nonbinary – The Establishment

The Power Of Claiming A Name For Oneself

Tyler Mendelsohn — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 13:14:47 +0000

For nonbinary and trans folks, stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge.

When I shook Leigh’s hand, the first thing I thought was, “He seems wise.” Maybe because he looked poised next to my gracelessness. Shaking his hand was an ordeal. In one hand, I carried a folder containing the interview prompt questions and a consent form for him to sign. In the other, an old school tape recorder—and a pen and a pad, in case the tape recorder finally succumbed to old age.

The first thing I asked was whether Leigh would be okay with my recording our interview. I wanted to have an authentic conversation instead of frantically scrawling everything he said.

He paused. Then he said, “Sure, but I didn’t write any prompts for myself, so I might struggle to articulate some things.” It confirmed my initial perception of him as precise, careful to say exactly what he meant.

I was interviewing Leigh for The Story of My Name Project, which I coordinated from 2014-2015. The project began as part of my job at FreeState Justice, a nonprofit offering free legal services to low-income LGBTQ Marylanders—including name change services. The call for participants was vague; it asked transgender or non-binary people who had gotten legal name changes if they wanted to participate in a project that celebrated their lives. If they were interested, they could email me.

And emails came. From people who had gotten legal name changes, but also from people who hadn’t. A transgender woman who kept her birth name. A trans man who had been going by a chosen name for years, but never legally changed it. The mother of a transgender teenage boy.

Each one taught me a little more about the inherent power in claiming a name.

Leigh is transmasculine; he injects testosterone into his muscles so that his appearance will align with his gender. But when he got his name changed to Leigh, he chose the female spelling.

“The name Leigh was traditionally male, until it recently gained popularity as the female spelling of Lee—the female spelling of a gender-neutral name,” he said. “I like how that experience of gender plays out in myself, because I’m read as male almost 100% of the time, but I didn’t want to go with a name that’s unequivocally male.”

At the time we spoke, Leigh was learning not to knee-jerk reject any femininity within himself.

“I associated such negative things with my femininity: times that I had been victimized, times that I had been abused, times that I had been made to feel not good enough. But that’s not all there is to being female. Why should my femininity be something I hate or fear, something I exorcise from my being completely?… I don’t want to perform a caricature of masculinity. That isn’t me.”

Leigh named himself after a woman who was important to him when he was young, whose strength he admired. He said she had been able to help other people, even while she herself was struggling.

I don’t want to perform a caricature of masculinity. That isn’t me.
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This name has a history of being used as both a girl’s and a boy’s name; Leigh spells it the now-female way—but when one says it out loud, the difference is undetectable. It also has personal significance. To capture such complexity in a name feels like an art.

Monica had known she was trans since she was a child in the ’50s—before there was a word for it. In the ’60s, she ran away from home. “I needed rebellion,” she said. “I never would have transitioned without rebellion. It’s how I found out there was something besides what I was taught growing up, in church and at home.”

For many years, Monica was trying to name what she’d always known on a non-verbal level. But she kept going back into hiding. She tried to be “the perfect man” in her romantic relationships. She got involved with drinking and drugs.

When she got sober, she did so in a men’s recovery house. While there, she kept hearing the name “Monica” in her head. She thought pushing it away would help her stop drinking and drugging; if she could just make it go away, all her problems would go away, too. But sobriety was what brought her out of hiding.

“What I didn’t know was that the more I worked on myself, the more I would find out about my true self,” she said. “In recovery, they talk about peeling away the layers. I was peeling away the layers.”

One night out after the recovery house, her friend made her up. When the friend asked what she thought, her answer was one word: Monica.

When you call a person’s name, you conjure them; their essence is supposed to be contained in that one word. Of the dozens of people I interviewed, no story is the same. For some, like Leigh, the process of choosing a name was more cerebral. Others tried on a few names until one felt right—a more intuitive decision. Another person, Angela, chose her name because as a kid she drew pictures of angels for her mom: “They were the one feminine memory from my pre-transition self.”

But one thing was consistent: Most people knew themselves enough to know exactly why their name fit. Stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge. Perhaps in some cases the process of choosing a name helped people understand themselves. In others, choosing a name was a chance to honor what they already knew—an articulation of self.

In Iceland, they generally use a formula to name babies. Siblings’ last names can be different based on their assigned gender. If a baby is assigned female at birth, for instance, her last name is her dad’s name, followed by the word “daughter.” Both first and last names are usually gendered. Names must only contain letters from the Icelandic alphabet.

The Icelandic Naming Committee approves or denies names, and determines whether given names not used before in Iceland are acceptable. If the naming committee allows it, transgender people—if their gender falls within the binary—can change their name to be more aligned with their gender.

Stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge.
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In America, parents can give their kid any name. Often, they pick a name before they even meet the baby—let alone know who the baby will be. Grey, who I interviewed for the project, said, “You need something to be called when you’re born—but it’s a big deal for your parents to pick this thing that is going to be such an important part of your life and your identity. It’s a big thing for someone else to decide for you.”

I was given the name “Tyler” at birth, but I couldn’t have chosen a more perfect name. I’m non-binary, assigned female at birth, and was always put on boys’ little league teams as a kid based on the name alone. In early 2017, after years of wearing binders, I got top surgery. Hair grows on my cheeks, neck, and chest. This is from Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and “abnormally high”—according to one endocrinologist—testosterone levels.

Thirteen years ago, I stopped taking the spironolactone (anti-androgen medication) I was prescribed. I like the ritual of shaving my beard in front of the mirror. I liked when a cis male former roommate and I shared a shaving ritual. I like choosing how much facial hair I have at a given time.

