Idea!!! (:

[Anthony Simon]

I'm all for it! Anything that will break the proverbial isolation I am in.

Yup, absolutely. That's such a major problem for CDs. Because the atmosphere has changed in a lot of the countries where we live I kind of think it might now be soluble. Although Robin Katie's worries about a fixed site drawing flak are I'm sure well-founded, there are probably places you could put it where it would be OK.

The one thing about places like this is no-one does it for money and it's not about sex or picking up people. Apart from the self-help groups out there (which, from a distance, seem over-ghettoised to me) that doesn't seem to happen in the physical world.

[Ginny Jones]

Turn around, touch the ground, bagsy Joyce Grenfell teaches us!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcNyvreO ... re=related" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Hugs Ginny x

[Kimberly Kael]

While there is strength in numbers and it's appealing to go somewhere that everyone understands you, there's a downside risk as well. The school effectively becomes a ghetto: nobody else is exposed to transgender youth and so they won't learn to understand and appreciate them, and the transgender population remains isolated and fails to learn how to interact with anyone outside the community.

Visibility in mainstream society should be the goal, though I certainly understand the need for safe spaces along the way (as with th LGBT school in New York that was referenced.)

[Anthony Simon]

Kimberley Kael wrote:

While there is strength in numbers and it's appealing to go somewhere that everyone understands you, there's a downside risk as well. The school effectively becomes a ghetto: nobody else is exposed to transgender youth and so they won't learn to understand and appreciate them, and the transgender population remains isolated and fails to learn how to interact with anyone outside the community.

It depends. If there is a fixed physical place where CD's/TGs go it will also tend to have a mental presence in the host society's mind. I'm thinking of "The Way Out Club" in the UK which has regularly turned up on TV here as kind of "the go to" place for the media when they want to have a CD/TG/TS presence in their programmes. This has been a once a week late-night place. If you have somewhere that's open on an ongoing basis in the week the presence in the public mind will be much greater.

What I think would be likely to happen is that, through that place and the way it was reported in the media, the TG population would actually gain more of a place in the public mind - and, almost by default, I think that would tend to make us less isolated. If, as Robyn K suggests, people decide to make an issue of the place, that could actually work to the advantage on TGs. On the basis of "no news is bad news" that would also tend to put TGs in the public mind (though of course there are big dangers too).

The more people get used to the fact that people like us exist, through whatever process so long as it doesn't end up with a poor image of TGs, the more it becomes easier to us to do stuff - be - (or better) in the outside world. It would put an awful lot on the people actually using the school (or whatever the focal point of the place was, doesn't have to be a school) - and you'd probably be replaying a lot of the battles blacks had to go through in the Civil Rights era - but I think it could be a thoroughly positive thing from the point of view of integrating TGs into society.