Mm-hmm

... that I hear all the time are that, you know, like, "You're always upset about something," or, um, I've heard people say that I'm a bully.

Uh, and I just think that those are misconceptions.

[laughs] I think that especially right now in a world where we have so much to be fucking upset about, and people are not really having the conversations that need to be had, everybody is trying to get their engagement up.

Everybody is trying to say the thing that needs to be said for the corporate donors to book them for whatever.

I am trying to mi- mirror what I'm hearing in the conversations that we have when the cameras are off, right? What are people saying when they're not thinking about their title at their job, or when they're not thinking about that nextdoor neighbor that they want to use for their boat this summer, or what their, uh, what they would say if their kids' friends weren't around because they're not sure how their parents think, right? Those are the conversations that I wanna have, and typically, those conversations require a certain level of passion and emotion.

And as a person who is a triple minority in a lot of spaces, I am pissed the fuck off, and I don't wanna have to come to my social media and, you know, speak like this in order to be received as somebody who should be listened to because I'm a docile woman who you should be able to listen to because I'm not raising my voice versus a, a s- over a certain octave.

But what's the one thing people do for attention that drives you crazy?

Mm-hmm.

And they didn't know what to do with me, and so I had to advocate from my freshman year to the time that I graduated, I had to advocate to have safe dorm housing.

I had to advocate to make sure that I wasn't allowed to be beat up on for no reason.

I had to advocate to even get my degree put in my legal name because I fought to get my name changed before graduation so that I would not have to look at that as a stain on my history looking back at one of the most like pivotal moments of my life.

And so I, I spent a lot less time thinking about the aesthetics of it all and a lot more time figuring out how to decipher Title IX so that it would work in my favor when I went to the, the academic affairs office to plead my case for a better dorm or to plead my case to be in the girls' dorm room or whatever the case may be.

I did not really start to think about aesthetic until after I graduated, and I was in the real world working at MAC.

And aesthetic became a thing because now I was working with other cis women, and being the big 5'10" girl in the store of all these 5'4", 5'7"s makes me stick out.

Okay.

I wanna just dive in here and get your perspective on, what do you think happens to an individual on a psychological level, especially a young queer person, when they don't see themselves positively reflected in the world around them?

Well, you have one of two things that can happen, right? There are folks like me, who will do their best to become those models of those things that we didn't see because we recognize that that is a supply and demand, right? But then there's also the unfortunate side, where you have folks who don't see themselves represented, and so they fall into the status quo and the stereotypes of what the media tells them that they have to be, which oftentimes for queer folks, and especially when you add on the layers of intersection that, um, go along with being a queer Black or brown person, it doesn't leave you a lot of options, right? And so there's a lot of unsavory characters that tend to prey on that, and there are a lot of folks who have just also become jaded, and that's become their reality, and so they preach that to these kids.

And I think that while both of those things are options, I wish that more people chose, you know, that first one, which is to become the thing that they don't see rather than lean into the stereotype.

Mm-hmm

... uh, and also being warned that I, I wouldn't be protected if this were to happen again.

So essentially it was just like, "You know, you can start the club at your own risk, but this is what happened last time, and we are not sure how helpful we're gonna be this time either," you know? And I couldn't help but to think about the fact that I was creating something that was necessary for the queer kids on campus.

It was necessary for me on campus.

A couple of weeks before really buckling down on the idea, I was sitting in a window in my dorm room wanting to jump out of the fifth floor, and that was my reality on that campus.

What went through your mind and your heart when you heard that these justices, these six justices had upheld Tennessee's ban on gender affirming care?

I think the first thing that ran through my mind was, where is your humanity? Right? Um, we, we talk about this a lot but we never really zoom in on this lens of humanity.

Are we not people first, right? When we think about the fact that these are not just children.

These are parents, these are doctors, these are folks that really are, are experts about the folks in question.

And we're allowing the government to come in and regulate hormones before a person's physician or their parent can say, "I'm okay with this," or, "I'm not okay with this or that.

This is good for your body or bad for your body." And we've had so many physicians come out and say that this does no detriment to children that are in need of it.

And yet and still we're fighting these same cynical bi- battles because we have some folks in the public that believe that they deserve to have the right to determine how people get to show up in society.

(laughs)