Coming Out First Person

Learning to Use Chopsticks: Coming Out as Korean-American

“At 27, I came out as Korean-American. I was always Korean, of course. I checked the “Asian” box when filling out a form. My ethnicity was written on my face in the shape of my eyes and my small flat nose. But until a few years ago, it wasn’t an identity I felt connected to. There were many identities that came first — poet, bisexual, queer, feminist, activist, organizer, fattie, vegan. Being Korean was a fact, but not an identity.”

Gender

Black Advocates Address Stigma, Discrimination Around Breastfeeding and Black Motherhood

“Black motherhood and bodily autonomy has been historically undermined and often robbed from Black women in numerous ways. From this country’s first visions of us as wild oversexed Jezebels able to easily produce the next generation of slaves and doting mammies, caretakers and nannies for our slave-master’s children, we haven’t been seen as individual and capable loving nurturers to children.”

Gender

Science Will Not Save Us: Medicine, Research Ethics, and My Transgender Body

“The growing “body of evidence” emerging from biological and medical research, according to some commentators, speaks loudly and clearly: transgender people exist, science says. Of course, we already knew that… Any responsible approach to folding science into advocacy efforts should not only understand what scientific research says, but how and why it came to say what it does.”

Gender

Asking the Question: When Public Interrogation of Trans Women’s Bodies Turns into Open Sexualized Violence

“Beyond being merely invasive, there are situations in which trans women can detect a seed of violence in these kinds of questions, which in numerous cases has manifested in actual violence. Last week in Atlanta just such a situation led to an extreme and violent incident in which two trans women were attacked, and one was beaten and forcibly stripped naked in public, evidently as a form of punishment for resisting such interrogation.”