PFLAG National Launches a Campaign with Calpernia Addams to Highlight Organization's Commitment to the Transgender Community

Timeline...

In September 1998 PFLAG became the first national GLB organization to include the transgender community when it added "gender identity" to PFLAG’s mission statement.

In 1999 Private Barry Winchell was murdered in a hate crime when two fellow soldiers decided that dating Calpernia Addams made him gay, and a candidate for execution in his sleep. Their story has been told in the 2003 film Soldier's Girl.

In 2002 the PFLAG board of directors adopted a policy to only support legislation that explicitly includes transgender people, and TNET became the first official 'special affiliate' with the same privileges and responsibilities as all PFLAG chapters.

In 2007 PFLAG became a founding member of
United ENDA to stand for fully inclusive employment non-discrimination laws.

And now in 2008...

"I am grateful to PFLAG for their deep commitment to the transgender community and excited about the opportunity to educate our community about PFLAG's important work on behalf of transgender Americans," Addams said. "PFLAG was the first national LGBT organization to include transgender people in its mission statement, and has adopted a landmark policy to only support legislation that includes the transgender community. They are a champion for equality and an irreplaceable ally for transgender people. Their love story with our community is long and significant, and I am proud to help them tell it through this remarkable campaign."

Addams announced the partnership today at www.calpernia.com. A PFLAG website, titled Transform the Movement, will also be launched later this summer, in conjunction with the campaign, at www.pflag.orgwww.pflag.org. The site, like the campaign, will highlight PFLAG's work in the community and showcase the stories of transgender people who have worked with PFLAG on equality issues.

Read the May 19th press release at PFLAG Launches New Ad Campaign with Calpernia Addams, Highlighting Organization’s Commitment to the Transgender Community ‘This is Our Love Story’ Campaign Will Debut This Summer.

Download the ad featuring Calpernia Addams and PFLAG.(pdf format)

Listen to an interview with Calpernia by Christine Burns: Half an Hour with Calpernia Addams.

Caution to the Wind

PFLAG’s mission is a three legged stool of support, education, and advocacy. In many ways they are hard to separate. Right now I want to focus on advocacy. Our next program speaker is Josh Friedes, Advocacy Director for Equal Rights Washington, who will talk to us about upcoming legislation in Washington that is related to the GLBTQ community we are a part of.

For more information about how this works and what we are allowed to do and not, you can read these documents (all in PDF format) from Alliance for Justice:
Permissible Election Activities Checklist
for more information as to how this relates to candidates, and
When Does Your Activity Become Lobbying?
and Public Charities Can Lobby: Guidelines for 501(c)(3) Public Charities
as to how it relates to lobbying on issues.

If you are not sure about how this works, ask us – the PFLAG-Olympia board. If we don’t know, we will help you find out, which will also educate us.

And remember that when you are not speaking for or acting as PFLAG, those restrictions do not apply.

So what about caution?

Self care is so important. Burnout is palpable and it is to be avoided. I experienced it once – before moving to Olympia and long before Bill’s death. But what I went through was complex, and it is defined both with the word burnout and with a word I didn’t know at the time: compassion fatigue. What’s the difference? Burnout is from working too hard and with too little - sleep, money, etc.. Compassion fatigue is from caring too much. It has been said it is the cost of empathy, but that casts empathy in a bad light which it does not deserve. Rather I believe it is a possible effect of losing too much of yourself to a cause – to the point where you don’t know when to say no, and you misplace other parts of what makes you whole. In doing so, while you probably do this believing it is necessary and a good thing, you lose sight of the fact that it means you bring less to the cause you are working for.

Why did I call this “Caution to the Wind?” While the wind can be frightening, it is a powerful and renewable source of energy, as are we. We need to take care of ourselves – AND each other, and sometimes we may need to pick up each other’s pieces. We need to know it is okay to say no sometimes so that we are able to also say yes, and so we can be in this for the long haul because while the changes we strive for are happening, it is not going to be a short sprint to reaching our goals.

It can be scary to take a stand and be vocal and visible on the issues PFLAG works on. Absolutely. And I am quite aware that ‘even’ for allies there can be safety concerns.

However, doing nothing is what really scares me.

When talking to people about this work, they say to do self-care you should “pick your battles” but I prefer to use words that don’t have a war connotation. So pick your strivings. Yes, do something!

Remember that none of us are acting alone. We have an amazing community to strive with, and we can lead and carry each other along the many paths to our goals.

And while we are doing that we should take the time to celebrate each other and our accomplishments, no matter how small they might seem, because they all add to the better world which we are still imagining.

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and:
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Follow-up on the April meeting

At the last regular PFLAG meeting we discussed ways to make PFLAG more exciting. With the exception of a few special programs that attract a lot of attention, participation in general meetings is down. Paid membership is also way, way down, and we’re having a much harder time recruiting board members and volunteers to do things like tabling events, providing snacks for the meetings, and stuffing and mailing the newsletter.

Everyone, it seems, thinks of PFLAG-Olympia as a vital organization, but without paid memberships (or generous donations) and not enough personal participation, we won’t remain a vital organization.

Among the things that came up with that meeting are that we need to dispel the myth that PFLAG is just for parents – or, as some put it, tissue paper parents who cry about having gay children. For the past two years our promotional materials at Pride, etc. have used the slogan “PFLAG is not just for parents anymore.” But that doesn’t seem to have sunk in yet. There were suggestions that we try to involve youth more and try to get youth and more other glbtq folks to help parents at tabling events so the public sees that a lot of different people are active.

There were discussions about sponsoring classes in some way, based partly on the success of the recent program on “Intersex 101” presented by Eric Dixon of South Puget Sound Community College. We plan to look into this, and would love to hear from others who have done it or would be interested in working on it with us.

Having more social activities was suggested, and we’ll be looking into ways to do that. Don’t forget our annual picnic every August.

The creation of this blog was also something that was suggested at that meeting too -- see, sometimes we don’t waste any time following up. We are looking for members and local allies who might be interested in blogging with us. We can have up to a hundred authors so let us know if you are interested.

Someone suggested we should have reviews of books and movies in the newsletter – those that are available in our library and others. We can do that if people are willing to submit reviews. Plus, we can publish them here and/or on the website. So, if you read a good book or see a good movie that may be of interest to the glbtq community, please write a brief review and submit it.

And please leave comments on the blog articles if you have a response or a suggestion. Those can be anonymous, but we hope you won’t want to be.

One day ... a first post

One day
society will accept
all its members as equals
regardless of their
sexual orientation
or gender identity.

One day
our sons and daughters,
brothers and sisters,
spouses, friends and parents
will be accepted
as the valuable human beings
they are.

Until that day there is PFLAG.