 They're still available for ordering and now enjoy our next talk. It's a little more tough of a topic, I would say, so it's about people who have a uterus because for them, it isn't always easy to be self-determined about their own bodies. That's because of lack of research time, sometimes, but also about lack of accessibility. And it's not self-evident that in gynecological practices you can feel welcome. And this is why our authors have published a book on gynecological self-determination. Hi, my name is Lena and I'm here with three other gynformants and we will talk about our collective and our activism. I will show you our website to introduce the concept. This is our website. It's called gynformation.de and it's about low-threshold information on gynecological treatments that can be filtered by different categories. And what is behind this is essentially a database of recommendations we receive from users about positive experience they have made in their gynecological practices and with gynecologists. And this is how you make recommendations. You can press this button which says recommend and you can fill in a poll that asks for certain data on the practitioners, but there are also poll points about accessibility, about the quality of treatment, the content of the treatment and different other aspects. But users are also asked to attribute themselves to certain groups, for example people with disabilities, non-binary people, etc. And our website reads in the poll and creates profiles that you can search and that you can also filter for different categories. For example if I'm a sexual and want a practitioner that is especially aware about that topic or you can add another category such as experience with sexualized violence and then you can also look for treatments, for example in this example birth, childbirth and then yeah that's it, you get your result and that's what the website is about. Our concerns are the right to self-information, enabling self-information, information about abortions for example is a very critical topic in Germany but also treatment that is free of discrimination and it's about the perspective of the patient that they have a right to quality treatment. Lisa is our expert on legal questions and she's been active in the group since its foundation in 2019 and we've been online since March 2020 by the way and Lisa maybe you can tell us about what differentiates us from other recommendation platforms like Yameda for example. Yeah this is one of the big questions that we asked ourselves in the beginning at the foundation because of course there is the risk of being sued if you do a website like that as an association so we wanted to minimize our own risks but there are differentiating categories we decided that we do not do negative recommendations we only have positive experiences on our websites internally there is the possibility to give feedback about bad experiences and we will verify and process that but we will not post it online on the website because that could get us into trouble legal trouble and the second big difference is that Yameda offers doctors premium profiles for money of course where you can add a picture and you can get ranked higher and stuff like that and of course we don't have that we offer objective filtering categories there's no way to rank yourself up financially so that differentiates us as well yeah from my perspective also we want to provide quick and secure access to this anti-discriminatory treatment because for people who are looking for good treatment and it's we don't want that they have to sift through all kinds of recommendation websites before they find valuable results and we hope to help here and yeah that is also why we founded this association because of political contexts and certain problems that we are reacting to and Lisa was also the one who whose idea was very important in our foundation and she's also done a lot of the press work I think many of those who are watching have made the experience that you often find negative experiences with gynecologists and many people are wondering how they can find a good practice and often you use oral recommendations from friends or family and with our database we don't just want to react to negative ratings and on the internet but also a political climate and often people aren't aware of their rights and don't have the terminology or the knowledge specific knowledge so at the moment sex is often thought of as a binary thing in the medical context and there is a lot of stigmatization of people such as trans individuals and also sex workers in gynecology medicine or medical science has a lot of problem with discrimination that results in real-life health issues we have lack of accessibility for wheelchair users or blind people we have ableism at doctors offices and also in gynecology sexualized violence is a topic where we need more awareness also sexual shaming happens in gynecological offices it can also become physical that's a long list unfortunately so this is why we found that the our collective so that we can make a positive difference with positive recommendations and ratings we as I said we work from the perspective of patients and our collective only includes people who have made first-hand experiences with gynecologists some of whom have medical knowledge but none of whom are actively treating patients themselves and Christina is our expert on data security and privacy and she's also active in other collectives but I would like to ask you Christina why is it so important that this collective is only made up of people who have made gynecological experiences themselves and who have experienced the perspective of the patient patient it is very important to all of us in the collective that we live our principles in all aspects and that concerns technology and data protection as well the whole concept of our collective is focused on the perspective of the