By Melissa Faliveno — 2020
Melissa Faliveno reflects on the insufficiencies of words like “bisexual” and “queer.”
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CLEAR ALL
At 25, Harnaam Kaur holds the world record as the youngest woman to have a full beard. For years, she was bullied. Now she’s an Instagram star.
The ever-viral artist discusses his meteoric rise and the pressures of being a Black gay musician on a global stage.
Xe/xem, ze/zir, and fae/faer are catching on as alternatives for transgender and nonbinary people
A grassroots civil-dialogue movement creates a new kind of safe space: one that invites students from across the political spectrum to discuss controversial issues, including policing, gender identity, and free speech itself.
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Like most veterans, I found the transition from military to civilian life a struggle—a tougher struggle than I had anticipated. For me, I found that one of my trickier struggles was with my identity.
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When I told my family I was trans, one of their initial reactions was, “But you’re so hairy! It’s going to be so difficult to remove all your hair to be a woman, so you should just give up.” They were zeroing in on my body hair as the barrier for me to be seen as feminine.
For LGBTQ youth in particular, the Internet can be a refuge—a safe place to feel less alone. For queer youth to feel normal, they need to see, read and hear the voices of others who look like them and use the same identifying labels.
“Representation and visibility is given to us by larger power structures, but what do we give ourselves? I’m more interested in that. What questions are we asking ourselves to grow and heal? To challenge the ways this world constantly teaches us to hate ourselves?”
We’re exploring what it means to be queer and have a body, with essays about the ways our bodies are legislated and discriminated against, the strategies we’ve used to find belonging in them, and how we’re breaking down the stereotypes, preconceptions, and fetishization that many of us endure.
LGBTQ legal strategy has long focused on equal protection. But if identity itself can be political speech, the First Amendment could be our future.