Episode 254: Gender Without Identity with Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini

Coming Out Pod

Health & Fitness, Sexuality, Comedy, Mental Health

4.9 • 584 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2023

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Holy hell, do we have a PIPING HOT EPISODE for you! When previous guest Avgi Saketopoulou and her partner Ann Pellegrini (both practicing psychoanalysts and faculty members at NYU) received an award for an academic article they co-authored, they were thrilled to find out that their paper would be published in a prestigious journal. They spent the following year working closely with the editors to revise their article for publication...only to be told at the last minute that they would be required to remove parts that the journal deemed "too political." Instead of bowing to pressure, Avgi and Ann decided to expand upon their thesis and publish it as a book, thereby making their work accessible to laypeople as well as academics. In this riveting conversation, Avgi and Ann discuss their controversial argument: that queer and trans people are not, to quote Lady Gaga, "born this way," but rather that any number of outside factors (including trauma) *can* affect and inform our sexuality/gender. It's a truly liberating, paradigm-shifting discussion about how we as queer people police ourselves as a result of (justified) fear that our words will be weaponized against us. And most importantly, we finally get to the bottom of the eternal question: *did* seeing the movie Mannequin as a child make Lauren gay??

Follow Avgi and Ann on Instagram at @avgolis98 and @apell168 respectively. And give Jeff Bezos the finger by ordering their incredible book at uitbooks.com instead of at the other place!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody.
0:07.0	Hey y'all.
0:08.4	Welcome to coming out with Lauren and Nicole. We are a weekly podcast where typically we have
0:14.9	people on from all walks of life. They tell us the stories of how they came out to friends,
0:19.0	family, and the world at large.
0:21.2	Because who doesn't love a cutting out story?
0:24.3	I just realized I said stories instead of tales.
0:27.4	And the reason why is because my mind is not, I know, isn't that, it's been five years
0:32.0	and I just screwed up our intro.
0:33.4	But the reason why is because my mind is elsewhere, because we are not doing our usual coming out journey today.
0:42.4	We are deviating from format.
0:44.2	We have a very, very special episode for Pride Month that we are absolutely excited about.
0:50.6	First of all, we have two guests.
0:52.5	So already excitement, the zoom is split into
0:55.3	four squares. It's very satisfying visually. But also, so you may remember back in March,
1:02.3	we had on an amazing woman whose name I butcher every time, but her name is Avri Sakatapulo.
1:08.5	Please forgive me if you're Greek and listening.
1:11.1	I apologize.
1:12.2	But we were talking about her book, Sexuality Beyond Consent.
1:16.9	And we had an amazing conversation that I truly, if you miss that episode, go back and listen to it.
1:25.1	But at some point in that episode, we started talking about gender and we had like a 10-minute sort of tangent conversation. And then he was like, you know, I actually have a book coming out all about this. And we were like, oh, my God, let's, we're going to do that as an outtake. But we decided we wanted to
1:45.6	save that conversation until the book was out. Well, guess what? The book is out.
	...

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