patients because that is the core at the core of the information it's not just thought to be a tool or a database but it's thought as a community effort and community knowledge and our ways of communication and connections are ever-developing and ever-growing and it's also very important to us that this is reflected in the technological aspects and that we incorporate those perspectives already in planning since we launched our project I think we've made a lot of progress based on feedback which we incorporated and I think that this really enhances our platform and I hope that it will benefit us so that we can reach even more people and help them yes I think that is an important point that you have just mentioned Christina because there isn't just the website that we play with but several other channels that we used to reach the community and where our net activism as it were is being played out so maybe you could say something about the role that has in our work what Christina also mentioned so maybe you can talk about that and yes I think it's very important what you're saying there Christina we have a lot of knowledge that we gain from various groups that maybe have been fighting a long time before us for a change in health care and medical care and there is a long history there of queer trans feminist movements anti-racist movements and the service that we are offering with this list of course builds very much on this collective knowledge it's important to stress that many collectives come about or come into bloom I would say for example Red High Heels show there are lists by trans people recommending practitioners to each other and for the gynecological area we would like to learn from the feedback that we have gained there and we have we actually used forms a lot before we went into a better phase we had about 50 experts with various backgrounds and asked them for feedback which aspects we may have overlooked maybe we were thinking wrong that was an important part of our work and networking with these other collectives is really starting up now and I think each one of us is learning a lot there and the important thing I think is that there is no defensive that if at some point we will receive some criticism you may have forgotten this group or raised someone we may hear so we don't want to react defensively to that but actually thank these people for giving this knowledge to us and we try to react so we don't want to have someone looking after the technology the website or the press work that we really have to explain it to so we want this knowledge to really enable our work we don't go to every gynecologist in Germany and test whether they are cool or not we are relying on collective knowledge and yes I would like to add to that I thought it was really good that from the from the beginning when we were in the patient perspective we were very much aware that our collective could not cover all perspectives so we needed the feedback and we are very grateful for that and it's a necessary part of our work we value this very much and we continue to value that it's continuous process yes exactly that is something I wanted to say too and what I said at the beginning about social media being important to us they are important tool for reaching out and starting an exchange because the website as such does not have interactive features what we also have next to the actual search function is a blog where articles are published on topics such as gynecological gynecological self-determination and there are resources on a separate page on abortions how they how they happen there is a manifest that we wrote so we try to collect or start a collection of knowledge for the long term of what we've learned through the exchanges but of course much of that exchange happens in social media channels so that is of course an active part of our work too now this practical experience that is created through exchange and this DIY principle that we have carries over to a field that we don't know so well and don't have so much expertise about so we are learning so we haven't had any training so we are gathering experience and that carries over to the work within the collective in terms of active participants we are fairly large about 12 are more or less active and Christina maybe you can talk a little about the way we empower each other as the collective through exchange and the expertise we gain yes I do think that this is one of the strengths of this collective that we are that we bring so many different fields of experience and not just empower each other but actually in which each other's knowledge we have questions that each one of us may bring not just knowledge and various perspectives and as you've mentioned in the collective we have people with who are in the medical field and some are more in the communicative area and some in the legal area so these perspectives come together and they are all important for the collective and this networks in a way that a fantastic kind of concept is created and we have been really able to supplement each other very well and of course we follow the same principles and that means that we don't just stay within our own opinions and expertise but we network to search for new perspectives and develop the project further as you said it's not a static thing there are various processes and the feedback process is a very important one there if we get feedback we really value that and not regarded as destructive criticism so every feedback we get we can take a lot out of and sometimes we really are so grateful about the open attitude with which people react and and in which they help us develop the platform further and maybe from my own perspective I could just in and say that regarding the way that programming technology privacy email encryption and all that is handled I actually I don't really come from that area but I find it very empowering to have people that