My Event (Further posting Later): Let’s Talk About Sex! Thursday, May 25th from 11am-12pm at the Trans and Queer Center. Join us to watch awesome videos, hang out, and chat about sex!
I have spent much of this week making slow progress on putting together my plan for the event I’m putting together at the Trans and Queer Center. At the moment I have an introduction and some pretty awesome conversation prompts, and I’m working to put advertising feelers more thoroughly this coming week. I’ve created a poster, though one that’s mostly text based since I was having trouble finding images to use that weren’t very simplified or very stereotypical, and I didn’t have the patience or inspiration to create my own image.
I’ve gotten my brief poster submitted to the greenscreens on campus, and I’m planning on putting up flyers, and notices up on facebook, greener commons, and some other groups that might spread further word of mouth.
I’m hoping that some awesome and open conversations can happen, as well as maybe some sharing of cool resources or hopes for future events or ideas for bettering the future of sex education.
I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about this event and putting together my thoughts for facilitation and advertisement.
For some reason, the lull of week five has hit me instead during week six, so it’s been hard to motivate myself to think and reflect on the work I’ve been doing in very productive ways, or sit down and do work on writing or editing or research. I think much of this week’s work has been kind of behind the scenes in my mind, it’s the little bits of thinking that I do when I’m ostensibly doing something else or walking through campus and the like.
However, toward the end of the week, which was also Queer and Trans week on campus, I was finally able to attend a QT week event. I went to hear Pidgeon Pagonis speak about intersex activism and experiences. This was a wonderful event, and I’m so glad I was able to go. There was a beautiful activity based around gender, a presentation on what intersex is and what activism around intersex issues looks like, and a short documentary that Pidgeon made was shown. One of the things that struck me on a more personal level was how familiar the experiences Pidgeon had with doctors was to my own.
Not in the direct experience of being intersex, because that is not an experience of mine, but the way the doctors treated a ‘condition’ that they didn’t understand. Either working on information that was incomplete or incredibly biased and harmful or putting a lot of pressure on an individual patient to know what they needed and wanted to do.
It’s really frightening to think that the experience of seeing a doctor, a person who’s supposed to be an expert or at least willing to seek out the relevant knowledge and be able to heal and help create a better quality of life, could be something so negative and something that is so applicable to people of vastly different experiences.
It’s a subject that seems at the moment incredibly large and important, because there’s connections to the current politics around healthcare and insurance, and there’s connections to so many different social justice movements.
The presentation and the descriptions of experiences with doctors reminds you that we really don’t know as much as we think we do about how the human body works. There is so much nuance that we haven’t begun to scratch the surface on, and so many ways to start and places to look at. It’s an incredibly broad area, and an incredibly connected and important subject. It highlights in a way the importance of interdisciplinary studies, to remind us that things have connections that we haven’t considered yet that are just as important as the obvious ones.
None of the things I’ve been working on this week or thinking about have really given me any unified ideas to write about, so I’ve mostly determined to muse a little, and maybe one of my simple musings will inspire someone else to write or study more on a subject.