Culture

Maybe you’ve noticed: there’s been a shift in how people and movements that are anti-trans present themselves, and it feels designed to make them more palatable to people who would otherwise recoil at arguments that position trans people as threats. I’m going to go over some of the clues that a resource or person’s only concern is directing people away from trans-affirming care and towards harmful, anti-trans spaces or approaches.

Women who had to, or chose to, dress as men to access masculine environments to follow their calling are often overlooked in history. Enter the book Let Me Be Frank: A Book About Women Who Dressed Like Men to Do Shit They Weren’t Supposed to Do by Tracy Dawson, who talks here with Gabriel Leão.

A guide to finding queer media, even when it feels hard.

I’ve written a piece like this three times now. Every time I wrote one, I hoped with everything in me it would be the last time. That the people attacking trans youth and their families for political gain would get bored, or would see that their actions were only met with resistance and scorn. I...

We’re big fans of young people taking sex ed into their own hands. So, it’s no surprise we were thrilled to interview Tara Michaela, who founded the Youth Sexpert Program (YSP) when she was nineteen.

Caos.a (a play with the word “Causa”, Portuguese for “Cause”) began during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, and was created by television host Barbara Thomaz, with professor Ana Sharp, lawyer Natália Veroneze, advertising pro Flávia Zaparoli and actress Maira Dvorek. Gabriel Leão is here to tell you all about it.

TEAF’s Communications Director Denise Rodriguez explains the current state of the organization and abortion in Texas, and talks about how marginalized people do and will endure the worst of the brunt from both the recent changes due to the Dobbs decision as well as other restrictions and access issues that were already in place.

The Iranian Revolution was co-opted by the clerics who then claimed as an achievement the mass covering of an entire nation’s women’s hair. Who owns my hair, let alone my body, when a revolution in which women fought alongside men soon after declaring victory, enforced hijab? When you shave the hair under that enforced hijab, are you then the revolution of one, defying, disobeying, and disrupting? When you rip off that compulsory hijab in public and shave off your hair in public, are you finally completing the revolution that the theocrats and the misogynists stole from you?

Kate Adamo is a sex worker who heads up the policy and advocacy work at Reframe Health & Justice consulting, which supports organizations and movements engaging in “practices of care, compassion, and collaboration,” all through a harm reduction framework. Kate shared her thoughts on the necessity of sex workers and their perspective as we fight for reproductive autonomy, and the internalized sex phobia that progressive spaces still need to get rid of.

Saniya Lee Ghanoui is a historian and critical media studies scholar who focuses on the intersection of gender and sexuality, medicine, and media. Through her studies, she became intrigued by how society created stigma and taboo around the menstrual cycle, which led her to focus on critical menstrual studies investigating the construction and depiction of menstruation in television, the history of menstrual education films, as well as the history of sex education in the United States.