I buy most shirts in the boys’ section. Usually when I go to a fancy event, I wear a suit and tie. But I like feeling pretty. I most often wear women’s pants. Occasionally I wear eyeliner, and even more occasionally, mascara. I feel like a slightly femme man, who is a woman, but not. Not all non-binary people think about or express their gender this way—there’s a huge, wonderful range.

Most strangers who aren’t aware of the nuance call me “ma’am.” Most queer strangers ask my pronouns.

“Tyler” fits. Even the cadence of my name, the way it sounds when it comes out of peoples’ mouths—like some people said during their interviews, just feels right.

Sometimes I felt guilty interviewing people who had to go through an arduous process to find a name that felt right. All I did was emerge from the womb.

Before I entered undergrad, my school “mistakenly” roomed me with a boy. My senior year, when my school actually did begin to offer gender-neutral housing, a cis male friend and I lived together for a few months. But then residential life attempted to take it back, insisting they’d thought I was a boy because of my name. They’d been confused. I thought: “Me too.”

Transgender women are mistaken for boys at birth; they are usually given boys’ names and put on boys’ teams. The fact that something feels off about this is often informative.

Mine is the opposite story, in a way. People would always apologize for putting me with the “wrong” roommate or on the “wrong” team. But I’m not sure what the wrong team would mean.

While working on The Story of My Name Project, I got an email from a trans woman named Tyler, who had been given the name at birth and chosen to keep it. She didn’t know if her story was appropriate for the project, but when she was coming out as trans, she wished she’d seen a story about keeping a name that fit.

Along with sharing my excitement about my connection to her story, I told her that it was very appropriate; the project had evolved to become more about the importance of having a name that fits, not solely about legal name changes. Hers fit, even if she didn’t have to change it to get there.

Sometimes I felt guilty interviewing people who had to go through an arduous process to find a name that felt right.
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I came to learn the many, layered reasons Tyler’s name resonated. Growing up, Tyler’s parents had been horribly abusive. She said they used the name Tyler as code for “be a man.” But Tyler had known and admired a girl with the name since middle school; she said she would often look at her and think, “If I were a woman, my name would still be Tyler.”

It was not up to Tyler’s abusive parents to decide what the name meant. As she put it, “The name belongs to me, and it always will.”

In Ancient Egypt, people kept their real name secret; it was believed that if someone learned your real name, they’d have power over you. A version of this belief exists in many cultures, legends, and traditions—throughout the world and throughout history.

In the story of Rumplestiltskin, Rumplestiltskin is defeated when the miller’s daughter learns his real name. In The Odyssey, Odysseus is careful not to reveal his true name to the giant, calling himself a word that means “nobody.” Later, when he does reveal his name, it plays a role in his downfall.

There is a belief in the western world, though it’s hard to pinpoint where it originated, that if you can name something, it loses power over you.

If knowing a true name is powerful, then naming yourself is giving yourself a kind of power. Not the kind of legends, where your power lies in having a leg up over someone else. The empowerment in saying, “This is me.”

Listen To The Sound Of Gender Transforming: Five-Tracks Of Resistance

Ayesha Sharma — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 08:17:35 +0000

Diasphoria: A Narrative Archive for and by Trans People of Color by Ayesha Sharma

We experience not only the in-betweenness of gender, but also the instability of ‘home.’

I’m Ayesha Sharma, and I’m an agender multimedia creative. I move through emotions like waves and, especially with the experience of gender and cultural dysphoria, I’ve felt an urgency in the past year to find a community that would provide comfort in shared identities and could foster mutual growth at the same time.

I was motivated to find a medium to share these discussions around gender and cultural dysphoria sonically.

On several warm December afternoons in Cape Town, South Africa, old and new friends sat down around a coffee table to discuss something that was relevant to all of us: gender disruption. We are six trans and gender variant people of color who share a real boredom in the gender binary.

Some of us were determined in our resistance of gender conformity while others had grown tired and frustrated from the backlash we’d received and the dysphoria we experienced.

We had gathered on these afternoons to collaborate and spend time with one another, but our meetings offered us much more: community affirmation toward some of our daily struggles.

Shared identity definitely does not mean shared experience, but it can provide mutual comfort and potential growth.
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The group of us includes Rumano Fabrishh, Jay-Aeron Gertse, Reinhard Mahalie, Nazlee Saif Arbee, Suhail Kapdi, Saadiq Shiraz Soeker, and me, Ayesha Sharma.

We’re from South Africa, Namibia, and the United States.

From Southern Africa, East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia; we are diasporic migrants through generations.

And so we experience not only the in-betweenness of gender, but some of us also feel the instability of “home.”

I produced the beats for each track through personal meditations on diaspora and gender resistance and then traveled to Cape Town to take part in relevant conversations with other trans and variant people of color.

I then recorded our conversations and later sampled words, phrases, and sounds from these recordings to overlap and mix with the theme-inspired beats I had produced.

The process evolved to become this autoethnographic EP, called Diasphoria: A Narrative Archive for and by Trans People of Color. The EP features two main tracks, “Catharsis” and “Imagining.” “Catharsis” is meant to stand as an ideological and emotional exploration of (gender) oppression and imagining as a journey in seeking elevation from the personal struggles that oppression brings as well as from the mental restrictions that keep us from actualizing our expansive selves.

This five-track recording offers a taste of our theory-forming, community-affirming group discussions.

Trans and gender variant people of color, like in this very project, are often the creators of content; the teachers, and the earth-shakers.

That’s why, when several conversations are sliced up and put together, they stand as an exhibition of new knowledge — new theory. Trans and gender variant POC are academics, journalists, and creatives in the fact that our personal acts of resistance and persistence boldly oppose colonial social structures. In that, people who occupy these identities have the potential to be role models and uncomfortable truth tellers.

