From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Kendall Seasmeyer.

I use she-her pronouns and I'm your host.

This week, we are re-airing a conversation we had with Alok Vade 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 as a way both to

celebrate the wins at the polls and to drive us forward towards a more expansive and imaginative

vision of what's possible from here. Here's the episode we hope you enjoy. This year brings an unprecedented surge of anti-trans

legislation, banning everything from sports participation to health care access. So far,

we're tracking roughly 280 state bills that have been filed ahead of or during this legislative session. At the same time,

the Supreme Court is on the precipice of delivering a final decision that will likely overturn Roe v. Wade,

blocking people who can get pregnant from abortion care. Now, these attacks are actually all

part of the same movement, a movement against bodily

autonomy and our ability to live freely, no matter our model or make, a movement to re-entrench

gender hierarchy and binary thinking. To that end, we're bringing you a conversation with

a loch vade menon, a non-binary writer,

performer, public speaker, activist, and artist, exploring the themes of trauma, belonging,

and the human condition. They are the author of Fem in Public, Beyond the Gender Binary,

and Your Wound, my garden.

Aloke has done a lot of work to interrogate their personal history, our collective history,

and to probe beneath the surface of what we've come to accept as the norm.

...