Lobby with pride

The NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby (GLRL) is excited about the upcoming Pride Festival, due to kick off on June 16, which commemorates the New York Stonewall Riots.

The 1969 Riots provided a platform for people to begin organising, protesting and mobilising around the LGBT rights. While the festival is an opportunity to celebrate how far we’ve come in securing better human rights protections for LGBTI people, it is also an opportunity to come together and discuss what still needs to be done.

The recent Australian Human Rights Commission’s report into discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, sex and gender identity found that LGBTI people still experience systemic discrimination in many areas of their lives.

The GLRL will give community members a chance to discuss experiences of discrimination at the launch of our Uncloseting Discrimination workshop series.

We will launch the consultation workshop series at Stonewall Hotel on June 23 at 7pm.

Thanks to generous funding from the City of Sydney, the GLRL will facilitate a number of workshops in July to better understand how discrimination affects members of LGBTI communities.

Each anti-discrimination workshop will target specific LGBTI demographics such as youth, older people, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, and transgender, intersex and other sex and/or gender diverse communities.

We want to explore issues of discrimination with individuals and groups who do not always get a chance to have their voices heard.

These workshops will give community members an opportunity to voice their opinions of how current legislative protections can be improved, which we can feed into the federal Government’s anti-discrimination harmonisation project. The project is reviewing federal anti-discrimination law, with the view to include protections for sex, sexuality and gender diverse people.

The workshops will also aim to educate people about the current state of NSW and federal anti-discrimination laws.

For details about these workshops visit www.glrl.org.au. To RSVP to these workshops, please email our senior policy advisor at [email protected]

By KELLIE MCDONALD, NSW GLRL