Genderqueer Chicago

Genderqueer Chicago members circa 2018.

Genderqueer Chicago is an in-person community group that hosted discussions and clothing swaps.

Meetings were "open to anyone... wanting to talk and think about gender" (except reporters and researchers). A former member described the group's attendees circa 2009 as "pink-haired, pierced and denim-clad mischief-makers" who were often loud by the standards of the library where they convened. Another member described GQC members as "mostly queer, genderqueer, and/or trans-identified".

The group's website said they sought to give people a place to discuss new perspectives on gender, to create visibility for gender variant people, and to make Chicagoans in general aware of the concerns of gender variant people.

Every other month, the group had special meetings where they assembled blanket forts in the meeting room and discussed topics chosen by members that day (rather than a single topic chosen ahead of time).

Some attendees chose to keep socializing after the end of most meetings, relocating to a nearby 24-hour diner.

Ryan of the Beyond Bryn Mawr blog called the group "one of the reasons [he] moved to Chicago". He praised the group for helping him make friends in a new city and for wecolming people like him whose genders fell outside a binary of "trans woman" or "trans man".

Lee Andel Dewey, a GQC member, adopted the group's working agreements and discussion-centered format for a group they facilitated called CommunityCave. Dewey said that taking these elements from GQC made CommunityCave more successful.