Welcome to Gender Reveal, a podcast where we hopefully get a little bit closer to understanding what the hell gender is.

I'm your host and resident gender detective, Tuck Woodstock.

Hey, everyone. I hope you've all been hanging in there. I'm sure that by now you are familiar

with gender conceal, our monthly bonus podcast, which you can sign up for at patreon.com slash gender.

For our February gender conceal episode, Ozzie and I spoke with the Palestinian activist Yaffa. Today, we are bringing you a short excerpt from that conversation.

Just a quick note, we did have some technical issues at the beginning of this episode. And so Yafas audio was going to sound like kind of crunchy for the first couple of minutes. I promise it clears up after that. Really nothing else to say. Let's get to the interview. Yaffa is a disabled autistic, trans, queer, Muslim, and indigenous Palestinian.

Yaffa is currently the executive director of the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender

Diversity.

They are also an engineer, peer support specialist, death dula, birthing dula, and yoga teacher.

They're the author, editor, and publisher of several books, anthologies, and poetry collections,

and their new book, Letters from a Living Utopia, will be released in May of this year.

I want to hear about the origin of your name and your decision to, like, move towards mononymity.

Yeah. So the name Yafa is the name of my dad's side's hometown in Palestine.

So Yaffa used to be a county, and it's a name that's been there for thousands of years back when the Canaanites were there. And then the ancient Egyptians kind of

adopted it, continued calling Yaffa Yaffa, and then it kind of got absorbed into Arabic and Hebrew.

And so I kind of love that it's a name that has existed across time and space

and has always kind of retained a lot of its same meaning. So it means beautiful and lovely in

all of those different languages, which I'm like, yes, it's true. But it was a name that allows me to

just really connect with home in a way that I didn't always

have access to as a multi-disclosed Palestinian who wasn't able to be born in Palestine,

wasn't able to live in Palestine, so it allowed me to kind of connect with that.

And then I played around with like potentially like last names and things like that.

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