Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Being queer and being a person of color are not additive identities — they are not two separate things you carry in two separate compartments. They are entangled in ways that shape every aspect of how...
Read article →Music is where I learned that I was not alone before I had language for why I had felt so alone. I was sixteen, listening to a mixtape a friend had made — half of which I had never heard — and somethi...
Read article →There is a specific pleasure I take in watching old films now, knowing what to look for. The best friend who never marries and is slightly too devoted. The villain with the limp wrist and the knowing...
Read article →Queer culture has done a lot of serious work. It has built political movements, fought for legal recognition, documented medical crises, processed collective trauma, and held space for some of the mos...
Read article →Drag has been called many things: performance art, political provocation, community ritual, pure entertainment, subversive theater, and — by people who do not understand it — a threat. The reality is...
Read article →Ballroom culture is one of the most misunderstood and undervalued traditions in American history. I first learned about it through a friend who vogued competitively in New York, and watching him move...
Read article →Few questions generate more heat in online LGBTQ+ spaces than the distinction between bisexual and pansexual identity. Some people feel strongly that the terms describe meaningfully different things....
Read article →Fashion has never been neutral. The way we dress is always a communication — about who we are, who we want to be, what community we belong to, and what we refuse to hide. For LGBTQ+ people, style has...
Read article →One of the most consistent findings in LGBTQ+ mental health research is that community matters. Specifically, having access to people who share your experience, who use language that fits, who do not...
Read article →Bisexual women are the largest single group within the LGB population according to most survey data, and among the most poorly served by both mainstream culture and LGBTQ+ spaces. The specific forms o...
Read article →Bisexual visibility is a phrase that shows up frequently in LGBTQ+ advocacy contexts — on Bisexual Visibility Day, in discussions of media representation, in arguments for bisexual-specific programmin...
Read article →Bisexual men occupy one of the most invisible positions in contemporary discussions of sexuality and gender. They are less visible than gay men, less studied than bisexual women, and less understood —...
Read article →The term "bi-cycle" circulates in some bisexual communities to describe something that many bi people recognize in themselves: a kind of recurring fluctuation in how prominently different aspects of t...
Read article →Being bisexual in a relationship where you read as straight to the outside world is a strange kind of double life. You are not hiding anything from your partner. You are not being dishonest about who...
Read article →Bisexual erasure takes different forms in different contexts. In gay and lesbian spaces, it often looks like skepticism about whether bisexuality is a stable or real identity. In heterosexual spaces,...
Read article →Monosexism is the assumption — usually unstated, often structural — that sexual orientation is binary: that you are either attracted to people of your own gender, or to people of a different gender, a...
Read article →Bisexual identity carries a particular burden that monosexual identities — whether gay or straight — largely do not: the burden of proof. Something about being attracted to more than one gender seems...
Read article →Deadnaming — using a transgender person's birth name after they have changed it — is one of the most common forms of harm that transgender people encounter, and one of the most persistently misunderst...
Read article →Medical transition is not a single event. It is a sequence — sometimes slow, sometimes surprising, always personal. If you are standing at the beginning of that sequence, or somewhere in the middle wo...
Read article →The distinction between gender presentation and gender identity is one of those conceptual clarifications that sounds abstract until it suddenly makes a great deal of practical sense. They are related...
Read article →Every few months, the debate about transgender athletes resurfaces in sports media, legislative chambers, and social media feeds. It tends to generate a lot of heat and very little clarity. If you wan...
Read article →Detransition — the process of moving away from a gender transition one has undergone — has become one of the most politically contested topics in conversations about transgender identity. For some, it...
Read article →Gender-affirming care is a term that has become politically charged in ways that obscure what it actually describes. In the clinical context, gender-affirming care refers to a set of practices — medic...
Read article →Coming out is rarely a single announcement followed by a lifetime of being known. For most people, it is something that happens again and again — in the doctor's office, at a new job, with a stranger...
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