Indiana Transgender Rights Advocacy Alliance (INTRAA)

About Our Logo

Monday, 06. 29. 2009

What’s up with the water?

Several people have wondered over the years what is the connection between transgender rights in Indiana and water. Here’s the story behind INTRAA’s logo and inspiration.

It all goes back to when INTRAA was forming in 2002. We were holding bi-weekly meetings with about 8 of us working through heady stuff like organizational structure, goals, objectives, mission, vision, bylaws drafts, etc. We were talking about how to mobilize different segments of the community and what educational, political, and advocacy efforts would be required to really make a difference. We had flip charts filled on three of the four walls of the dining room we were meeting in and it dawned on me that if all this came together it would create a huge ripple effect not only within the transgender community but also within the larger LGBT and Allied communities.

We were organizing at the same time that ICON was really coming into its own, at the same time that the Indy Rainbow Chamber was launching, that Indiana Equality was in its early formative stages. Several of us had also come together to form a loose-knit Domestic Partner Benefits coalition that eventually spawned working groups that formed what later became known as the Greater Indianapolis Fairness Alliance. Lots of organizing energy was being generated in several different locations both in Indianapolis and across the state. Each group that was forming, together with already established LGBT and allied organizations, along with each individual in those groups had a chance to make a real difference by banding together and creating a million “centers of energy” for LGBT organizing in Indiana.

Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.

That ripple builds others.

Those ripples–crossing each other from a million different centers of energy–build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and injustice.

–Senator Robert F. Kennedy, 1966

So that’s what’s up with the water. We are essentially all droplets of water that working in concert from different centers of energy to sweep down the mighty walls of oppression.

It is the essence of all coalition work really.