Reposted from SF Cronicle.

“Kenya Boudreaux met a guy on a dating site. She liked his photo, his personality. She agreed to meet him in person. That’s when things got weird.

He wanted to wander down alleys. He pressured Boudreaux, 19, to drink.

“It made me feel very unsafe,” said Boudreaux, a black transgender woman and student at San Francisco State University.

Last year, 23 trans women and gender nonconforming people were murdered. Most of them were black or Latino.

“There’s already this life expectancy of we probably won’t make it past 35 years old,” she said recently. “That’s very harrowing for me, so I feel like if I do end up murdered, I want that person found and charged.”

So Boudreaux, a mechanical engineering and computer science student, got to work making an app to help with just that.

Last week, Boudreaux and more than a dozen others participated in a hackathon to build “solutions to social problems unique to transgender people of color.” It was organized by TransH4ck, an Oakland organization that acts as a hub and a home for transgender and gender nonconforming folks and allies in the tech industry. The organization encourages the creation of open-source technology for this population.”

More Info here!

Half of young people believe gender isn’t limited to Male and Female. (via Fusion.)

” 57 percent of female Millennials believe that gender falls on a spectrum, according to the poll, compared with 44 percent of men. And Millennials in the Northeast were even more likely to say so, at 58 percent. (In the South, that number fell to 42 percent.”

What’s your experience?

And what are you thinking about gender right now?

Hey fellow Genderforkers,

As some of you may already know, we now have forums! They’re a safe, friendly and welcoming space for you all to come discuss things, gender related or not, with similar souls.

The link is on the sidebar, under Stay Connected (Our Forums), or you can click on this link right here to get to them:

http://discuss.genderfork.com/

It would be the most awesome and amazing thing to see you there, whether you’re brand new to our site and want to find out more, or have been a regular visitor for years.

Drop by and say hello, we’d love to get to know all of you in our wonderful community, and hear what you’ve got to say!

Reposted from The Self Made Men.

( Submit A Photo )

If you like Genderfork, I’ll bet you a unisex bathroom key that you’re gonna love Queer Eye Candy, too.  Run by the inimitable Sinclair Sexsmith of Sugarbutch Chronicles, it’s another fantastic photoblog putting a personal face on queerness.  Sinclair writes:

This country is afraid of us, but they don’t know who we are.

We’re hot, we’re fierce, we’re vulnerable, we’re beautiful, we’re in love, we’re horribly ugly, we’re scared, we’re tender-hearted, we’re dog mommies and daddies, we’re parents, we’re children, we’re neices and nephews, we’re married, we’re bachelors, we’re rednecks, we’re blue-collar, we’re construction workers, we’re political pundits, we’re musicians, we’re drag performers, we’re community organizers, we’re angry, we’re activists, we’re just us.

Let’s show off who we are. Let’s show those who don’t know what we look like, let’s show off who we love and who we spend our time with, let’s show off our joyous communities and our heartaches and our hardships and our work and our play and our joy.

Let’s celebrate ourselves, just as we are.

Go show your support, submit your photos, and add it to your feedreaders. This site is doing something beautiful.

(Sent my way by Susan Mernit — thank you, gorgeous!)

Check it out! I just created a Twitter account for Genderfork. There are just so many amazing messages coming in from the Share form, I wanted to give them a broader outlet. So I’ll be posting a few quotes a day over there. If you’re already on twitter, please give it a follow.

And if you’re not on Twitter yet, and you’re reading this site to feel more connected with a supportive community, you might want to consider joining. It’s a great space for extended conversation, and you might even find some new pals among the folks who follow Genderfork.

Enjoy!

Love,
Sarah

Wikipedia has a pretty impressive list of unisex names available for your perusal. For inclusion, each name must fit at least one of these criteria:

• have originated as a unisex name (e.g., Abijah).
• have multiple origins as both a masculine and feminine name (e.g., Alva).
• have been used significantly at some point in the past or present as a name for both males and females (e.g., Tristan).
• be used as a nickname for both masculine and feminine names (e.g., Chris).
• be otherwise significant in a historical context as a unisex name (e.g., Zooey).

Many of the names on the list, surprisingly, don’t strike me as unisex. But maybe my worldview is small. That’s been proven to be the case more than once in the past.

Source: Wikipedia: Unisex Name