Hello, I'm Gemma and welcome to another episode of Good Influence. This is the podcast

where I welcome our guests to discuss their experiences, answer your questions and teach

us something new. This week we're talking about gender and activism, experiencing the

world outside of binary norms, how much society needs to understand about gender, and how

to have kind, productive conversations about identity.

So joining me this week is Rain Dove. Rain is a model actor and activist. Known for subverting

expectations of gender and clothing, Rain has modelled alternately as male and female

in shoots, while personally choosing to use no particular pronouns. At the beginning

of the war in Ukraine, Rain founded grassroots organisations Safebo, which worked to help

more than 20 trans and queer people who were stuck in the country safely across the border.

It turns out when you upset people, it's quite fashionable.

So first up, would you like to just tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to activism

and around gender sort of issues? Sure. Well, for a soulmate, my name is Rain Dove,

I'm like from this guy, Dove, like the bird. And I think that activism has always been

a part of my existence. And I think actually activism is a part of everyone's existence,

you know, because our existence is resistance, it's resisting the vast of void of non-life

in the universe, and we are here like breathing and our hearts are beating. I don't think

I've ever really defined myself as an activist until moderately recent, and I think that

the word activism is a really loaded word, because it can be quite capitalistic in some

senses and quite definitive. And activism is a spectrum. But for me, coming into the identity

of adding that as a way that I would introduce myself is, I would say maybe a couple of years

ago, I realised that when you don't feel good, you have to do good. And the choosing of

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