marsha's blog

Gender and Creativity

Submitted by marsha on Mon, 03/01/2010 - 7:00am

Why not use your experience of gender and identity as a spur to your creative life?

The work you have done - may still be doing - on understanding your gendered identity allows you to look with intensity into how our personal and private worlds develop.

Take that same set of experiences as a force to drive other work! To drive your education, your art, your writing, even the business of work itself.

And this method can be a gift to others as well; we will live life as an example of complexity, reporting to the world through our creations.

For the Future,
Marsha Botzer

Freedom

Submitted by marsha on Sun, 02/28/2010 - 1:34pm

What will you do to be free?

Will you grant a voice to your worries about gender and identity? Where can you do this safely? How is it done?

Visit us! Come to Ingersoll and do not be afraid. Come here and talk about what is going on when you think about gender and gender expression.

Do this, and no absolute will compel you an inch further. The steps ahead are all yours.

We do not guide lives, we open doors. This is the good work we do, work shaped by decades of learning and thousands of visitors to Ingersoll.

For the future,
Marsha Botzer

Licensing Success

Submitted by marsha on Sat, 08/08/2009 - 4:45pm
Dear Friends,
 
This is how equality can be brought out of the confusion within bureaucratic systems: 
By working together with unfailing respect for each other – and giving this same respect to the other side of the system for as long as those representatives show honest commitment to the work.  
 
By recognizing the particular skills of each participant, and by never quitting the process, even when to keep going means working without recognition or praise. 
 
By calling every skill and every idea into the work. 
 
And we have succeeded! The issue today is the advance in Washington State’s Driver’s License Policy regarding changing gender markers. The unworkable birth certificate approach has been abandoned, and the new Policy is much closer to the great goal of a policy that truly improves lives while also meeting governmental needs. 

From Survival to Pride

Submitted by marsha on Sat, 07/18/2009 - 8:27am
Friends! Welcome to Ingersoll,
We have served our communities for many years, and during those years we have seen such change!
 
Our whole being is about change – personal, social, in the mind and in the world - and still the power and surprise of just how change occurs brings us constant amazement and renewal.
 
We have come from a time of survival to one of pride, from small meetings in unknown privacy, to full partners in the greater work of building equality and fairness for all people. We attend to the individual, yet we change the world!
 
It is a very long way from our first public celebration in a tiny meeting room above a long-vanished restaurant on Capitol Hill in Seattle, to our established history of education outreach to legislatures, businesses and organizations local, national - across many borders - on to our recent proud march in the annual Seattle Pride Parade, Ingersoll T-shirts everywhere, singing and laughter, families, individuals, joy!
 
It is a long way from founding Ingersoll to my recent visit to the White House and a meeting with the President, as part of an LGBTQ Leadership Reception.
I call out thanks to all who have made Ingersoll possible, all those who have served and moved on through the years, all those who gave so much to make us thrive. Thank you, for times of struggle and times of achievement, cheers to you, brave ones.
 
And now, in the work of change, comes a new generation of leaders! We are fully and wholly aware of the great challenge that intellectual and generational change brings – we are linked across ages and continents, cultures and ideas – united to take the best of our Ingersoll's past into the developing present, so that we may all have a future of fairness, justice and full equality. The task is great but we are ready.
 
I know you will go about your self-discovery in your own way, that is the nature of the world. If Ingersoll can join you in that great adventure, we are ready!  Visit us; bring your voice and intelligence to our united work.
So, I say:
 
More Conversation!
Educate, Organize, Take Action!
Build a Better World Together!
 
In the words of Robert Green Ingersoll:
 
“The Time to be Happy is Now,
 The Place to be Happy is Here,
 And the Way to be Happy is to Make Others So.”
 
 

Marsha Botzer, Founder, Ingersoll Gender Center
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