Celebrating Gender Identity | Raising awareness and celebrating gender identity through a video competition.

What is the problem you found?

The main problem found while researching the topic of “gender identity” was the lack of acceptance towards people who do not identify as their sex assigned at birth. The lack of acceptance is associated with the lack of exposure because people tend to disregard unknown facts/information. In addition, a recent report found that 43 percent of trans and gender diverse people don’t feel safe in public, and 32 percent don’t feel safe on public transport. This suggests that gender diverse people are more likely to be assaulted or abused in public. Hence, we believe raising awareness would have a positive impact on people’s understanding of gender identity and make our society more safe, accommodating and diverse.

What is your opportunity?

How might we as members of society increase awareness on gender identity and have a positive impact on people’s understanding of gender identity by using the cyberspace as a platform to create a video competition.

Who is your audience?

Our primary customers for this competition are high school students since increasing their understanding on this topic would result in a more accepting future society. In addition, teachers can enrol students who have elected media arts as one of their subjects in high school to partake in this video competition as one of their assignments.

What Is Your Solution?

In order to decrease the percentage of inequity in our community, we are proposing our prototype of a video competition. Our prototype is an online video competition which is presented as an user-friendly website. As depicted in the prototype, students will be offered 3 distinct topics and will be required to create a video on any one of those topics and upload their entry before the stated deadline. All videos will be judged by a panel of judges and the winner will be announced shortly after the deadline. The winner will be awarded with a $100 Dymocks gift card while the runner up will be awarded with a $50 Dymock’s gift card. Raising awareness through a competition is significantly effective since it makes the learning process enjoyable and delightful. Researchers have determined that the human brain processes videos 60,000 times faster that text. In addition, videos encourage information retention, and they have a more profound emotional impact on its audience than any other modes of communication. Therefore, raising awareness on gender identity through a video competition would be the ideal approach to making our society more safe, accommodating and diverse. Implementing this protype would benefit individuals and our community as a whole since raising awareness would lead to stronger community bonds and would enable individuals to be authentic without the fear of being judged. Hence, we are striving to establish a safe cyber platform where videos of personal experience, history and/or understanding of gender identity can be shared with the broader community.