Trash Your Gender

📌After a year of floating about (!!!) Trash Your Gender is delighted, ecstatic, orgiastic to re-energise our thirst in for a night of queer explosions on the 10th of May.

Trash your Gender is dusting off our high-heeled boots and picking our mascara out of the dustbin and getting ready for an amazing collaboration with Kıbrıs’ta 17 Mayıs / May 17 in Cyprus, in preparation for a week of celebrations leading up to the march on May 18th.

📌INCLUDING PERFORMANCES BY:

– Gravity Grave
– Rubina Fuego

Trash Your Gender (TYG) parties are an underground movement for queer and queer-friendly folks in Cyprus that is beginning to spread rapidly, and has already undermined several oppressive structures across the world. Join us in our attempt to pounce on Cypriot patriarchy and prowl our way to a queer utopia. First in our safe space: the lab, to the settlements of normativities, and then… the WORLD…!

TYG is a party where people can feel comfortable in undressing their everyday gender performance and simply becoming something else, for one night. Not a carnival, not a circus, TYGs give you the opportunity to question the idea of gender perceived on you in how you perform it. Becoming something else in TYG is an exercise on your self, in party form! These words are wise after all, “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”

TYG is ‘a political laboratory to experiment with gender expression’, bring your materials with which to build and deconstruct. Bring make-up and other tools!

📌 On Safer Space

This is a political laboratory to experiment with gender expression. We want to make sure that it is that. This is not a carnival. Nor a circus. Nor a time to ridicule. And not a joke. Our way of living is not a costume. Appreciation, not appropriation. Just imagine the person who likes make-up, ties, skirts and men’s shoes being ridiculed by a white straight man reaffirming their masculinity, by caricaturing his stereotype of a pushti/puşt at the carnivals. Some things might not be obvious to you, but offensive & degrading to others. Duh.

TYG has a zero tolerance on racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, biphobic, femme phobic, ageist, ableist, classist, xenophobic, heteronormative, homonormative or oppressive behavior or language of any kind.

While this is easy said on paper, managing your isms and phobias is a pre-emptive exercise to catch yourself in assuming for others, on to others, and preventing yourself from oppressing others. Deal with your shit. If unsure, ask questions. This is a party, don’t make it suck, and make room for others. If not, we reserve the right to deny space to anyone that breaks these principles.

‘Safer-space’ unfortunately can provide a false sense of security. There will always be some people that will always experience oppression regardless of any cultivated environment, and queer spaces are not exempt from that. That does not mean though that we are resigned to the status-quo. Some of us need to check our privileges. Some of us need to uproot our internalized patriarchy. And all of us need to check our language. If you experience or witness behaviour that crosses your boundaries, makes you feel uncomfortable or if you feel the need to talk to someone, we will be there collectively to offer solutions and support.

DATE: 10.05.2019

Time: 22:00

Location: Papa Bar