March 26, 2012

"Monthly Notes" #3 from WPATH President Lin Fraser

Dear Members,

This month as the Board prepares for Strategic Planning at our annual meeting to be held in Ghent in late April, I've been doing a lot of thinking about where we have been, where we are now and where we might be going in the future. Central to this planning is a review of our Mission and our Vision Statements. I have also been thinking about community, the WPATH community, who we are as a community and what might be the best ways to be in community, as we continue to grow and expand.

I can go back to 1979 at our first conference when we elected our first board and approved the first Standards of Care. There weren't many of us, but something special was born and a lot of us are still around and still active in WPATH. We stayed in communication and in community via snail mail, travel and conferences where I had, and continue to have, some of the best times of my life. I am still relishing our time together in Atlanta.

Now I'm thinking about how we have changed and yet how we are also the same. What has never changed is the need to network and share among ourselves. As an interdisciplinary group, we remain passionate and cutting edge, at the edge of the humanities and science, passionate about our work and learning from each other for the greater good, not just for our community, but for all people IMHO. What is different now is that we are far more diverse ourselves in the best sense of the word, and rather than being a small group, we are growing rapidly with the almost palpable conviction that we are at the tipping point of a worldwide movement for change. And as we grow, the question is even more important, how do we stay connected and in community?

We are the oldest and only global interdisciplinary professional association devoted to trans health and we are expanding.

Central to our mission and vision is to come together and communicate with each other toward the greater goal of providing better healthcare for trans persons worldwide.

To review: As an international multidisciplinary professional Association, the mission of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) is to promote evidence based care, education, research, advocacy, public policy and respect in transsexual and transgender health. The vision is to bring together diverse professionals dedicated to developing best practices and supportive policies to promote our Mission. Goals include furthering the understanding of and providing healthcare to transsexual, transgender and gender nonconforming people by professionals in medicine, psychology, law, social work, counseling, psychotherapy, family studies, sociology, anthropology, sexology, speech and voice therapy, other related fields, and more recently, spiritual care. WPATH provides opportunities for professionals from various sub-specialties to communicate with each other in the context of research and healthcare including sponsoring biennial scientific symposia.

I started thinking more about the WPATH community after I attended a community event in Los Angeles sponsored by WPATH members Marie Keller and Elise Turen of the Los Angeles Gender Center. Marie has also been in the field many years and it occurred to her that there were many professionals and activists in her own back yard so to speak, that she just didn't know .So she took it upon herself to spend a year finding out who else was in the LA area, traveling all over, having coffee, attending meetings, learning about all the other folks doing this work. One thing she learned is that most of the people she met didn't know each other either. So together, with the help of facilitators from The Relational Center... she and Elise invited everyone from the area to come together for a daylong Transolidarity event to share hopes and dreams, to be in community and to see what might happen. They also included a few of us from Northern California.

Without going into too much detail, as there isn't a perfect analogy between living somewhere in LA and our situation of being spread out all over the world, I do want to say that the feelings I had in LA were the same ones I had in Atlanta, of feeling the excitement in the room and of feeling part of a very special community. It was my privilege to be at both events and to feel the hope in the room and the recognition of being with kindred spirits. At the end of the day in LA, many people spoke to the group about the promise for a better tomorrow, the expectation that we are at a tipping point for change and that through community, life for transsexual, transgender and gender nonconforming people is indeed getting better. It was quite a moving experience.

Click on the link to see the WORD Cloud created from the event and a comment from WPATH member Max Fuhrmann...

I have always felt a kinship with almost any WPATH member I might meet, but as we grow, I'm afraid I don't know even half of our membership. And like Marie, I don't know everyone in the Bay Area where I live. So I am, I believe, missing something important.

Yet, as we move forward, we can reflect on what we do very well as a community.

We already have, I believe, the very best conferences imaginable. And we have Bangkok, as described in the invitational video from Conference Chair, Dr. Preecha, for a "once in a lifetime" experience, to look forward to February 14-18, 2014.
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And I am humbled and often in awe at the caliber of the conversations on the listserv, the shared knowledge, expertise and experience of our members as we engage in far-ranging enquiries, shared practice, philosophy, detailed references, case-management and even the occasional respectful disagreement.

What else can we do? How can we harness the energy of 600 people to our best advantage? Are there better ways to use technology? . I notice some of us have started webinars. Should we try to have more meetings? Or should we try to
set up more regional groups such as CPATH and ANZPATH? Or develop more committees; make it simpler to join the ones we have? Provide regional WPATH trainings? If we do, then, of course, we need to think about the matter of funding.. and figure out who will have the time and energy to do the work.

As we grow, how can we maintain that feeling from Atlanta?

Like Marie, I've been trying to get to know our members, and ran across this quote on Jennifer Madden's site:

"The WPATH symposium in Atlanta, September 2011, was a wonderful experience. Seeing so many of the world's most brilliant minds brought together in one place and for the sole purpose of exchanging ideas about gender diversity was a historic event for me. Sharing these ideas both within the scientific realm as well as the transgender community made me reflect on how exciting it must have been shortly after the turn of the 20th century when some of the first sexologists met in Berlin. Harry Benjamin was truly a maverick of his time. The standards of care for the health of transsexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming individuals has been revised and is now in its 7th version. One of the biggest changes in my mind is the attempt by WPATH to urge the de-psychopathologization of gender nonconformity".

When I asked Jennifer for permission to quote her, she said yes and responded:
"When in Atlanta, I had such a good time at the dance. All I could think of was: There is no other place on earth right now where so many other transgendered people like myself are dancing and having such a good time. On my personal site, in the blog, I put pictures of the dinosaurs in the museum.'

With that lovely image in mind, please send your thoughts, ideas and dreams for an even better WPATH to me:

Lin Fraser
WPATH President