By the community, for the community

About HPV+ME

HPV+ME was created by Wendybird with funding from Women’s Health and Equality Queensland.

About Wendybird

Wendybird is a not-for-profit, peer led Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ+) grass roots community organisation based in Brisbane. Wendybird works to intentionally grow safer and always supportive communities for people of diverse bodies, genders, relationships and sexualities and their friends, families and children. We do this work so folks have a community to participate in, and a place to experience connection, acceptance and belonging, resulting in improved mental health and wellbeing.

Learn more about Wendybird

About Women's Health and Equality QLD

Women’s Health and Equality Queensland (WHEQ) is a not-for-profit organisation whose purpose is to advance the health and wellbeing of all Queensland women. WHEQ has the goal to make high quality, appropriate healthcare and information accessible to all women via a range of modalities, and supports a diversity of women including those who have diverse bodies, sexualities and genders.

Learn more about WHEQ

How

HPV+ME

was developed

HPV+ME was developed by the LGBTIQ+ community, in collaboration and consultation with LGBTIQ+ people, to create a relevant and engaging campaign for LGBTIQ+ people.

Wendybird received funding from Women's Health and Equality Queensland to develop a cervical screening campaign specifically for lesbian and bisexual women and transgender men, who are often invisible in or excluded from traditional cervical screen awareness campaigns, resulting in less participation in prevention screening and higher rates of cervical cancer.

Due to the recognition that HPV can and does impact all people regardless of their gender or sexuality in a multitude of ways, the scope grew and evolved to become a HPV awareness campaign for all LGBTIQ+ people.

Wendybird facilitated a consultation process with people from across the LGBTIQ+ communities to identify the priorities of the campaign, develop key messages, decide what information should be included, and how this campaign should be styled and designed to engage LGBTIQ+ people.

To ensure that correct and accurate health information was included content was developed in consultation with Cervical Cancer Australia and trusted LGBTIQ health professionals.

This is the first targeted LGBTIQ+ HPV health promotion campaign developed in Queensland.

HPV+ME uses the initalism of ‘LGBTIQ+’ to refer to all people who have bodies, genders, and sexualities that are seen to be outside the cisgender and hetrosexual society norms, including those who are lesbian, gay, same-gender attracted, bisexual, transgender, gender diverse, non-binary, intersex, queer, asexual, pansexual, Sistergirl or Brotherboy.

LGBTIQ+ people and communities are diverse and have many different and evolving ways of describing ourselves. In short, if this campaign speaks to you, this campaign is for you regardless of which words or initials you do or don’t identify with.

For comprehensive information about people with intersex varations, please visit Intersex Human Rights Australia https://ihra.org.au/

For information about the health of transgender, gender diverse and non-binary people, please visit AusPATH https://auspath.org/