31 May 2016

Triratna Gender Diverse Buddhists

Facebook group

This is how they describe the group:

The Triratna Gender Diverse Buddhist Group is for gender diverse people and their allies, within the Triratna Buddhist Community. It's open to anyone in the TBC who identifies or experiences themselves as intersex, trans, genderqueer, non-binary, genderless, gender-questioning, gender-curious... or who has a personal interest in exploring their gender identity or experience. (That's definitely not meant to be an exhaustive list - but you can probably work out from this subset of terms whether this group is for you.)

This is a space where we can share our experience of being gender diverse in what is still, from a gender point of view, a very binary and relatively diversity-unaware Buddhist community - with a view to supporting and getting to know each other, but also to helping the community at large to understand gender diversity better, and to cater better for people in the sangha who do not fit into the existing binary framework that underlies a lot of the TBC's activities. And of course, the other purpose of this group is just to be somewhere where we can collectively explore our relationship with our [a]gender experience/identity as Buddhists.

As there will be people who would like to participate, but do not want their participation to be visible on Facebook, we've also created a Secret group just for gender diverse people (this means that only other group members will see your posts or know you're a member) - please message one of the Admins here if you'd like to be invited to that group. Any discussion outcomes in that group which its members would like to be broadcast more widely can then be brought into this group with those people's anonymity still preserved.

As practising Buddhists, it's important that we communicate here on the basis of the ethical precepts. Alongside of that, we do have one golden rule here, which is that nobody polices anyone else's gender identity or choice of labels.