Help us to map the right to education for LGBT

After publishing the Guide to Advocate for Sexual Diversity Education, GALE starts to map the right to education worldwide. On the GALE website, the GALE Checklist is now available. This short survey helps GALE to make an overview of how the right to education is respected and implemented for LGBT people in your country. The results will be used to create a map of denying, ambiguous and supportive states.

The survey consist of 21 questions. Our questions focus on the role of the State to secure these rights, but you can also add information about what happens in practice. If you do not add additional information, the survey will take just 5 minutes to finish.

At the end of the survey you will be asked if you would like to become a GALE reporter. We would like to find interested supporters in each country to keep on monitoring the right to education, and to stimulate both LGBT and mainstream organization to do the right thing. This could be to develop training and materials, but even better would be to first assess what the country needs and which types of strategy and interventions will be most feasible and effective. The GALE Foundation will support reporters to act on this, for example by helping to organize strategic workshops or some research.

A recently published article in the Dutch Review for Sexology (TvS) in the framework of the ongoing research into sexual health in the Netherlands done by dr. L. Kuyper indicates that more than half of the Dutch population abhors lack of gender clarity in the persons they meet. 57,3% answered Yes on the question "When I meet someone I find it important to know that person's gender" and 12,3% actively wants to avoid trans* people or gender variant people. While 59% thinks it to be ok that trans people undergo sex reassignment surgery, still 38,3% is of the opinion the trans person should pay up themselves. Another 8 or 9% would break off contact if a friend would tell them they were changing gender.
Source: Tijdschrift voor Seksuologie Vol. 36-2 pp.129-135 (ISSN: 0167-5915)

About one or two weeks ago a Dutch court decided that hermaphrodites (persons with a certain intersex condition) do not have to undergo medical procedures in order to get their preferred sex registration recognised. Anticipating the new gender recognition law and political statements of government,a general registral mistake law can indeed be used for this aim and not the (currently) archaic gender recognition law that requires sterilisation.
We have been instrumental in both the political statement and in the pointing the lawyer to the right grounds on which to act.

I have the pleasure of working with IHLIA - the International LGBTI library, archive and information center (www.ihlia.nl) to organise an international conference in August 2012. It is right at the time of the Amsterdam Canal Pride. We are bringing together LGBTI movements that are interested in collecting the cultural heritage of LGBTI people in their country, and public libraries, archives, museums. We have a vision: by 2020, every National Archive and National Library in Europe and every major city library in North America has a dedicated LGBTI collection, visible and accessible to the public. These spaces are a sanctuary for young people, a place where they discover their proud history, a place where they discover they too can dare to live their dreams.

Are you interested in finding out more? Write to homodok@ihlia.nl.

Transgender Network Netherlands and Human Rights Watch together with COC this Thursday will present a report called Controlling bodies denying identities" on the situation of transgender people in the Netherlands to the secretary of Justice.
One of the first countries to have a gender recogntion law in the 1980ies the Netherlands now is backbencher in the range of countires having sich a a law. Lately Portugal surpassed Holland with a law requiring only Portugese citizenship, majority of age and a diagnosis of gender dysforia. The last four years Dutch ministers on several occasions said the human rights violating Dutch law should be revisioned but until now little initiative has come from that.
It is to expected that the coming bill will do away with all required medical treatment for legal sex reassignment but wil still be pathologising trans people by requiring a diagnosis of gender dysforia.

i totaly agree with that statemnt, lets make history, and the rights a reality, Viva LGBTI Vivi.

For the first time, there will be an African Boat at the Amsterdam Canal Pride on 7th August 2010.

The African Gay Youth Foundation is preparing to take center stage in this year’s pride event with a message of Solidarity with the LGBT communities in Africa, raise the visibility of African LGBT individuals in the Netherlands and declare once and for all, that Homosexuality has no boundaries! (Homosexualité sans frontières!) We are here to finally shout out – We are Gay, we are African and we are not going away!

We also want to pay homage to Mr. Nelson Mandela, who had the courage to ensure that South Africa’s post Apartheid constitution included protection of LGBT rights.

I look forward to hearing from you. Let’s make History!!!

HI to everybody.
We - my friend and I need a help. I'm from Ukraine, now living in Poland. My friend from Czech living in UK. We want to be together. but can't married in Czech course of his family and course he is long time living in UK. one way for us - to have a job and live in Netherlands, became a residance permission and then married.
Been UE citizen he can do that without problem. But not me.
If somebody can help me to receave job permit in Netherland or can tell me how to do it as soon as possible.. i will very thakfull.
please write to e-mail : vaniaba@ukr.net
thank You very much

I am quite busy these days in organizing the Congenid trans world conference in Barcelona, Spain from 1-6 June. It will be the first of its kind, to host mainly activists on gender identity/expression (trans*/inter). There have been pre-conferences on trans at ILGA ocnferences, but this one is completely related to trans/inter/gender identity/expression affairs. Preapring a Declaration on our human rights that builds on the Yogyakarta principles, the issue paper by COE Commissioner Hammarberg and other.

In the Netherlands, marriages can be between two people of the opposite sex or of the same sex. The majority of the people support this legal change. But some people don't. And some of those people have a orthodox christian background.
This has caused a problem because some of those orthodox christian people have position as civil servants, and are people who perform the wedding ceremony on behalf of the state. Among the civil servants (working for the local governments) there are some who refuse to perform a wedding between two people of the same sex.
The current government's position is that this is no problem: as long as a local government can provide at least one civil servant who can "do the same-sex marriages".
RozeLinks thinks that civil servants should not discriminate, and that at least applicants for a civil servant position in which they might have to marry people. should not be hired if they want to restrict their services to opposite-sex couples. But with two christian parties in a government coalition (together with social democrats) it is impossible to take steps against "refusing civil servants".