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I think in the end, the review does come down to your assesment. Basically the service reveiw of all the services outside of the womyns center were composed more or less from interviews with the co-ordinator, and at most 15 responses from the student population at large.

So yeah, at best, (and I am willing to give the review the benefit of the doubt) it was a bunch of non queer folk reviewing a service that they didn't much use?

How did non-queer folk think you could make the queer service better? Be more accomedating to non-queers. (Well gee, who would of guessed.) The fact of the matter is, i'm a fairly active volunteer within glow, and I will admit our 'non-queer' attitude needs some work. However, so does many issues within the organization such as bi-inclusion, lesbian-alienation, SOF support, absolutely every aspect of our trans-support needs to be overhaulled (and by overhaulled, I mean created, cause we have next to nothing). I know this, the top level of Glow knows this, the people who conducted the service review, are probably not even aware of what 'bi-inclusion' is...

You can't much fault the service review for that, they are students volunteering their time, and shouldn't be expected to know the details about how to run a good LGBT service.

Which I assume is kinda why we have seperate volunteers who do know how to (or are atleast interested in) running a good LGBT service working towards doing that.

I'm not saying that GLOW should be allowed to run around and spend Feds money willy-nilly (all 1000 dollars that's in their anual budget), yes there should be oversight, but it should be oversight directed towards how well it's following it's mandate. Not in defense of it's mandate. The feds service review would have been much better received, and much more productive if it focused on the relationship between Feds and it's services. The review should have looked at how Feds could better equip it's services to fulfil their mandates.

And the mandates themselves, if they need reviewing? That's something for debate in council, and definantly a question that should be brought to students, but in a careful way, and with more than 15-20 students a service giving their input.

Which is part of the problem. So many people are afraid of "discriminating against the minority" that sometimes the best decisions aren't made.

"I'm guessing that having four probably straight men and a probably straight woman"
What's wrong with them being male? What's wrong with them being straight? Are you saying that as male, they're not qualified to present a review? Or that because they're straight, they're not qualified to be on a committee?

An analogy to discrimination in hiring processes. Suppose you are an employer with 4 positions open, and 8 people apply (4 women and 4 men). As employer, you feel that the 4 most qualifed to make you money would be the 4 men. Is that discrimination? Or is that just business sense? Yet so many companies and schools sometimes seem to care more about ratio than about who's best suited for the position.

If it was 5 gay women on that committee, what would you say then?

Presure for 'equal opportunity' gender hiring practices, and the critique of the IAC offered above aren't exactly analagous, but I see where you are coming from.

I'm not a big fan of the politics of difference, but I think both of our complaints were more focused around the lack of numbers that participated in the review, not any specific demographic within that group. My comment that a primarily non-queer IAC generated reccomendations that were focused mainly on Glows dealings with non-queers was not desinged to disparage either the IAC members, or the recomendations they made, but simply to point out that they lacked depth that better research or representation could have provided. I'm not the sort of person who thinks if you represent every minority on a comitee that all of a sudden every problem is fixed. I don't care if the comitee is 5 lesbians, 5 straight guys, or a group so ethnicially, sexually and genderly diverse that it puts the captain planet team to shame, if it doesn't do it's research in the proper fashion, it's going to end up making ill-informed recomendations.