are ready to run a small workshop for us the crypto party perhaps and we're not just getting knowledge about gynecology our bodies or as on our rights as patients but also knowledge about tools which we can use for activist work so there is a further empowerment process there also concerning people that have a legal perspective so that gives me the security that I have a good basis on which I can speak and act so that is a very important process again from you and everyone else the expand extended community we all learn from that from all that and not just within our own collective but also with the other collectives that are in the same process and that is so interesting particularly in times of corona if you think about activism there and accessibility of resources and a networking that maybe uses online media much more yes exactly that is extremely enriching and we organize as a collective in working groups that take on various tasks but as you've just said they run workshops so we give workshops to each other on sensitive language or mindful language so we can actually gain these bits of information and knowledge which makes it very interesting and Lisa you told me that show the work you have become aware of issues in the legal field about equal treatment within gynecological treatment and maybe you can talk about that a little you have been muted sorry I was listening so intently yes thanks for the question I would say that there is a general trend in the legal sciences regarding the relationship between practitioner and patient there are more information obligations now but at the same time there are aspects that have been disregarded completely for example I don't want to go into too much into too much detail but there is a law for equality that says that services should be offered to all people and if someone doesn't do that then legally there is the question whether that is discrimination and this is very important in industrial relationships labor relationships but strangely it's not used a lot in the practitioner-patient relationship which means that certain patients will not be treated by gynecologists so that is a question that's in your law studies simply doesn't come up and the mainstream legal science doesn't deal with that and I recognize in work that much of the literature is written by cis men generated by cis men who disregard these topics entirely or if they deal with them well they just have shitty attitudes I have to put it that way and actually I think these are against the constitution as such yeah so these are questions that are important and that within our working groups we have an exchange about and I think that is so enriching this is really great yes that to me is very important to how this diversity really is important to us it's not just a nice thing to have different perspectives but really extremely important to find solutions and the feeling that I think for the first time I had in this collective to really be taken seriously with these problems and that these problems are something that we have to work on absolutely it is well known that research on various symptoms that happen occurring in this area is not as active as research in other areas so that abortions are not taught in medical training so this really is a structural problem and we are just a small drop in the ocean there but I think we can give incentives to look at certain issues we maybe work to make things more visible but we also look for pragmatic solutions that may get you to a good point even if the structural problems persist that gets me towards the end but I would like to ask around what you wish for for the future from a project like this and what the topics are that you would like to look at and that maybe feel very tough and large for you at the moment so what can be done now with us in the future who wants to say something to that I can start sorry I would say there's a lot of potential still for improvement as you said before I would wish for medical training to change in the way that not just that the cis male isn't the perceived normal and that instead discriminatory experiences are brought to the table and there's training and discussion about how you can prevent them and also the potential for errors and diagnostics need to be addressed because certain symptoms and I often overlooked and that needs to become a topic in education as well maybe you could say something about the topics within the collective of course there are different plans one plan that we're concretely working on is to get into contact with gynecologists more and that we use the knowledge that we get from this project to make concrete improvements and approach people with easy to do that would help us as patients and I also dream of a better networking that we can also apply our best practices from good information to other topics and areas for example in therapy I could imagine or even for general practitioners practitioners we could copy paste some of the strategies but of course we would need more networks and new people in order to do that and we would also love more reach so that more people use our service and also to be found in search engines and also paragraph 218 and 219 and the German basic law need to be gotten rid of yeah Christina last words from you and I don't have any additions I'm just very happy and very blessed to be working with you girls and let's continue our good practices yeah that's it from our presentation and see you in Q&A in a minute no sound again from Julia so again unfortunately there is no sound so nothing to interpret at the moment I should get into lip reading the sound is back on at the moment we're only working in Germany but in all states so of course unfortunately as we depend on collaboration from people our reach is a bit patchy so we don't have that much coverage in some of the states and it would also be difficult for us to cover the whole German