The sentiments shared in this EP are arranged specifically for trans and gender variant POC listeners, as the discussions themselves were initiated with the intention to promote insight, affirmation, and expansion based on shared identities.

They comment on colonialism and the gender binary, gendered bodies, queer desire, self-confidence and community affirmation, religion, morality, social media community, and much more.

Others who are not trans and gender variant POC are invited to listen to this EP too, but with the understanding that the goal shouldn’t only be to consume, but to hold oneself accountable to meaningful reparations as well.

Some of the ways that this is possible are by promoting the media visibility of trans and gender variant POC creatives as well as by supporting representation of trans people by trans people, when cis queers often gain disproportionate mobility for capitalizing on them instead.

This project would not have been possible without the energy and time of my friends and collaborators.

Jay, Rumano, and Reinhold

Jay, Rumano, and Reinhard are an inspiring team who possess the capabilities to revolutionize their industries and people’s lives in the process.

Saif, Suhail, and Shiraz

Saif is passionate, intentional, and steadfast in their messages of liberation, meaning that they come away from most interactions either getting free things, loyal admirers, or stupefied students. Suhail is a hilarious, humble, and explorative soul whose interests are subtly rooted in a motivation toward deeper meaning and morality. Shiraz is a force whose essence and beliefs challenge traditional knowledge through creative practice.

Wandile Dhlamini

Wandile Dhlamini was the illustrator for this project and created its cover in addition to individualized designs for each track. They’re brilliant, bold, hilarious, and talented in pretty much everything they do.

If you like what you hear in this project, share it. You can also download all five tracks directly through Bandcamp.

Also, check out my feature on this project’s collaborators soon to be released on Everyday Feminism and be sure to follow everyone on social media to support their latest work. You won’t regret it.

A Wide Open Letter To My Mouths: A Nonbinary Survivor Story

Chloe Rossetti — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 21:56:49 +0000

I use you to pleasure and protect each other, and me—this is my love letter to you, Mouths.

Modified from Mirjana Veljovic/flickr

Content warning for mentions of sexual assault.

This essay is part of the forthcoming anthology Written on the Body: Letters by Trans and Nonbinary Survivors of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, edited by Lexie Bean, with Jessica Kingsley Publishers in April 2018. You can read more about the project here.

“It is confusing and embarrassing to have two mouths.”
— Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” from Glass, Irony, and God (1992)

Dear Mouths:

Recently, a new lover retaught me how to eat a mango.

We were naked on a rock, in a stream, somewhere in Virginia, long hair wet against our bodies: Two shimmering mountain mermaids. On the second day of our solar eclipse pilgrimage to Short Mountain, Tennessee, in a polycule of lovers, we had managed to steal away to find a pocket of time, a creek, and a mango to share together. I was excited and nervous, giggling and bantering wantonly as I pulled her close to me on the rock. Water, catching the rays of the sun, glinted as it swirled around us, beading on our sweating bodies.

Intertwining my legs with hers, I sat up straight to meet my lover’s gaze, grinning broadly, pucklike, as I took the mango from her hands and wedged it between us. My lover initially smiled and giggled back at me; then the smile tensed into something else as a flush crept up her cheeks. She receded from my gaze. I felt her tense slightly where our bodies touched. I asked what was going on for her. My blushing lover took a deep breath, and opened her heart to me.

Letters From Trans And Nonbinary Survivors To Their Body Parts

There had been prior shared mangos. Some of those times were beautiful, others disappointing or chaotic. Fruit-sharing with lovers who weren’t fully present or appreciative really let her down. To guard against this scenario with the large, viscous, and sticky mango, my lover first vetted people with lower-impact fruit. She had already shared a peach, two plums, and some cherries with me before our mango, so she knew, she said, that I “got it.”

In that moment, though, recent life events had left her feeling vulnerable. Sharing that particular mango with me, then, would be a sacred and historic act for her. A healing ritual. I understood, then, that my lover was still vetting me: reminding me that she was initiating me into her practice. I nodded; receiving and affirming as best I could as she exhaled. I did get it. In our shared nectary, fruit is a vessel, a kink, and a prayer.

Sharing that particular mango with me, then, would be a sacred and historic act for her. A healing ritual.

I didn’t say it, but I was nervous too. Nervous and excited to meet a person who spoke the same sex language as me. More than once I had watched her mind flood with images of what might transpire in our shared reality. This titillated me.

While she was talking, my lover massaged the mango until it seeped translucent yellow nectar from its nipple. I felt my own nipples coming to life as I watched her work.

When the time came, she brought the mango to my lips.

“Remember, no teeth,” she reminded me. I had rushed earlier fruit foreplay by tearing chunks from the flesh. I smiled at her coyly, and nodded. Then I put you, sweet Mouth, Upper Mouth, on the mango’s nipple and sucked, long and hard.

I kissed my lover, and passed some of the nectar into her upper mouth. She used her tongue to gently and precisely stroke the tip of mine in a way that made me moan and pant; mouths wet, clit tingling. I imagined her tonguing my clit when she kissed me like that. We discovered that I could stimulate myself if I massage the tip of my tongue with my finger: my clit would tingle and I would get wet. My two mouths love to communicate.

Soon enough, my upper mouth and the mango were all over her. Nectar was everywhere.

My two mouths love to communicate.

Mouths — would that I could give you this sort of healing all the time. We’ve whispered, screamed, ejaculated, menstruated, eaten, overeaten, shared secrets, spoken harshly, queefed, pleasured, gasped, contracted, broken out, scolded, drooled, oozed, scissored, discharged, miscarried, forgiven, prayed, bitten, sucked, ovulated, made love. You are my nourishment portals — I can’t live without you. I love the shapes you make when you are getting what you want, when you are thinking, smiling, frowning, contracted, relaxed, clenched, pursed, engorged, wet, salivating. I have covered you in lipstick, fruit, ejaculate, lube, and other bodies. I have bled out of you. I have waxed your hair and let it grow. I have brushed my teeth and neglected hygiene. I have changed my diet to fix you. I have fixated on you. I use you to pleasure and protect each other, and me.

