Results for: be the change
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A Tale of Two Mommies (Or Who Wore the Maternity Pants?)
“She would have loved to carry our child. Would have met the body changes with joy. That she was physically barred from being pregnant did not make the situation easier. She hid it well. But now I understood why she looked forward to the birth with such clear-eyed intensity.”
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PHOTOESSAY: Taking My Chosen Body Outdoors
I decided to meet Syd in Oakland to celebrate my newly healed chest. We hiked out into the Happy Boulders, selected our first climb and immediately took off our shirts. It was glorious, but also terrifying and vulnerable.
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When You Wear An Agbada
“To understand my relationship with this symbol of masculinity, we’ll have to start with my journey of queerness I had no idea I had embarked upon until I was turning 28, the sleeves of my buba — the tailored Agbada shirt — all rolled up to my elbows and my fingers rubbing down on the clit of a girl I had only met a couple of times prior to that moment.”
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The Implication of a Bag
“I was unwilling to buy a binder. It seemed like a declaration, the kind I was nowhere near ready to make yet. But for that winter, I had the bag.”
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I Still Don’t Look Like Myself
“I can’t be a woman without the right clothes. I’ve been on HRT a year by now, but I still haven’t been gendered correctly by a stranger. It’s a lot of things. I try not to think about bone structure, about shoulders and necks and foreheads.”
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Birthdays I Remember
Melanie was born on August 5, 1982. I know this because I fell in love with her in fifth grade.
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She Never Liked Me Anyway
Dementia used to be called madness, I was told.
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Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be (Lesbian) Cowboys
“I wanted her to smile at me that way. I wanted her to say my name. This turned out to be easy.”
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Line Breaks for Resistance: How Black Poetry Lets Us Rescue Ourselves
If Alice Walker once said “hard times require furious dancing,” then hard times call for reading poetry, particularly black poets. Follow zaynab’s journey in reconnecting with black poetry as a means of daily survival and understand why reading the work of black poets can enhance our collective understandings of what it means to cultivate and sustain resistance.
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How Whitney Houston Taught Me the Greatest Love of All For My Queer Black Self
My journey to self-love through the influence of Whitney Houston’s life and music.
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Shoulder Pads and Short Cuts: How Grace Jones Made Me Powerful
A love letter to the only woman that stole my heart and snatched my scalp at the same damn time.
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Queer Latinx Love is Resistance: A Collection of Vignettes
“There’s nothing more I want to remember than every moment and sensation we shared. Our grinding hips at Queer Cumbia, feeling your drunken sweat drip onto my freshly implanted tits. The way we sloppily made out and smeared our red and burgundy lips all over our mouths, noses, forehead, and neck.”
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Birth of The Nintendo Generation
It was the end of my innocence when I realized that being Black or being Queer in this country could get you killed. This was the time before Hurricane Katrina, before 9/11, before Ferguson. Before. Before. Before.
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Leaving It on the Court: When My World Changed, Sports Stayed
My teammates didn’t know that I was ending my run in this men’s league because I had to leave my male identity on the court.
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A Queer Fat Femme’s Adventure To Find A Bra That Fits
“It was daunting to go in for a custom fitting but I’m a convert, now. I definitely feel way more confident in my choice of size and style.”
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Call and Response: On Body Snarking and The Word “Tr*nny”
“If you do feel the need to ask if someone is transgender or not, first ask yourself why. Why is it your business? Why do you need to know? And will it change anything you think about this person?”
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Identity Theft: A Trans* Intersex Woman On Traumas and Surgery
“It’s unfortunate, unfair and illogical that intersex people get assigned a gender and a sex and are expected to either stick with them or fix someone else’s mistake with expensive, risky surgery on their genitals.”
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Transitioning While Genderqueer (Despite the Standards of Care)
“It would have been nice to share my entire truth with her, but because of the Standards of Care, I didn’t; I feared my story would be seen as diverging from the typical trans* narrative too much.”
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I Had Facial Feminization Surgery
“I paid a dude to knock me unconscious, peel back my face, and cut out chunks of my skull and jaw.”
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The Incredibly True Story Of How Cissexism Made My Same-Sex Marriage Legal
Thanks to a simple governmental regulation, my wife and I were able to exploit a legal loophole and obtain a federally recognized marriage.