Alok Vaid-Menon on the Fight for Gender Freedom

This week, we are re-airing a conversation we had with Alok Vaid-Menon in early June, before we had the final Dobbs decision. Alok’s work is always salient but with the recent midterm election results showing an overwhelming affirmation of reproductive access, we believe their call for transformative thinking around gender essentialism and bodily autonomy is a way both to celebrate the wins at the polls and drive us towards a more expansive and imaginative vision of what’s possible from here. Alok Vaid-Menon is a nonbinary writer, performer, public speaker, activist and artist exploring the themes of trauma, belonging, and the human condition. They are the author of Femme in Public, Beyond the Gender Binary, and Your Wound/My Garden. Alok has done a lot of work to interrogate their history, our collective history, and to probe beneath the surface of what we’ve come to accept as the norm. They challenge us all to use our imagination to re-wire what we believe is possible for ourselves and society around us. This is a really special conversation and our team, quite honestly, all felt gob-smacked by Alok’s perspective. We let this conversation run long because we wanted you all to experience it and take it in as we did.