marginalized identities

Photo: courtesy of the author.

How Drag Queens Like Lady Bunny Inspire A Straight Biracial Woman Like Me

Drag queens, like Lady Bunny, teach outsiders to embrace ourselves and to embrace others. That means doing more than demonstrating tolerance.

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"I spent quite a few of my preteen and early teen years enjoying taking pictures. But because of the combination of racism, fat antagonism, and lookism, I wasn’t always comfortable getting in front of the camera." Image: Thinkstock

The Right To Be Ugly: How Lookism Affects My Ability To Be Carefree

[W]hy must the acknowledgment of my beauty be predicated on how well and how often I contort to attempt to fit into some kind of ideal? Why can’t I be all the iterations of me and still be beautiful?

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We are all different, as we come from different backgrounds, experience different hardships, and come to have different perspectives on the world. Image: Thinkstock.

Saying “We Are All The Same” Will Not Unite Us

As much as you want to believe people are all the same, we don’t have the luxury of being seen as the “default” in the same way white, straight, cis people often are. We don’t have the luxury of dismissing our painful history and systemic issues for the sake of everyone getting along, because we’re still in the middle of them.

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"We’re painfully aware of the fact that we’re “the only one” in the room, or one of very few. Don’t make it worse." Image: Author

3 Ways To Avoid Tokenizing People (Because I'm Sick Of It)

It’s like being a deer in the headlights. You’re in imminent danger. You know it. But you can’t move. You can’t speak. No reaction whatsoever. You just stand or sit there, frozen in time, waiting for the crash.

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