Hi Loves,

We’ve gotten some messages lately from readers expressing disappointment that their profiles haven’t been posted yet. It’s true. And I know it sucks. I’m sorry. But it has absolutely nothing to do with us not liking you.

It has to do with the fact that there are TONS of you. Seriously. We’re getting 50+ profile submissions a week right now, and our site is welcoming over 12,000 different visitors a month. We weren’t planning for this. But we’re really really glad you’re here.

For the last 8 or so months, we’ve been running three posts a day. Here’s why:

1) It’s a reasonable workload for our volunteers.

2) It’s active enough that you get to see a lot of variety.

3) It’s slow enough that it still feels like a spotlight — like what we’re showing you right now is special.

I’m not saying that this is the perfect pacing — there’s definitely room for us to grow — but I do want you to know that there’s a bottleneck here. We only have space to run about 10% of our submissions at the moment. And the posts we do run have often been in our queue for several weeks. So if you’re checking back a few days after you submit your profile, you’re getting a jolt of disappointment. And I hear you. That’s feeling crappy right now.

For the time being, I ask you to view this project as a publication rather than a social networking site. We’re not expressing your thoughts in real-time — we’re accepting submissions, sorting through them, and presenting a beautiful, curated, artistic collage of our identities in an endless stream over time. That’s all this project is.

And you’re right. We do need more.

At the moment, the best resource I know of for “more” is Queeries, a social networking site for a very broad mix of identities, and I encourage you to check them out (just sign up and you’ll see what I mean inside). You can also dive into our Facebook group, which lets you comment in a way that’s attached to your profile. And there are a few other good sites listed on our site’s sidebar.

If anyone else knows of good places for Genderforkers to connect and express yourself, please post them below.

And again: We’re really really glad you’re here.

Thanks and love,

Sarah Dopp
Founder of Genderfork

Hey Beautifuls,

In case you haven’t already slyly discovered it from our sidebar, we have a LIVELY wonderful community going on over at http://www.facebook.com/genderfork. It’s an auto-generated feed of the content from this blog PLUS the content from our Twitter feed (displaying as “status updates”) PLUS whatever random photos and links people fans are contributing with Facebook’s tools.

My favorite part, which is harder to replicate in a blog or Twitter feed right now, is the “Like” button. When the other volunteers and I scan the page and see “23 people liked this” under a post, we know we’re onto something. Please keep giving us this awesome feedback.

PLUS it’s easy to find and connect with other Genderforkians in the land of Facebook. If someone strikes your fancy, try adding them as a friend and including a note that says “Hey, I found you through Genderfork… you seem awesome! I’m _____. We have a lot in common.” Or, you know, something phrased less awkwardly than I would say it.

Anyway, come play! http://www.facebook.com/genderfork

Love,
Sarah Dopp
(the quiet happy founder of this here community space)

And so it goes when they’re rocking academia and doing gratuitous oodles of crazy wonderful things… sometimes volunteers have to pare down their commitments and move on to that next fierce post for changing the world.

Thus, we’re sad to announce that Jakk, one of our devoted photo curators (who’s been on staff since I first cried “Help me!” last December, 2008) is stepping down.

Jakk
Photo Curator

adrift somewhere in the sea of college academia, jakk is agendered with some happily displayed masculine and feminine qualities for flair. gender pronouns aren’t a big deal for him, and she’ll answer to “she”, “he” and “xe/ze”. xe’s first loves will always be writing and reading, but he also has a thing for wrestling, and artmaking (of any sort), and all things glam, drag, or burlesque. and maybe she dreams of growing up to be the next amanda palmer meets dr. frank-n-furter meets ziggy stardust.

Jakk’s been blogging these photos.

That was a good solid ten months, Jakk, in which you trudged out into the world and found dozens and dozens of gorgeous, interesting gender variant portraits and brought them back like shiny pennies in your palms, offering them to our blog engine with a big excited grin, whispering, “Here.”

We’re happy that your life is full and thriving, we thank you from the bottom of our queerdo hearts for your service, and we wish you all the best on your journey ahead.

Hugs,
Sarah

p.s. You can always see who our amazing volunteers are over here.

Hi Beautifuls,

I want to alert you to this fantastic project that’s being run by my personal heroes, Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman. They’re creating an anthology of and about gender variant voices, and just announced their call for submissions. As Bear put it, they’re looking for pieces that “add to or advance the conversation about gender (as distinct from simply reflecting it, or lamenting it).”

I’ll be submitting. I hope you do, too.

Hugs,
Sarah

———

Call For Submissions
GENDER OUTLAWS: THE NEXT GENERATION
Kate Bornstein & S Bear Bergman, eds

Deadline: 1 September 2009

In the fifteen years since the release of Gender Outlaw, transgender narratives have made their way into cultural locations from the margins to the mainstream and back again. Today’s trannies and other sex/gender radicals are writing a radically new world into being. GENDER OUTLAWS: THE NEXT GENERATION (Seal Press) will collect and contextualize the work of this generation’s most forward-thinking trans/genderqueer voices—new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world’s most respected mainstream news sources. Edited by that ol’ original Gender Outlaw herself, Kate Bornstein and writer, raconteur, and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, GENDER OUTLAWS: THE NEXT GENERATION will include essays, commentary, comic art and conversation from a diverse a group of trans-spectrum people who live and believe in barrier-breaking lives.

Continue reading »

Hey Everyone, I’m very excited to introduce you to IdentityTBD, who’ll be helping me with the editing work around here. idTBD is someone I’ve known for many years, and I think you’ll find we share similar sensibilities.

And you can see the full list of your friendly Genderfork Staff over on the Volunteer’s Page.

Thanks for continuing to make this such a rich community.

Hugs,
Sarah

Hey Everyone,

Here’s our idea for a new game… The “Think Out Loud” form now poses a question, which we hope will get a bunch of people talking about a specific subject all at once. Our plan is to change the question about once a month or so, and see what that brings up. Currently, it’s:

Describe an outfit you’ve worn that expressed the complexity of your gender.

(okay, so that’s technically not a question, but you get the picture.)

You can still use the form to say whatever you want, as anonymously as you want. The prompt is just a suggestion.

Check it out: Think Out Loud

And let us know what you think of our new game in the comments below.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Lots of love,
Sarah

Hey Everybody! Take a look at our new commenting system! We talked about the pros and cons and decided to do this for a one month trial. If it sucks, we go back to the old way. You tell me what you think.

I’m expecting there will be a few kinks to work out from the initial install, so if you see anything weird or have any tweak requests, please leave your thoughts here.

If you select to create an account when you leave your first comment, you’ll stay logged in (assuming this is your primary computer) and you’ll start accumulating a list of all your comments in one place. This is really cool, but totally optional.

You can also comment with OpenID instead of with your email address. If you use the internet a lot, there’s a good chance you already have an OpenID. And if not, they’re easy to get.

A note to anonymous and pseudonym-using commenters: This system doesn’t support anonymous commenting (sorry) — you have to go the pseudonym route. Just get a Gmail account under your fake name and use that when you fill out the form. Or make an OpenID. As with the old site, the system will display a your image if you’ve associated a gravatar with the email address you use, so be careful not to accidentally cross your identities that way.

Neat things:
– you can edit and delete your comments after you leave them
– you can get emails when people respond to you directly
– you can subscribe to full comment threads and watch the entire conversation over email if you want
– you can quietly report inappropriate comments to me so i know about the immediately

Okay… go play and tell me how it goes.