Planning a Gender Workshop

So my co-officers of Trans* Parachute United and I are currently planning a gender workshop for this coming Sunday, and I’m actually really excited. We have some great ideas for it, and I really hope that we can pull the execution off.

Originally, we started planning a simple panel, with people speaking about themselves and their personal experiences, like most panels at Juniata run. After about ten minutes, though, we realized we had the beginnings of an educational workshop on our hands, and we just ran with it. It’s caused some unnecessary stress, but I think we have something good here.

One of the main problems is not knowing exactly what to cover. I’m in up to my neck in transgender-related terms and discussions every day, which makes it difficult to know exactly what other people know and don’t know. I think we have a good beginner’s guide to transgender things, though, and I really hope that we don’t go too far over people’s heads.

It’s been pretty chaotic planning this thing, though. We came up with the first activity pretty quickly, then decided on an hour and a half for the running time, and then laid out a basic framework with four panelists, thinking that we had two weeks. Then we realized that we had one week, a one hour running time, and a panelist that wasn’t responding to e-mails asking to meet up to discuss the event.

But now our event is pretty well fleshed-out, the panelist finally met with us, and now all we can do is wait for Sunday night.

Note to self: Next time you want to plan an event like this, do it more than a week beforehand.