Gender Identity and Transgender Issues Podcast

My friend Vonney brought this podcast to my attention, as he was featured on it and we both care a lot about gender issues:

The Gender Spot – 26th April

I think it’s a really great introduction for people who perhaps don’t know much about gender nor the issues around it. It offers a lot of statistics and places to visit online for further reading. I think it is brilliant overall but in particular I really liked the discussions around the lack of gender information in education. It’s something I feel especially passionate about and I class it as one of my goals to help somehow in regards to this. I would love it if schools allowed external visitors to talk about subjects like this, as well as mental health and sexuality etc, as this would also educate teachers!

The YouTube videos that Vonney brought up interested me, as it may be something I would like to join in on and make videos about as well, as I myself identify as genderqueer/non-binary. My gender identity confuses me as I feel that I can fluctuate between male, female, and agender. But as there is no label for this, I currently feel that my expression fluctuates a lot, some days being very feminine, sometimes masculine and sometimes neither. But that my identity is perhaps agender – neither male nor female, nor necessarily a mix. Currently I am happy with either female pronouns or neutral pronouns (them,they) and my title is Mx. I prefer to be known and referred to as Char because it is a lot more neutral than my birth-name.

I created an interactive piece regarding non-binary individuals for my Final Major Project of my Extended Diploma; it did confuse my peers at first as they thought that I was trying to say that trans men and women were different to cis men and women. They didn’t quite understand the non-binary aspect of gender, and I think it took me explaining it to them, as a genderqueer individual, for them to understand better. On the contrary, I included trans men and trans women as men and women, because that is of course what they are. The only difference being that they have to suffer a lot more as they are not as privileged as cis men and cis women.

My final piece – the triangle represents genderqueer individuals and the cube and sphere represent male and female individuals. I also designed a leaflet alongside them to explain gender.