Whatever Happened to Transgender Support Groups and Conventions?
It is almost early fall again and time for the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta, probably the most well known transgender meeting place. This will be my 5th SCC and I will again be presenting a workshop on Thursday, September 4. So it is time to evaluate the means by which the transgender community communicates. Our meeting places have changed over the years, adapting to new technologies and circumstances.
As part of the support group movement in the 1970s, transgender support groups started in order to provide a safe place to crossdress and to provide educational opportunities. Education was aimed at developing our transgender presentation and to help us deal with the problems created by family and cultural rejection. Transgender groups literally took over hotels or churches for the night and provided places to dress and be in a safe environment. Support groups actually started with Alcoholic Anonymous (AA) in the 1930s to discourage the behavior of drinking. However, many of the support groups in the 1970s were there to actually encourage various behaviors including gardening, BDSM, quilting and sewing. But the formats were all similar to AA. The meetings included personal introductions, educational presentation, questions and problems. Transgender groups typically added a field trip after the meeting to a local transgender-friendly bar or restaurant in order to give new members an opportunity to go out to public places in the safety of the group. When Lynn Conway made the first accurate estimates of transgender people in the United States in 2000 she started with a count of transgender support group members. I am not sure what she would find today.
I always looked forward to attending support group meetings across the United States whenever my travel schedule allowed. My favorite was Crossroads in Detroit but I also attended meetings in Washington with the DCEA group and even attended Androgyny in Los Angeles. I even got “adopted” by the Crossroads couples group because it met on weekdays that fit my schedule. It was there that I met my mentor, Milesa Phar, who helped me understand myself and transgender behavior. I still keep in touch with her from time to time. She was my first transgender friend.
Paralleling the development and operation of support groups, various computer-networking technologies provided meeting places for transgender people, even if they are virtual in nature. These places started with computer “bulletin boards” which provided chat rooms, bulletin boards and articles on transgender presentation and news. Computer savvy transgender people would set up these computer systems that allowed people with personal computers to dial in. Tricky part was finding a board in the local dialing area to avoid long-distance charges. My first computer was a Heathkit that I built myself in 1981 and when I was not on travel, I would be on a board every night. Of course bulletin boards were just a precursor to today’s Internet social media which allows instantaneous communication around the world. Today’s social media programs developed after Internet list servers, usegroups and chat rooms (mIRC) showed what might be possible.
Support groups provide a valuable service to those new to the transgender community but once a new member gets her/his feet on the ground, there is less reason for her/him to stay. Some volunteers stay on to keep a group operating but once transgender people feel comfortable in public alone, they can form their own informal groups and meet on the Internet or local public places. This turnover process makes support groups vulnerable to extinction and, indeed, my Crossroads group is no more. There has been no recent survey of transgender support group members that I know about but it appears that the formation of new groups and membership has not kept pace with population growth. If support group membership is not keeping pace, it would not be such a bad thing. Communications on the Internet have more than compensated for this steady state. It probably also is an indicator that public acceptance for transgender people has improved.
With regard to convention meetings, such as Southern Comfort Conference, there has been a significant decrease in the number of conventions in the past few years. Yes, First Event, Fantasia Fair, Gender Odyssey and the Pennsylvania Keystone Conference are still with us but IFGE, Be-All, Chicago Pinkfest, California Dreamin’, Houston SPICE, Kansas City Fall Harvest all appear to be gone. Others are on a year-to-year basis. Some of this decline can be attributed to the downturn in the economy but there are indications that successful meetings are becoming more specialized and offer new themes such as the Philadelphia Trans-Health Conference.
The state of face-to-face transgender meetings appears to be continuing but informal groups and the Internet more than fill in any gaps. Question is: What do we have to say to one another?
Category: Transgender Body & Soul, Transgender Opinion
About the Author (Author Profile)
Dana Jennett Bevan holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and a Bachelors degree from Dartmouth College both in experimental psychology. She is the author of The Transsexual Scientist which combines biology with autobiography as she came to learn about transgenderism throughout her life. Her second book The Psychobiology of Transsexualism and Transgenderism is a comprehensive analysis of TSTG research and was published in 2014 by Praeger under the pen name Thomas E. Bevan. Her third book Being Transgender was released by Praeger in November 2016. She can be reached at danabevan@earthlink.net.Subscribe
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Fair point, Angela. I knew as soon as I’d hit the “submit” button that I was going to be accused of an unwarranted generalisation!
There’s clearly a big dependence on the location of these events, and all I can realistically do is describe what’s happened in my back yard of East Anglia, England. Some groups certainly seem to be prospering while others are failing – the inclusive London clubs which I went to on special occasions are clearly still going strong, but they have a large catchment area to draw on, as well as a good source of funding and support – and they attract LGB people, drag queens, genderqueers, and ordinary people who just want to go to a good party and don’t care who else is there. The trans-exclusive Essex-based monthly disco I enjoyed for some years is still going, albeit at considerable personal cost to the lady who founded it; however, the associated quarterly magazine has long since changed from the crossdresser-heavy publication of the late 1990s to one dealing almost exclusively in transsexual matters, so I can only guess at the composition of the clientele at today’s parties.
