By Karen Mizoguchi — 2021
“I can’t wait for people to laugh along with me as I attempt to make sense of some of our most pressing issues,” Jonathan Van Ness tells PEOPLE.
Read on people.com
CLEAR ALL
We talked to the writer about his debut memoir How We Fight for Our Lives and his move from poetry to prose.
Confusion over why autism is so prevalent among transgender people may be limiting their access to medical care.
Autistic queer folk may experience struggles for acceptance in both identities.
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.
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.
One of life’s paradoxes is that we are encouraged to “be ourselves,” but are often punished when we do.
After generations in the shadows, the intersex rights movement has a message for the world: We aren’t disordered and we aren’t ashamed.
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.
Queer culture and the arts would be much poorer without the presence and contribution of butch and stud lesbians, whose identity is both its own aesthetic and a defiant repudiation of the male gaze.
“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?”