I didn’t actually see much of the Sunday events. I needed to grab an interview with my friend Kathy Caton who has been shortlisted for the National Diversity Awards (in the LGBT role model category) this year. Kathy was busy at Radio Reverb producing a show, so I headed on up to their studio and did radio stuff for a while before heading home. Some of that may end up on Shout Out eventually, and of course I’ll put all of the audio up on my gender podcast at some point. In the meantime, I have found a couple of vlogs on YouTube that will give you a taste of the atmosphere.
The second one has a brief glimpse of me in the background, but it is very brief so it should be OK for you to watch it without risking going blind.
Those videos were very interesting. From the first one, I got a good impression of what it mean to the trans people who attended, and it seemed fantastic. The second, however, was a perfect illustration of the point you made recently about growing events being swamped by cis people. From that video it seemed like a totally different event – just a day of entertainment and cake stalls. The co-option really disturbed me, especially as from what you experienced it isn’t even what I would consider an absolute minimum for a trans event – a safe space for trans people. Part of pride is being visible, of course, so the answer isn’t to hold a closed-off event, but ugh.
It’s very difficult. The first point to make is that if you have the event in a public space then it cannot be safe. What you didn’t see in either of those films, or in my reports, was the safe space that the convention organizers established in a nearby (and very supportive) church where anyone who was upset could go for help and comfort.
As to cis people, the question has to be, “how do you tell?”. Some of the young trans women I met there were just stunningly beautiful, and most of the guys look fairly rugged after a few years on testosterone. In addition there are now lots of non-binary people turning up. Some of them aren’t that unconventional in their gender performance, especially considering the range of what is socially acceptable for women.