As for the more low-key support-type meetings, I regularly went to two – one in my native Suffolk, England, the other in the adjacent county of Norfolk. The Norfolk one was hosted at the private address of someone who described herself as a trans-counsellor. While 15 to 20 years ago, it enjoyed a good mix of around a couple of dozen mostly crossdressing members, it now apparently caters exclusively for M2F transsexuals; given that the organiser of this group was the only person ever to have tried to convince me that I was a transsexual (yeah, really!), maybe that’s a good thing … clearly she had no idea what crossdressing was about.
The Suffolk monthly meeting was run from a local mental-health drop-in centre … a connection which wasn’t lost on the more mischievous members of the group! It never attracted more than a dozen members in all the years it was active, and once or twice during school holidays when members had other priorities, it was just the organiser and me, and we sometimes closed early and went to a local pub! It also had a surprisingly high turnover … I’m not sure what happened to the many new members who left after just a couple of meetings, never to be seen again. But the problem with this location was that the car park belonged to a supermarket across the road, and many members weren’t willing to be seen in public even to the extent of crossing the road to get to the venue, especially in the summer when the evenings were light. The group closed down due to lack of numbers several years ago.
I think, Angela, there’s a difference between a “party” and a “meeting”. The confident crossdresser who’s coming to terms with what they are, and who’s starting to enjoy what they do, is the sort of person who likes to strut their stuff in front of other crossdressers and members of the regular public alike; however, as you know, the vast majority of crossdressers don’t get that far, and in my (admittedly rather provincial) experience, novices prefer to “test the water” at a quiet meeting in a more private environment closed to members of the public … and it’s these that seem to be in short supply. My second outing en-femme was to the Essex disco mentioned above; I often wonder, had I not had the benefit of my first get-together in a quiet non-threatening environment, whether I’d have made it any further … in my case, probably yes, but I’m unusual even amongst crossdressers, and I can’t truthfully speak for anyone else. But the demise of the meeting has, in effect, removed the stepping stones between the closet door and the rest of the world – or they’ve at least taken on a new identity which isn’t particularly relevant or even friendly to crossdressers – and I think that’s stopping a lot of people from making their first move.
Thank you for your interesting observations, Dana.
However much I may denigrate real-world support groups for simply being amalgamations of individual closets into a single bigger closet, Internet chat rooms are no substitute for meeting other transpeople face-to-face. Unfortunately, this “virtualisation” of the world seems to the way things are going now in all walks of life – people would rather text their friends than pick up the telephone and have an interactive conversation … far less actually meet them physically over a cup of coffee. Call me old-school, but I hate this trend with a vengeance.
I therefore disagree that the Internet has more than compensated for the loss of the support groups – the two aren’t equivalent to, or even comparable with, each other. I’d also amend your comment about the demise of the support-group meeting being an indicator that public acceptance for transgender people has improved, by replacing “transgender” with “transsexual”. Being a crossdresser, my interests are in a different corner of trans-space, and I see no such improvement here; indeed, the fact that I have to point this out is evidence of its truth – we’re still around in significant numbers, but we’re all but invisible. The status quo is that crossdressers who would have got dressed up and gone out to meetings ten or twenty years ago are now connecting with each other over the Internet because … well, because there ARE no more public meetings, as you’ve said. Essentially, the “use it or lose it” philosophy kicked in – transsexuals left to pursue their just human rights, and the remaining crossdressing contingent failed to provide a sufficient core to enable the meetings to continue.
While transsexuals used support groups to their advantage, crossdressers failed to do so; I believe that the opportunity for them to put their case to the public has now come and gone. With the demise of the real-world facilities, crossdressers have now gone back to their individual closets, where they use the new technology to exchange poor-quality headless pictures of themselves with their unknown and unidentifiable “friends” in virtual space. That most definitely is NOT indicative of a healthy community, and neither is it a step in the right direction.
HI Graham, as a producer of monthly parties for trans people of all stripes I have observed that many crossdressers came to my party several years ago and are now going out to other venues to have fun in their femme finery, too. I still get regular customers but a lot of them are going to other places on other nights. At least is this area more TG friendly spots have opened up in the past few years so the ladies have more choices. And some of them are going to straight bars and restaurants that accept them. At the same time the local support group has been losing people. First timers are just as likely to show up at one of my parties as they are to go to the support group, even though I encourage them to go to the group to meet other people in a room without loud dance music. So I think there is more acceptance among the general public around here.
I was surprised to hear the support groups were an endangered species across the pond. I thought we here in Australia were going downhill from nowhere. I could probably count on ‘Homer Simpsons’ hand the number of conventions I heard about over the last ten years. I’m prepared to be proven wrong. I know of friends who tried to arrange such events as getaways but they were poorly supported so the organisers gave up.
When I came live in Melbourne there were two major groups with monthly meetings, Seahorse Victoria and the E.B.P. ‘Elaine Barrie Project’, they had meetings on alternate fortnights. One smaller group, Flamingo Club, (subtle?) had a representative who attended E.B.P from time to time but as a group (sic) was ineffectual.
Now there seem to be a few smaller gatherings who meet on a semi-casual basis. A problem I find in locating these groups.
But, conventions, a shame if they are falling by the way side. I know a lot of us down under would drool to attend such an event.