First United Methodist Church, Parlor

1421 Spruce St., Boulder

This is our Back-To-School program which will help us to understand how our schools are meeting the needs of LGBTQ students.  Andre Lanier, Director of Institutional Equity for the Boulder Valley Schools will talk to us about current staff trainings and progress made to integrate transgender students into comfortable school settings.   He will be joined by four high school students and recent graduates from Boulder Valley and St. Vrain School Districts to share their personal experiences in dealing with issues and finding acceptance or lack thereof.

Did you know that one student from Niwot High School, Marley Hamrick, when she realized that there was no inclusion of sexual orientation and gender expression/identity in the St.Vrain School District’s non-discrimination policy revised their policy and got it approved by the Board of Education last year?  Marley and our new PFLAG youth board member, Maria Delmonico, who attends Longmont High School, want to help start a St. Vrain Safe Schools Coalition this summer.   They are looking for parents, teachers, LGBTQ persons who live in that school district to join them in effecting much needed change in school climate.   Contact JeanInBldr@comcast.net if you are interested in attending a preliminary meeting in August to support these students’ efforts.

NOTE a permanent change in schedule:  Newcomers and those needing support should plan to stay after the program to meet in a confidential setting at 8:30p.m.   Please note this change in format approved by the PFLAG Board at their annual retreat.

Join PFLAG Boulder County for the largest and most exciting pride event of the year, in Denver, on June 27 and 28. We will step off from Cheesman Park at 9:30 a.m. and lead the parade to Civic Center Park and Broadway and Colfax Avenues in Denver. Everyone is invited to attend, and march, with us! Join all the PFLAG chapters in the state of Colorado for this exciting event.

If you wish to carpool, a party of vehicles will meet at the Table Mesa Park-n-Ride at 8:00 a.m. Let Jean Hodges know if you want to carpool. Contact her at 303-444-4580, or email her at JeanInBldr@comcast.net.

Bring your water bottle, sunscreen, and your own sign–or you can get one in Denver! Wear a solid shirt in a bright rainbow color if you can. Balloons will be provided by Denver PFLAG.

After the parade, join us at the PFLAG booth on Saturday at 10:00 a.m. We need volunteers to help staff the booth on Saturday and Sunday, so put your PFLAG on and come on down!

Join PFLAG for our July program when we inaugurate our new book reading program! We plan to read two books per year and discuss each at a PFLAG meeting. For July, we will read Julia Serano’s book, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, spoken word performer, trans activist, and biologist. Her writings have appeared in queer, feminist, and pop culture magazines and anthologies, been excerpted on National Public Radio and in The Believer and the San Francisco Chronicle, and been used as teaching materials in college-level gender studies courses across the United States. She has a PhD in Biochemistry from Columbia University and is currently a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in the field of evolutionary and developmental biology.

From the cover:

In this provocative manifesto, biologist and transsexual woman Julia Serano shares her experiences pre-and post-transition and reveals the ways that fear, contempt, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape society’s attitudes towards trans women, as well as gender and sexuality as a whole. Whipping Girl is a personal, analytical, gripping account that debunks popular misconceptions about transsexuality, while exposing the cultural belief that femininity is frivolous, weak, and inherently inferior to maleness and masculinity.

Join us for a provocative discussion about this book and the issues it raises. You don’t have to read the book to participate. We will provide information to make it easy for you to join the discussion, or if you’d rather, just listen in!  To purchase the book, visit Left Hand Books, at 1200 Pearl Street, Suite 10, Boulder, or call 303-443-8252.

WASHINGTON — Lawyers for President Obama are quietly drafting first-of-their kind guidelines barring workplace discrimination against transgender federal employees, officials said Tuesday.

The guidelines will be in an updated federal handbook for managers and supervisors to be distributed and posted online in the next couple of months, and they could also be included in other materials for managers. They will list transgender people — those who identify their gender differently from the information on their birth certificates — as among several groups protected by antidiscrimination laws.

Though transgender men and women are not believed to make up more than a fraction of a percent of the federal work force, their inclusion in the discrimination guidelines is seen as a breakthrough by transgender and gay rights advocates.

“The president is making a very clear statement that transgender people won’t be discriminated against,” said Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, a group that has been talking with the White House about the new provisions.

The provisions will help give transgender workers avenues within the federal government to protest a job action as discriminatory, though Ms. Keisling added, “There is also a very important symbolic value to that, from our point of view.”

Read more >>  New Protections for Transgender Federal Workers – NYTimes.com.