This is my love letter to you, Mouths.

In my freshman year at Yale, a fellow freshman forced me to suck his dick while I was drunk. He was strong; he played rugby. He was wasted. He was also my friend.

I was drunkenly walking this friend home after a party. We cuddled in his bed. Then we made out. Suddenly, my friend pulled down his pants to expose his erect cock and forced my mouth onto it. You said “No no no no…no…” didn’t you, Upper Mouth? “No no no” until you and I gave up and sucked his dick.

The next day, we met up to talk, and he apologized. “I am so…so…sorry,” he said, his voice quavering. We were exiting the local deli, Gourmet Heaven. We had just gotten sandwiches. I had ordered a hero with smoked turkey, brie, and green apples, with honey mustard.

Introducing The Establishment Online Community!

I looked at him. “I forgive you,” I said. I thought I meant it too. I even gave him a hug, ostensibly because I wanted to, though I’ve since wondered if I was acting on a lifetime of programming to compulsively care for men ahead of my own wellbeing. I forgive you for assaulting me; here’s a hug to soften the blow of your crushing burden of remorse.

We parted ways, sandwiches in hand. I didn’t really see him or interact with him much ever again.

The next day, it all hit me. I dissociated; couldn’t think, could barely focus on work or class; I felt numb, confused. Angry. I started meekly asking around about how to notify Yale College of a sexual assault on their campus. I wasn’t even sure if there was a difference between a charge and a complaint; I just wanted them to know, and I wanted something to be done.

The process was oblique, to say the least.

I’ve since wondered if I was acting on a lifetime of programming to compulsively care for men ahead of my own wellbeing.

Once I had found the correct avenue, through some asking, I found myself sitting on a couch opposite a grim, unsympathetic-looking woman with an air of resigned bureaucracy. Her attire was plain, bordering on drab; her grey hair pulled back into a taught bun. The room was dark.

My interviewer perched on the edge of a chair opposite me, and asked me what had happened. I recounted the events as I recalled them and she listened, impassively.

I finished, and all was quiet. Then:

“Did he rape you?”
“Um…no…?” Are my mouths so different? “He forced me to into oral sex.”
“Was he sorry?”
“What?”
“Did he tell you he was sorry?”
“…yes?”
“Then there’s nothing we can do.”

I pushed her on this. I wanted to press charges. I wanted something, anything, to happen. She didn’t budge.

A few months later, I was in Amsterdam with a lover ten years my senior. We had met at the 2007 Asian Fencing Championships in Nantong, China, both competing for Australia in different weapons, and hailing from different states. I lay on my stomach, face down on a sprawling, plush bed on the top floor of an open-plan townhouse, and made him fuck me from behind, thrusting his dick into me until I wailed with pleasure. We came, and then I asked him to hold me while my body convulsed, wracked with sobs. I told him about the assault then. He consoled me, sweetly but cluelessly. Almost vacantly. I could tell that he didn’t really know what to do. Receiving that vacant comfort was almost worse for me than keeping the news inside. How far away men can sometimes be from the violence of other men.

I was with my mother and sister on that trip, and I ended up telling my mother about the assault the next day. She brushed it aside quickly, too troubling for her to look at. Six months later she apologized, and it was my turn to brush it aside. In that initial moment, though, the weight of pervasive, collective dismissal from lover, institution, and mother crushed both of my mouths shut. I sat on my secret and my sex life dried up.

How far away men can sometimes be from the violence of other men.

My assailant went on to reoffend, unreprimanded, multiple times, and graduate with an Ivy League degree.

The same year that he and I both graduated, some very brave Yale feminists did two things: revive Broad Recognition, a feminist magazine that I wrote many articles for, and file a Title IX complaint against Yale University that was upheld, forcing the school to redo their entire system for processing sexual assault claims. The Title IX complaint had 22 cases in it: 22 among thousands. I wanted to add mine, Mouths, but I realized that three celibate years later I still felt too broken from the experience to let either of you speak the truth for me.

Mouths, you have always healed each other. Learning how to have great sex has given me a rich and resonant voice, and license to tell the world about what has happened to me. Learning how to vocalize my pain and pleasure had led me to energetically dearmor my genitals. Examples of this are numerous, Mouths, but I want to recall a very direct and recent story about both of you, and how you interacted to make me feel better.

I sessioned with a Sacred Intimate (SI) recently: A warm and handsome middle-aged queer man who had played with me at a kink retreat a month or two before. It was the dead of winter then. I had melted in his hands as the snow piled up outside.

The job of a Sacred Intimate, I would say, is to cocreate a sensual/sexual container with a client in order to witness and facilitate a self-healing process. After the kink retreat I decided to become an SI someday, since sexual healing is already a part of my life. I gave my friend a call, ostensibly to ask him about his profession. I ended up arranging to travel upstate for a session. I told myself that it was a “research trip.” My body, meanwhile, geared up for an emotional and physical release: I became anxious as the day approached.

The Dangerous Exclusivity Of Spaces For ‘Women’ Sexual Assault Survivors

As my SI drove me to his house from the bus station, he noticed that I was tense, and asked me how I was feeling. I told him that I was nervous. I wondered if he would find this surprising. The last time we had seen each other he had undressed me, handcuffed me, and strung me up by the padded cuffs with a length of rope stretched over a beam in the middle of a sex party, flogging me front and back until I shrieked with pleasure. We were not exactly strangers to each other’s bodies, and I wasn’t nervous about being with him sexually again. It was for other reasons: I had never paid for sex before, nor had I ever really had complete transactional license to ask for exactly what I want in bed.