speaking countries because yeah we're a bit too busy for that at the moment and maybe that goes into Lisa's topic but there are differences regarding legal foundations regarding data protection and also abortion but there are similar projects in France in French Switzerland and in Austria we also have queer med which is a similar portal for medical practices so there are similar projects in other countries you were talking about the resource question many people are really thankful for that but there are people who would like to support you so the question goes out how can we support you there are different approaches we have a blog which we mentioned on our website where you can read more in-depth articles and we're always looking for contributors who want to write articles that we can publish and our core collective has a relatively fixed structure already but there is an email address which you can use to contact us and then we can see how you could support us and also sharing is caring even if you don't have the capacity to work in the collective you can always increase our attention for example yesterday we got a very important Instagram share with 80 thousand followers which got us 500 new followers so after that we had like 20 more contributions so if you have some way to increase our reach you're very welcome to use that but we're also looking into SEO how to find our website more quickly so if you have made good experiences please do fill in our polls so yeah participate and that will help us so just get in touch with you right yeah all right how many people are working in your collective and you mentioned working groups how many of those do you have and on which topics we're about 12 people at the moment but it varies greatly depending on our resources because of course this is all voluntary work which we do in addition to our actual jobs so yeah we have different working groups for example on PR texting legal website issues legal issues yeah you said that the polls we all do evaluations blog writing glossaries yeah there's always something to do so I think our structure can be maintained as long as we don't get too big because we have very close and tight knit collaboration and of course we're dealing with confidential data so it's very important that we know who we're working with oh yeah and translation is a big topic we're working on translation at the moment English is the first language we're working with so one last question I think we still have five minutes left you can still post your questions so one question what is the feedback he got so far of course there's some critical feedback which we mentioned at the panel sometimes we were criticized that we didn't have enough coverage of certain topics and experiences that weren't included and since we've been online we've been we've been getting into it more and more and we've reached a larger community and we've gotten positive feedback from people who haven't been to a gynecological office for a long time and now finally dare to go back because of us and that is very good and also sometimes we when we get negative feedback about certain practitioners we always make a collective decision on how to proceed maybe one feedback that was a bit scary to me actually from gynecologists we developed a process on the abortion topic getting in touch about that and there's a tendency for some doctors officers who don't want to be mentioned which I think is because of a societal tendency to suppress this topic that some practices don't want to get public with that did you get anti-feminist feedback I haven't seen any but of course we are aware that that is a risk if you are because people are searching the net for certain content and that is a threat that we are aware of but I haven't done remember any emails or dms from that corner well there was a transphobic comment on Twitter but that was more played reflected through us to a different account or something but I think apart from that it went pretty well so we've been lucky so far fingers crossed but of course one does the work as Lisa has said in the knowledge in that awareness yes of course that is nice to hear and I am keeping my fingers crossed that it should continue one last question I have maybe there will be others forthcoming how is it with translating this page into simple language have you thought about that Christina maybe you can talk about this yes we had this we were aware of this need from the start but we didn't want to do it in the way that one of us will now sit down and do it all of that but we wanted to find someone who could really support us well in that and really know what really know what that means to have an offering in simple language because of course this should be something to enrich our offering and not just a side track so if someone is watching that can translate into a simple language it would be a great feedback to hear from you we cannot of course offer any jobs but we would gladly have someone join that collective who would work with us with us on that so yes thank you for the talk and there'll be a big blue button room that you can use to talk more the link to that is in the at the bottom of the question pad but one last question for me how what is the best way to reach you after this day is over or if I watch the recording of this talk how can I get in touch well the best thing I would have said is email and contact contact at information.de and of course you can use all the other channels Instagram Twitter Facebook a little you don't you can't be just too well on Facebook Insta and Twitter that is where we respond quickly and also quite importantly you can email us with encryption too fantastic thank you very much for giving us this information thank you for watching taking part asking questions maybe and maybe for your continued discussions in big blue button so this was the presentation of information thank you and thank you