Queer and queer activism

The trans law includes an entire section on measures in the field of education that requires education administrations and universities to train teachers in sexual and gender diversity, but it does not appear that this specialisation exists to date.

Adding an additional option to the gender markers on documents would mean accepting a hierarchy that is worth questioning. The author of this text, whose case has opened a crack in the Foreigners' Registry, reflects on the possibilities of a future without gender checkboxes. 

The desperate ones don't disappear
We're all still hanging around
And what do your rainbows do?
What do your bright flags do?
What do your rainbows do here on the ground?

Ezra Furman, Come Close, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEegYQsLwrU

Yes, we, the desperate ones, are not going to disappear, as the trans singer Ezra Furman sings in Come Close. And, your rainbows, your Pride carnivals (it no longer makes sense to call it a "march" or a "demonstration". It's a carnival), don't help us at all. I don't need your shiny rainbow flags. I can do without your pride.

Or: why names are important

“Feeling is everything, name is but sound and smoke that damp celestial ardor.” So says Faust in Goethe's Faust. But is it really so, is our name really nothing but sound and smoke that damp celestial ardor? If so, why is it that the first thing they take away from you in a prison, in a concentration camp, in a detention centre like Guantanamo, is your name, and turn you into a number? In this way, they take away your personality, your humanity. For me it is obvious: our name is much more than sound and smoke, the name represents our individuality, it makes us human.

ALEX

Alex, my five- or six-year-old gender-bender. They would have liked to have been able to play with their gender, but they were too scared.

Most of all, they would have liked not to have to go to their first day of school as a boy. Maybe as a girl, as a gender-bender, as depicted in this picture.

The Genderbread Person has been around for quite a while as a nice tool to explain gender, sex, and sexual orientation. The website https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/ has as latest version v4.0, which is from 2017, and which I feel falls short on several aspects. This is why I created version 5.0 in December 2022, and now I created this slightly improved version – version 6.0. I am aware that it will fall short on several aspects, but I feel I can explain my own gender and attraction much better using this version than version 4.0.

Too often, gender equality is interpreted only as equality between (cis) men and (cis) women. Binary trans people, let alone non-binary, gender fluid, or agender people, are not imagined. The 'T' in LGBTIQA+ (both 'Q' - queer - and 'A' - asexual and/or aromantic - are usually omitted) is relegated to sexual diversity education. Only, the 'T' - trans - has much to do with gender identity and little to do with sexuality.

17 September 2000: "It's funny what you can do with a PC. It's so easy to change sex (gender), and I don't even look bad as a woman (...) A gender change is an interesting thing, and maybe I should try it once in reality (I have this desire to dress in women's clothes anyway, and maybe at least once I should give in to that)".