Learning how to have great sex has given me a rich and resonant voice, and license to tell the world about what has happened to me.

“Have you thought about what you want to do in the session?” he asked gently, as we approached our destination. I shook my head and cast my eyes downward. Approaching this frontier of sexual healing had left me bereft of my connection with my desire.

We arrived. I showered and changed. We sat on his porch and looked at the forest, grey and beautiful, still devoid of leaves in the early spring. It was warm that day. I felt ungrounded, jittery with nerves and the energy of the city, so I asked for help to become present. My SI nodded, and gestured that we go inside. He stepped behind me, and gently but firmly grabbed me by the scruff of my neck. I immediately became aroused.

Applying firm and even downward pressure to the back of my neck and shoulders, my SI took me on a tour of his workrooms. There was what appeared to be a stimulation room, with a St. Andrew’s Cross and all manner of floggers and toys, and a destimulation room, filled with mats, cushions, and essential oils. My SI picked up one of the essential oils and held it under my nose, asking me to breathe it in. Walnut oil. I immediately felt my energy come back into my body and surge down my legs into the earth.

We traveled to the other room, sat in a cushioned nook near the cross, negotiated our boundaries, and checked the time. My two hours began.

My SI undressed me, blindfolded me, and cuffed me. In the first half of the session he cuffed me to and flogged me against the cross, talking dirty to me, sucking my nipples and teasing my clitoris until I begged him to finger me. I strained against my cuffs.

I dissociated once. I went to a place of anxiety and doubt: I was in a stranger’s house, in an undisclosed location, where nobody could hear me scream. I had spent a lot of money on this experience. I was tracking my ever-present attraction to Daddy Doms, wondering how that fits within my politics. My mind went anywhere but that room.

My SI quickly noticed and brought me back. Whatever fluctuations happened in my body were duly registered and responded to in a safe, sane and consensual way. In my sexual history and experience, this level of attention and sensitivity is very special and rare.

Once my SI was fingering my lower mouth, and I started to approach climax, he would have me tell him when I was about to cum and then he would pull his fingers out, allowing me to crest by myself, riding on the wave of my own pleasure. Soon enough I was gushing down my legs and onto the cross.

My voice started to open: This experience of climactic solitude was unimaginably powerful. “Be as loud as you want,” my SI whispered to me. My volume wavered with my sense of safety. Whenever my voice closed, my SI would coax it open again, lovingly affirming my right to vocal expression, no matter how loud or monstrous.

I have always been loud during sex. My voice is low and resonant, and carries far. Upstairs neighbors have yelled at me to “SHUT UP!” as I fucked. During that session, however, the sounds I made were some other thing entirely — louder and more monstrous than ever before. I filled the woods with my sound. I blew open all the doors and shook every tree. My silken, beastly grunts shattered walls within me.

One mouth heals the other.

I filled the woods with my sound. I blew open all the doors and shook every tree. My silken, beastly grunts shattered walls within me.

My SI knew when I needed a break. He led me, still naked, cuffed and blindfolded, to the destimulation room, which was smaller and ringed with a waist-high ledge brimming with essential oils. Mats and cushions covered the floor. My SI lay me down, propped up my head with a pillow, uncuffed me, and enveloped me with his body, pulling a blanket over us and asking me if I was comfortable, if I needed anything.

He then asked me to describe to him what was going on with each of my chakras, from the quality of brightness, to the color, to anything else I could see. I energetically scanned my body and relayed what I saw. My lower three chakras were bright and vibrant; my fourth chakra, over my heart, was wavering, static-y, trembling. My upper three chakras, in particular my throat chakra, were dim.

My SI explained this back to me in terms that I could understand. Orgasmic energy generated in the lower pasture needed to be sent across the dam that was my diaphragm to nourish and feed the upper pasture. This could be achieved by breathing in sharply every time I had an orgasm. For one mouth to feed the other, there needed to be a bridge.

We decided that my SI would continue to hold me, still blindfolded, in the destimulation room, and massage my lower mouth. He called it a “yoni massage,” but as a nonbinary human I prefer gender-neutral terms for my genitals.

For one mouth to feed the other, there needed to be a bridge.

I rode the waves of pleasure in my dark den and breathed in every time a wave crested, moaning ecstatically. It continued this way for a while, and then all at once my in-breath turned into little gasps, which turned into sobs, and I felt so young; too young. My mind became populated with images of my first boyfriend, starting with the uncomfortable and rushed way that we had lost our virginity to each other, and blossoming into all of the ensuing cruelty and abuse in our relationship. I was screaming and crying and cumming and mourning that it wasn’t supposed to happen that way, as a tidal wave of repressed violence around my sexual awakening broke over me. I felt that my trauma connected to the trauma of the greater world. By the end I had a vivid sense that a more global healing was pulsing through my body.

My cervix softened and opened my throat. Lower Mouth received as Upper Mouth gave. I was leaking pleasure, pain, sobs, and cum all at once, mouths releasing what they needed to in order to heal me, and each other.

Cristian is the Sacred Intimate referred to in this piece. He has enthusiastically consented to making his name and website available to anybody interested in working with him.

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Meet The Women Behind The Initiative Tackling Tech’s Diversity Crisis

The Establishment — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 15:27:36 +0000

Meet The Women Tackling Tech’s Diversity Crisis With Project Include

“We had to reject some applicants, because we were unwilling to water down our requirements or extend our timeline, and they were unwilling to commit to them, their HR or legal teams were too focused on legal risks and downsides, and/or they were focused on more of a PR boost than meaningful change. A few larger companies we talked with were reluctant to address more than gender, unwilling to take on risk, and/or slow to make decisions.”

