47 PM

The State Department has decided to make U.S. passport application forms "gender neutral" by removing references to mother and father, officials said, in favor of language that describes one's parentage somewhat less tenderly.

The change is "in recognition of different types of families," according to a statement issued just before Christmas that drew widespread attention Friday after a Fox News report.

The announcement of the change was buried at the end of a Dec. 22 news release, titled "Consular Report of Birth Abroad Certificate Improvements," that highlighted unrelated security changes.

The new policy is a win for gay rights groups, a vocal and financially generous Democratic voting bloc that has pushed for the change since Barack Obama began his presidential transition in late 2008. The decision follows last month's vote to end the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which gay leaders consider one of their biggest victories in years.

Fred Sainz, vice president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights advocacy group, called the news "a positive step forward for all American families. It was time that the federal government acknowledged the reality that hundreds of thousands of kids in this country are being raised by same-sex parents."

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, blasted it as reflecting the "topsy-turvy world of left-wing political correctness." "This is clearly designed," he said in a statement, "to advance the causes of same-sex 'marriage' and homosexual parenting without statutory authority, and violates the spirit if not the letter of the Defense of Marriage Act," the federal law that defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

He called on Congress to take action.

It was not immediately clear whether a similar change would be made to all federal documents. But after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced in 2009 that partners of gay American diplomats would be eligible for benefits accorded to spouses, the rest of the U.S. government followed suit.

In 2000, Clinton was the first wife of a president to march in a gay-pride parade, and as secretary of state she has advocated on behalf of gay rights. In a speech in June she said the United States "was elevating our rights dialogues with other governments and conducting public diplomacy to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons."

Rosemary Macray of the State Department Bureau of Consular Affairs shrugged off complaints of political correctness and described the switch as an unremarkable bureaucratic tweak. "Really, there have been so many changes in the last 10 or 15 years with reproductive technology and the like, and so this is

why it is important for us to accurately reflect families in these applications," she said.

The DS-11 form is required of first-time passport applicants and children younger than 16. The change will go into effect Feb. 1 and will be part of an already-scheduled revision of passport forms, Macray said.

"It's not going to really involve any expense to taxpayers," she said.

sheridanm@washpost.com ed.okeefe@washingtonpost.com

"She's A Boy I Knew" film showing to Benefit TransOhio

They say that when someone comes out of the closet, they

can't stop talking about it. Vancouver filmmaker Gwen Haworth

not only talked she made a movie. Using archival family

footage, interviews, phone messages, and hand-drawn animation,

Haworth's documentary SHE'S A BOY I KNEW

begins in 2000 with Steven Haworth's decision to come out to

his family about his life-long female gender identity. The resulting

auto-ethnography is not only an exploration into the

filmmaker's process of transition from biological male to female,

from Steven to Gwen, but also an emotionally charged

account of the individual experiences, struggles, and stakes

that her two sisters, mother, father, best friend and wife

brought to Gwen's transition.

Under Haworth's sensitive eye, each stepping stone in the

process of transitioning becomes an opportunity to explore

her community's and our own underlying assumptions about

gender and sexuality. When Steven starts to wear his wife

Malgosia's clothing, she struggles with whether Steve "wants

to be with me or to be me;" when Steven changes her name

to Gwen, her father comments, that's "when I realized I lost

my son;" Haworth's gender reassignment surgery, or vaginoplasty,

forces her sister Kim to grapple with her own experiences

in the medical establishment and raises questions about

the implications of the medicalization of gender.

In these tender and difficult moments, SHE'S A BOY I KNEW forces us to question our own assumptions about

the role that names, clothing, and anatomy play in our constructions of gender identity. As her transition progresses,

Gwen is forced to reckon with the end of her marriage and the loss of her status as son and brother. But

in doing so, she also discovers that while the nature of personal relationships may change, the love and support

present within those relationships can remain just as powerful and sometimes even more so.

At turns painful, funny, and awkward, SHE'S A BOY I KNEW explores the frustrations, fears, questions, and

hopes experienced by Gwen and her family as they struggle to understand and embrace her newly revealed identity.

Monday, February 21 · 8:00pm - 10:00pm

Gateway Film Center

1550 North High Street

Columbus, Ohio

$6—Benefits TransOhio

Transsexual Model Lea T First Runway Show at Sao Paulo

January 30, 2011 04:50 PM EST

Transsexual model Lea T. took her first turn on the runway. Which designer did she walk for? Somewhat surprisingly it wasn’t for Givenchy.

Lea T.’s first turn on the catwalk was for Alexandre Herchcovitch. She walked in the Fall/Winter 2011/2012 show in a long, black dress with ornately adorned sleeves during the Sao Paulo Fashion Week in Brazil.

The native Brazilian had all eyes on her as she debuted on the runway. There is no doubt that the transsexual model is a brand new star of the runway. She walked with some of the biggest names in fashion, and she shined.

It is great that the transsexual model Lea T. is having such success at something she is obviously so passionate about. This is surely the first of many runway shows for her. She is likely to have designers knocking down her door to get her to model their latest creations.

What do you think of the pictures of her that are coming out of Sao Paulo? She looks simply amazing!