Privacy

SAFETY:  Today especially, it is important to keep the transgender community safe and growing. No one is required to give us their legal name, address, or telephone number in order to become a member or participate in our events.  Any personal information you share will be kept in confidence. Only those who monitor the website and are leaders of events will have access to your membership information.

SECURITY: We will never divulge, sell, exchange, or release personal details to anyone or any organization. Please be careful with the contact information you choose to provide so that your privacy remains secure.  We encourage our members to use a fem name, or name different from their legal name if they need to remain anonymous. If you have concerns about using your primary email address, we recommend you establish a separate email account with a service such as Gmail and use this for your correspondence. We will never send mail to your home, or call you on the phone, unless you request it, and we will honor any special contact instructions you give us.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Although most of our members enjoy taking pictures, we have clear guidelines concerning photos taken at our events. We ask that all photographers get permission before taking anyone’s picture. Photographs may not be posted on the internet, published, or shared without permission from every person in the photo. We thank you in advance for being  respectful of others’ wishes when using your camera at our gatherings.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website. These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Who we share your data with

We do not share your data, email address, and images with third parties. If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue. For users that register on our website, we store only the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where your data is sent

Visitor comments are monitored and released only by the site administrators and members. These may be checked through an automated spam detection service.