A little perspective helps a lot

One of the things I'm working on is updating our website. We've got so many issues in progress that it requires a lot more time to try to keep current on everything, not to mention the fact that it just plain needs maintenance. After all, I learned web design because the NCTE website got handed to me one day a few years ago and I knew nothing at that point. It means that all of my mistakes as I was learning are coded right into it; it is kind of a record of my own learning curve as I got a certificate in web design and learned a whole lot more.

But beyond the personal, our website is also a record of transgender progress. I was working on the news pages, moving things to archives and it gave me a chance to reflect on how monumental some of those early victories really were. I also revisited those days when our news seemed pretty bleak--a series of bad regulations that made things worse for trans people and there didn't seem to be much change on the horizon. What a cool thing to be moving those stories out of the way to make more space for us to report positive events. It's not all smooth sailing now, of course, but we are moving forward.

The website updates are more functional fixes than glamorous changes right now, but that pretty much suits our organization, too.