By Katie Tandy, Nikki Gloudeman, and Kelley Calkins

Yes, it is that bad.

The impassioned rhetoric surrounding diversity in tech isn’t hyperbolic; by every possible measure, a lack of inclusivity remains a damning, deplorable, distressing problem.

Consider this: In a recent Fortune survey of nine top tech companies, women comprised, on average, one-third of the workforce. Minorities, meanwhile, were found to make up “just a tiny fraction” of those workforces. Worse yet, representation was revealed to be even more dismal in leadership roles.

And lest you think things are changing — they’re not. Or at least, they’re changing at a glacial pace.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the representation of women in computer and mathematical operations is actually slightly worse than it was in 2010 (it has improved for underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities, but only slightly). More alarming, still, is that women are earning just 18% of computer science degrees . . . compared to 37% in back in 1985. Another analysis found that the major tech companies that had made the most progress in diversifying their workforces increased their hiring of women and people of color by a paltry 3%.

The situation is so bad, in fact, that it’s easy to stop paying attention, to resign oneself to a situation that feels both bleak and insurmountable.

But for the eight accomplished women behind Project Include — who have a cumulative 150 years of experience in the tech industry, and who have all lived the discrimination revealed by these troubling stats — resignation isn’t an option. The only way forward is a push for change to address the underlying issues that have stymied the industry.

Launched in May, Project Include provides practical tools and recommendations to industry executives looking to fundamentally, and from the outset, change their approach to diversity. The initiative is notable for the holistic approach it takes to inclusivity; the women involved are all too aware of how cursory hiring checklists or quotas can only accomplish so much, so they’ve worked hard to dig deeper and address the systemic issues driving the problem.

On the Project Include website, detailed guides address everything from company culture and training programs to conflict resolution and progress tracking. The recommendations go beyond where the conversation usually ceases; case studies and advice focus not only on women and ethnic minorities, but also on other frequently marginalized groups, including people who are trans, nonbinary, LGBTQIA, and disabled. Representation for populations that are neurodiverse, socioeconomically underrepresented, and in other ways pushed to the margins of society will remain a primary focus for the team.

Though nascent, the initiative has already elicited interest from thousands of startup CEOs, venture capitalists, and those looking to help across six continents and dozens of countries. After poring through hundreds of applications, the founders have hand-picked 26 startup and venture capital leaders — from companies including Airbnb, Patreon, Asana, and Kapor Capital — to take part in the Startup Include and VC Include programs, with the goal of creating meaningful change by the end of this year.

In a post for Medium, Project Include co-founder Freada Kapor Klein emphasized that this isn’t just lip service — Project Include is only working with those committed to tangible results:

More than just a matter of ethics, the women of Project Include believe that their approach is necessary for success. Considering that we’re talking about some of the most innovative companies in the fastest-growing industries, there’s no logical reason to uphold the status quo; according to McKinsey research, advancing women would add $12 trillion to the global economy by 2025. And different research by the same consultancy found that companies with racially diverse leadership teams financially outperform their peers by 35%. In a variety of studies, diversity of thought — when teams are made up of different genders, backgrounds, ethnicities, and experiences — has proven to drive innovation and out-of-the-box solutions.

The Establishment’s all-female co-founding editorial team — Kelley Calkins, Nikki Gloudeman, and Katie Tandy — talked with five of the women involved in Project Include to discuss their experiences in tech . . . and what can be done to mitigate a diversity crisis.

Laura Gomez, CEO | Founder of Atipica

— Interview by Katie Tandy

A native of Silicon Valley, Laura Gomez has borne witness to the “diversity problem” — which is arguably a euphemism for systemic oppression and racism, depending on who you ask — her entire life.

She was 10 years old when she and her family migrated from Mexico; her mother cleaned houses and worked as a nanny for tech executives from the moment they arrived stateside. While Gomez says she always exhibited not only a keen interest in computer science, but a natural talent at it, no opportunities were ever extended to her.

“The families treated us very kindly, but never offered me an internship or said, ‘Oh! you’re interested in tech!’ They never thought that I could be part of their tech creation. The majority of California is Latino. Seeing so many Latina women serving instead of creating has really hit home — it’s really shaped me.”

This ubiquity of white men in the tech field — for a brief glimpse into this phenomenon, look to Google’s tech employees, who are 83% male and 60% white — is what Gomez calls “Connectivism.” She explains that it’s not intentional exclusion — it’s not malicious — but a dangerous pattern that has emerged.

It’s one that Project Include and her own company, Atipica, is dedicated to disrupting.

“When people create something, they hire their friends who look like them and went to the same school. This is Connectivism. This is what happened in Silicon Valley. That’s why half of Google was from Stanford. Why Dropbox is all people from MIT. It’s been a perpetual pattern that emerged from hiring and working within a network.”

Gomez, who’s been recognized by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her participation in the TechWomen program — in addition to being named Person of the Year: Social Pioneer by GQ Mexico — has wended her way through some of the biggest names in the business, including critical stints at YouTube and Twitter, before founding her own start-up this past January.

Atipica — like Project Include — is focused on bolstering inclusion and diversity in the workplace; it seeks to interrupt bias among job-seekers and employers, taking not only a resume into account, but also the human being behind it. In fact, she looks to the Dalai Llama as an inspiration for successful business practice: “Idealistic as it may sound, altruism should be the driving force in business, not just competition and a desire for wealth.”

Gomez says that capitalism posits business and altruism as opposites, when in reality, they should work hand in hand. “When you put humanity into a job, it allows for more prospering. People must consider the social impact when they’re creating a new generation of start-ups and wealth.”

