March 23
1998
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From All Over: GenderNews |
Posted
March 23 1998 |
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We received the following press release from AEGIS, the American Educational Gender Information Service, Inc. |
| AEGIS Suspends Information
& Referral Services |
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Press Release
Effective, immediately, AEGIS will no longer be providing information and referrals to the many people who contact it. This service will resume at an unspecified future date. Executive Director Dallas Denny said, "Since 1990, we've done tens of thousands of referrals and changed thousands of lives. We've helped transsexuals, their therapists, and reporters. But with my resignation impending, we've been unable to find anyone to do this important but time-consuming task. We simply don't have the resources. We pull together information to meet each individual's particular needs, so each response can take as much as 30 minutes. There's also the question of money. Not only does it require an infrastructure-- computers, phone lines, internet access-- but photocopies and stamps. It costs more than a dollar to send out an information packet-- and that doesn't include the time it takes to prepare it. Occasionally, people will send us a contribution by way of thanks, but that's the exception, and not the rule." Denny said, " We've managed to provide the community with free referrals and information for nearly ten years, but we have no choice but to suspend services until we can find the money and the volunteers which will allow us to continue." Denny said she was grievously concerned that transsexuals will have no place to go to get the information they desperately need. "Unfortunately, transsexuals have reported feeling verbally abused when they have contacted some of the other national organizations. With the exception of FTM International, which serves female-to-male transsexuals, the other national organizations are set up more to deal with crossdressers. Transsexuals have different needs," she said. Denny noted that AEGIS had successfully operated an automated telephone system for more than a year, "We have begun to look at systems which would let us provide information to large numbers of people, automatically. The automated phone system had about 150 recorded messages about transsexualism," she said. "People would spend as long as an hour on the line, listening to the messages. We had planned on putting referral information on the line also, but a lightning strike took out the system in late February, and we have not had the funds to replace it.""AEGIS will be continuing to look at ways to automate information distribution with a replacement telephone system and via the internet," Denny said. "We will be setting up a web site which will include referral information. We're also looking at something Jessica Xavier calls Distributed Gender Education. Under this system, there would be many local nodes for information and referrals rather than one national point of dissemination. This system would be less likely to be disrupted. It would also make it easier for callers to talk to a live volunteer. Sometimes people need more than cold facts and information. They need to hear another human voice." |
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