“Gender self-determination is vital and I can feel great about who I am when I am at home. But I live a life where I engage with other people and doing what feels good for me is a lot more challenging when I step outside the door. With pronouns specifically, it’s hard not to feel like you are dependent on others to ‘validate’ your gender, or rather, it’s hard not to feel like your gender is not valid when people use the wrong pronoun.”

I had heard about Reina Gossett and Grace Dunham’s close relationship, and how it was informing some incredible work together, so I sought them out to find out more — over the course of our afternoon together in NYC, our conversation covered everything from the damages of biological essentialism to the radical power of empathy to how important it is to feel sexy sometimes.