But like any fight, this one hasn’t been without a few blows and setbacks. Gomez explains that even talking about a lack of diversity makes people very cagey; those in power feel threatened or guilty, unsure how to ameliorate the situation when they feel their very existence is the problem.

“We got such different reactions,” she says. “Everything from, ‘this is great!’ all the way to, ‘this makes me feel bad when I read it. Do I have to feel bad that I’m a male founder and a CEO?’ People were reactionary. It makes people so uncomfortable to have this conversation, so we wanted to acknowledge that and say, ‘Yes, it’s going to be uncomfortable.’ But people aren’t going to feel good about themselves until we move forward and have these discussions.”

Tracy Chou, Engineer and Entrepreneur

— Interview by Kelley Calkins

To an uncritical eye, Tracy Chou’s rapid ascent within the world of tech could appear preordained. Her parents were both software engineers in Silicon Valley — she attended school not far from the Googleplex — and she herself went on to complete both an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in computer science at Stanford. But even after nabbing internships at both Facebook and Google, and despite her obvious talent, Chou couldn’t always see a future for herself in tech.

Growing up, her mother told her tales about how she was treated differently — as one of four women in a class of 200. At Stanford, Chou accumulated her own set of stories. Not perceived as a serious student, she found that her male classmates were willing to help her out with schoolwork — that is, until she started outperforming them.

One of the men she’d dated in college, for example, grew increasingly agitated as Chou’s skill set surpassed his own. Eventually, he admitted that he “wasn’t used to a girl being smarter” than him, asserting that he’d believed “technical ability and attractiveness were inversely related.”

As Chou continued to excel at classes, internships, and a job at Quora after graduating, she continued to be marginalized and belittled for, well, not adhering to the tech bro archetype. “For a long time I didn’t know if it was just me, something about the way I was comporting myself, that kept people from trusting me.”

The more she talked about her experiences and researched the matter, the more she realized “that a lot of these issues were the result of women internalizing issues of sexism.”

After her stint at Quora, Chou joined Pinterest: “They treated me as an engineer, rather than a female engineer; they had high expectations of me.” She told me she could succeed when success was expected of her: “Being in a supportive environment made all the difference.”

And what a difference it has made — not just for Chou, but the entire industry, which she’s been shaking up for years.

In 2013, after attending the Grace Hopper Celebration — a gathering of women in computing — and witnessing a collective lamenting of diversity issues in the tech industry, Chou wondered how bad the numbers really were. So she set out to discover them, publishing a blog piece calling for tech companies to disclose their numbers of female staffers and uploading a spreadsheet to Github where they could do so.

As a result, more than 250 companies have self-reported these data.

Chou has taken this commitment to transparency and measurable solutions with her to Project Include. She emphasized, however, that diversity is about more than just race or gender.

“Research shows that if you put self-identified Democrats and Republicans in a room together, the combination will be more productive than a room of just Democrats or just Republicans. The reason people focus on gender and race is because they are visual markers — but we’re not even getting that right!”

As one example of this, she told me, “Asian people often get totally left out of the conversation. Some companies do have people of color, they’re just all yellow, not black or brown. Asians are people of color who have unique issues that warrant discussion.”

Rectifying such matters and ushering in a climate of true inclusion — where all employees feel valued and safe at work — is Chou’s primary focus at Project Include. “Our ultimate goal is to build a community where people are discussing these issues — what they’ve tried, what’s working, what isn’t working.”

“We want to support the next generation of companies in tech to get it right from the start,” she said — and I couldn’t help but visualize and cheer the next generation of Tracy Chous, working in tech unfettered by stereotypes or sexist scrutiny.

Susan Wu, Entrepreneur and Investor

— Interview by Kelley Calkins

To understand the mission of Project Include, Susan Wu says it’s important to understand what inclusion even means. The word is typically used in reference to women and, less frequently, to people of color. But while these are both undoubtedly important, to understand inclusion in such limited terms is to not really understand it at all.

“When I think of intersectionality, and when I think about diversity, I don’t really think of it in terms of gender or race,” Wu says. “I think both of them are important categories, but there are many, many categories of marginalization that don’t ever get talked about because they’re so marginalized.”

Wu tells me, for example, that she most strongly identifies as a survivor of childhood trauma, a category of marginalization often left out of the inclusion discussion. “Project Include is designed to help shine a light on all marginalized groups,” she emphasizes. “Adult survivors of childhood trauma often hide in the closet; they are living in shame their entire lives, so they can’t even form support groups, much less professional support groups to talk about it.”

After a long career in the industry — spanning roles as a VC operating executive, chief executive at an open-source organization, and founder of a company that went public on NASDAQ — Wu has too often seen a limited view of inclusivity curb needed change. She likens this limited approach to a GIF she once saw on Twitter of people trying to save the Titanic by focusing on the part above the water, rather than the sinking vessel beneath the surface. A cursory approach to diversity, she says, “overlooks the fact that the Titanic is sinking.”

In only implementing a couple rudimentary programs, without offering institutional support, companies may even exacerbate their problems . . . and then use these failed attempts to “prove” that pushing for change doesn’t actually accomplish anything.

In particular, Wu says, it’s impossible to make necessary shifts without the committed involvement of those at the top:

“Diversity and inclusion always start with the founder and CEO. If they don’t understand the significance, and aren’t personally invested in and/or supporting the outcome — which is improving the culture and work experiences for underrepresented communities — there’s nothing we can do that will really work.”

When I ask Wu why she wanted to get involved with Project Include, her answer is both simple and forceful: “We were all just fed up, honestly. We were very frustrated with all of these startups that publicly talk about their commitment to diversity and inclusion but, if you look under the hood, aren’t actually doing anything about diversity and inclusion.”

