I’ve Been At The True Colors Conference For The Last Two Days

I have been up at the True Colors conference in Storrs at the University of Connecticut campus. True Colors is an organization that works with LGBT youth and for the last 17 years they held a conference for the kids, professionals and the general public. This year I went to a workshop on Friday about transgender youth, called “From Toddlers to Teens: Creating Developmentally Appropriate Support for Gender Variant/Transgender Youth”. The description for the workshop was…

This day long workshop will explore child-centered issues and interventions across the developmental life cycle of children. Beginning with gender different toddlers and children in the morning and progressing through adolescence in the afternoon, the presenters will explore the differing needs of the youth, their parents and caregivers as they grow and develop. The workshop will include both didactic presentation, discussion, case studies and will offer significant opportunities for questions and answers from the participants. Parents of gender variant youth will participate throughout the presentation.

The workshop was given by Moonhawk River Stone, he is a therapist in the Albany area that specializes in trans-youth. He is also on the Boards of Directors of Transgender Youth and Family Allies and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. It was an excellent workshop and I learned a lot, much of which will help me in my Independent Studies class.

Most of Saturday I spent at the Connecticut Outreach Society’s table at the conference. It was very rainy and windy on Saturday, so I didn’t really want to walk the other building to go to the other workshops. Then at 2:45 I did my presentation called, “Transgender Activist History: From World War II to the Presents” and the description of my workshop was…

The workshop will cover the people and events that shaped the transgender community from the end of World War II until the present. I will talk about notable persons such as Christine Jorgensen, Virginia Prince and Sylvia Rivera. I will look at events that have shaped the trans-community such as the Dewey's Lunch Counter Uprising (1965), the Compton Lunch Counter Uprising (1966), the Stonewall Uprising (1969) and the HRC protest (2005). In addition, we will discuss the current state of gender inclusive legislation.

I was worried that the attendance would be low because it was the last workshop slot of the day and that many people would have left the conference early because of the stormy weather. I was promised that there would be a computer with internet access there for me and I checked with the staff that morning to make sure that there was a computer, well there wasn’t. There were about six or seven attendees there went I got to the room. The staff tried to set up the computer for me and had no luck in getting it to work, however, an attendee had a laptop computer that she loaned me and saved the day. By that time the room had filled up with about 40 attendees. I started my presentations about 15 minutes late so I was forced to rush through my power point presentation, skipping a number of slides.

Looking at the workshop evaluations afterward, almost all of them circled “Excellent” or “Very Good” and one wrote in “Superb!!” Someone one else wrote, “this was the best workshop that I attended during the conference” and another wrote, “I stayed just for this workshop and I’m glad that I did.”