Happy Back to School season from the Strategy Lab for Intersex Movements. 🍎

Here’s some news from our world.

We had a beautiful time co-facilitating interACT’s third annual Intersex Youth Retreat this August. SLIM led workshops on grief, generative writing, embodied leadership, and intersex movement history. The experience was fully funded for 19 young people by the California TGI Wellness Fund.

Remember that time we announced we were building a digital archive?

Well…

🧱 You have 45 days to leave your mark on the project! So far, over fifty people have redeemed virtual bricks, writing “engraved” messages that will be preserved on the site. Every individual contribution counts! Please continue to share the fundraiser. Thank you to all who have.

💸 We’ve also received a generous, anonymous donation. We’re here to build the Hermaphrodites Fight! archive, make it free for everyone, expand via research travel to University sites, and keep producing cultural work we hope you’ll love being a part of. If that’s exciting, please keep supporting.

🎨 We’ve hired an illustrator we’re really excited to work with. Who is she? Stay tuned.

🎙Interviews are surfacing so many stories. We’ve been in conversations about intersex work for decades, but everyone carries different memories. One gem is a short film about intersex disclosure in relationships created by besties Lynnell Stephani Long and the late Maddie Blaustein, of Pokémon voice acting fame.

An international update:

🇰🇪 Saifa coordinated, and SLIM funded, travel for a group of Black intersex leaders from the U.S. to join the African Intersex Movement’s first conference in Nairobi, Kenya. We can’t wait to hear more about the experience this October.

Upcoming public events:

🎤 If you’re in Chicago on Saturday, October 2nd, Hans will speak on Hermaphrodites Fight! at the Queer History Symposium, a daylong fundraiser for Gerber/Hart, Chicago’s LGBTQ Archive. The event takes place on the third floor of the Center on Halsted building, which has a flat street-level entrance and an elevator. Masks are provided but not required by the event planners. We’re asking for more accessibility details from Gerber/Hart.

🗓 HOLD THE DATE: On Monday, October 26th—Intersex Awareness Day—we’ll be co-hosting another virtual salon and ribbon cutting ✂️🎀 for the Hermaphrodites Fight! website with our colleagues from interACT and a lineup of speakers from across bodily autonomy movements. 7:00pm EST, live Spanish interpreters, automatic text captions, donation based or free. Look for more details soon.

See you there,

Hans & Saifa
Strategy Lab for Intersex Movements