In an environment where talk is often empty, Wu is ready to fundamentally change the discourse around inclusivity — and, hopefully, salvage the entire ship in the process.

— Interview by Nikki Gloudeman

Erica Joy Baker, Senior Engineer at Slack and Diversity and Inclusion Advocate

When I asked Erica Joy Baker what had led her to Project Include, she cut to the chase. “I’ve been in the tech industry for 15 years. I’ve had some good experiences . . . and some not-so-good ones. A few years ago, I decided I wasn’t going to be quiet about it anymore.”

“In 2014,” she said, “I started doing some therapy; I was wondering why I was so angry all the time and I realized that I was keeping a lot of things in. I just decided I was going to stop.”

The straightforward simplicity of her words belie her wide-ranging and pivotal work; not everyone who just decides to stop keeping things in simultaneously send tremors throughout an entire industry.

First came her powerful blog post, “The Other Side of Diversity.” Published in the fall of 2014, Baker used the piece to point out how the “prevailing narrative surrounding minorities in tech relates to how beneficial employing minorities can be for a company.” And then, in bleak, unequivocal detail, spoke to the flip side: “how being a minority in a mostly homogenous workplace for an extended period of time” affected her as “a black woman in the predominantly white male tech industry.”

Next, she set her sights on her own employer — none other than that great tech juggernaut: Google.

Baker had worked as a Google engineer for a number of years when last summer, she and a few coworkers, while “bored,” created a spreadsheet to record their respective salaries. Baker posted the document on her internal social network account — where it took off “like wildfire,” with more and more employees adding their salary and benefit information.

The sheet revealed, in Baker’s words, “not great things” about pay equality.

She went public about her experiences in a string of tweets, sparking not just a Valley-wide, but a nationwide, conversation on diversity and pay.

“Companies are extremely afraid of transparency,” Baker told me, reflecting on the experience. “They do their best to discourage employees from discussing salaries.”

It had bothered her, though, that there was no sense of how much various employees were making, as companies make big offers “to exceptional and extraordinary candidates — with no thought about how that exceptionality is rooted in a biased opinion of what that exceptionality looks like.”

Baker’s work continues to focus on combating these biases.

In addition to her role at Project Include, she’s a senior engineer at Slack, where she spends 20% of her time on diversity and inclusion efforts. “I don’t like to say the word ‘diversity’ without the word ‘inclusion,’” she emphasized to me. “Diversity refers to it being not a homogenous environment; inclusion refers to making that diverse environment safe.”

Given Baker’s high-profile work on these issues, I asked if she identified as an activist. She promptly answered that she doesn’t — and then countered with a question of her own, “Have you read Shonda Rhimes’ Year of Yes?”

“I listened to her read it and it was like listening to Grey’s Anatomy. She talks about how she hates the question, ‘Why does diversity matter?’ She points out how it’s such an asinine question. This is the way the world is, this is what it looks like, why are we even asking this?”

Like Rhimes, Baker said she’s “just working so that things are the right way,” adding that “the fact that they aren’t being done that way means we have to fight.”

And so, simply put, that’s what Project Include is doing.

“If Donald Trump gets elected, though, I’m moving to Bora Bora,” she said.

Let’s hope not — Baker’s absence would sure to be all of our losses.

bethanye Blount, CEO of Cathy Labs

— Interview by Nikki Gloudeman

Like many women with a long history in the tech industry, bethanye Blount clearly remembers the days when she was expected to sublimate her opinions and even passively allow for latent sexism in an effort to act like “one of the guys.” In an environment where pushing back could threaten the career she’d worked so hard to establish, it was easier, and safer, to simply go with it.

Not anymore.

“Now, when men say something that I feel doesn’t resonate with me, instead of going, ha ha ha and sort of walking away, I’ll be like, Uh-uh. No. Y’all sit down. You’re all going to listen to me now.”

After two decades in tech — including as a co-founder of MailRank, which was acquired by Facebook in 2011; leading teams in infrastructure at Facebook; and, most recently, founding and serving as CEO of Cathy Labs — Blount has become increasingly emboldened to more freely assert herself. “When you’re first starting in your career — and this is especially true for those from unrepresented groups — you’re always thinking, it’s just me. You’re always double-checking yourself. One of the great things about being later in my career is I’m much more like, Ah, no. This is crap.”

But this isn’t really a matter of a woman learning to “lean in”; it’s a matter of a culture slowly shifting to make room for women like her who have always demanded to be heard.

Project Include is a manifestation of Blount’s desire to push harder for the cultural shifts that, slowly over time, have helped her in her own career. In joining the project’s team, she’s making the industry as a whole sit down and listen.

A primary focus, she says, is asking companies to broaden what’s been a very limited idea of change. “Often, when people talk about diversity, they look at their hiring numbers,” she says. “And this is, honestly, incredibly short-sighted for organizations to do.” Instead, she says, companies need to support diverse employees during their entire life cycle at a company. More fundamentally, they need to recognize inclusivity as the only way forward in the modern world.

In this way, she explains, companies just starting out have the greatest opportunity, since they can build a culture of diversity from the ground up. “I’m looking forward to seeing companies that are born from the beginning with an understanding of why creating an inclusive company culture leads to your company being stronger and more resilient,” she says. “In 10 years, I can’t wait to see how experiences and choices made early on have enabled companies to be more successful.”

And until that day comes? It’s safe to say that Blount — and for that matter, all of her Project Include colleagues — won’t be going anywhere. “Many of us have expressed the viewpoint that we’ve had this moment where we were just ready to flip a desk and walk away,” she says of confronting sexism in tech. “But we still love the experience. We love technology. We’re not ready to walk away.”

All illustrations by Emma Munger