Blog: Perspectives

On July 16-17, 2019, the US State Department hosted its second annual Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. While positioned as a human rights conference to promote freedom of religion and belief, and highlight persecution of religious minorities around the world, in fact it was a charade masking the underlying intention of undermining and challenging the universality and nature of human rights.

Nonbinary identities like my own are often disregarded, ignored, or at best, regarded with confusion. Especially in formal spaces. This was not the case at the event ‘Gender Diversity Beyond Binaries’ hosted at the UN on July 15, 2019, at the sidelines of the High Level Political Forum for Sustainable Development - marking the first time an event was dedicated entirely to trans and non-binary people’s lives at the forum. This intentional inclusion of nonbinary folks in formal spaces is desperately needed. It speaks to nonbinary people like myself on levels that binary people, especially cisgender people, could not begin to understand.

Yesterday, July 14th, was International Non-Binary Day! Nonbinary individuals don’t identify within the gender binary – that is, society’s traditionally assigned genders of either male or female. There are several different terms to describe this identity, like genderqueer, gender fluid, agender, gender non-conforming, and many more. The way people identify themselves is completely up to them, and it’s important to be aware of the multiple ways that they do!

Applications are open for OutRight's global LGBTIQ movement to advocate at the United Nations. Every December, OutRight hosts LGBTIQ activists from around the world in New York for a week of high-level meetings and activities around Human Rights Day (December 10th).

I didn’t want to go to the 2016 Trans March. I had come out as trans two years prior, dropped out of college, and moved back home to San Francisco. Now, I was having a hard time connecting with queer people in San Francisco and felt like I had no idea how to be a trans member of the queer community. Being trans made me feel more self-conscious than proud.

I did ballet throughout middle and high school. I had a light blue water bottle that I took with me from school to ballet. I never put any stickers on it – I didn’t know enough of myself at that point to feel comfortable advertising my identity in this way, and my experiences with ballet only served to reinforce this discomfort.